Anna Tivel

Portland songwriter Anna Tivel issues albums at a clip so rapid—nearly 10 in a dozen years—that you would be forgiven for assuming they sound like first takes, diary entries worked out over outbursts of sound. But from the start of her discography to 2025’s breathtaking and devastating Animal Poem, Tivel has earned acclaim for how attentive everything she makes is, from the way she may detail the colors or smells she perceives to the way she places those words over painstakingly played folk-rock beauty. When Tivel moved to Oregon from her small town in Washington’s northwest corner to attend college, she never intended to be a professional musician, instead working at restaurants while studying to become a nurse. Those occupations, it seemed, trained her eye for the care and clarity she supplies to her songs.

“You can be someone who loves, or you can be somebody else,” Tivel sings at the end of Animal Poem’s title track, landing on the line after teasing it for three minutes. “I tell you kid/the first one is the hardest.” Tivel’s songs always suggest she is someone willing to do the hard work, to find the humanity where it has been overlooked, to give, as she puts it elsewhere, “a person endless value.” Through simmering and gently psychedelic songs, she sings with complete emotional candor, sketching out images of love and loneliness, empathy and unrest in a voice that applies perfect paint to scenes her words so expertly sketch. In 2022, NPR’s Ann Powers called Tivel one of her favorite living songwriters; since then, she has only gotten sharper.