Singer-songwriter Michaela Anne is an emerging artist who is sure to garner plenty of accolades at the 2019 Americana Music Fest and for this Yep Roc debut, Desert Dove, which follows up her acclaimed Bright Lights and the Fame. Michaela Anne leans country and brings a classic honky-tonk vibe, but more often her pristine voice, is set against dreamy, ethereal backdrops, apt for the album’s title as she brings some of that Laurel Canyon and Joshua Tree sound that hearkens back to Gram and Emmylou. Take “Run Away With Me,” which begins in a honky-tonk mode and morphs into something quite different. But she can deliver the former too as heard in the true classic country styled “Two Fools.” You may have already heard and seen the album’s first single and video, “By Our Design,” which is also the opening track for the LP and a great example of her style.
Michaela Anne is a military kid who lived in several states and abroad from Washington to California, to name some of the. She now resides in Nashville. Her means of staying sane even while growing up was writing songs. This batch was written and recorded in California with producers Sam Outlaw and Delta Spirit’s Kelly Winrich who called on guitarist Brian Whelan (Dwight Yoakam, Jim Lauderdale), fiddler Kristin Weber (Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price), and drummers Mark Stepro (Ben Kweller, Butch Walker) and Daniel Bailey (Everest, Father John Misty). The goal was to veer away from traditional arrangements and predictable instrumentation.
You can hear some examples of this on “Child of the Wind,” where a fuzzy electric guitar takes the place of what would usually be a pedal steel or fiddle intro. The tune “Tattered, Torn and Blue (And Crazy)” would be rendered as a blazing honky-tonker in other hands but here the accompaniment is soft, allowing Michaela Anne’s voice to float above the mid-tempo backing. The music becomes even more atmospheric in the title track., and again it says well beneath her vocals and lyrics which are the focus.
The relatively steady vibe of the album is completely intentional. She comments, “This record, for me highlights the gray area, the nuance of emotional life and relationships that seem to be harder to convey in today’s modes of communication limited attention spans: short excerpts on Instagram or Twitter paragraphs. Nothing is black and white, solely good or bad. Who we are, how we live, how we love, what we desire or reject, it’s all full of contradictions and confusions. I wanted to explore that through my songs with care, depth, reality as well as light-heartedness, fun and fantasy.”
She does have a rebellious streak as well, not content to just do things “the way they are done in Nashville.” That’s clearly apparent in “If I Wanted Your Opinion,” a rebuttal to condescension and patronizing. She says, “When I got to Nashville, I was told the ‘rules of songwriting. I was informed that a woman in a country song can never be the victim, but she can also never be the perpetrator. That’s not real life. As a woman, sometimes you’re everything at once and I wanted to write about those real experiences.” Rather ironically but perhaps intentionally, the music to “If I Wanted Your Opinion” is as classic country as any tune here. “Somebody New” returns to that dreamy, desert-like song while the closer “Be Easy” reveals the purity of her voice against lightly strummed acoustic guitar.
Michaela Anne has been on a steady rise since her 2014 debut Ease My Mind. Desert Dove will certainly steepen this trajectory. She is deservedly a major emerging voice in country and Americana circles.
