Events

[FOLK] Ana Egge was born in the same Canadian prairie-lands as Joni Mitchell, but her new project comes to us from even further north: Denmark. And yet despite having been recorded in what’s largely considered a cold country, Say That Now brims with a difficult-to-finger sense of warmth and community that sets it apart from her previous work. Maybe some of that feeling comes from it being a collaborative project attributed to Ana Egge and the Sentimentals, who’ll play Sportsmen’s Tavern on Wednesday, July 20.

But it also sounds like living in a colder climate forces the crafty Danes to create warmth through interaction.

“They really support the arts over there,” Egge said, calling from the Brooklyn home she shares with her partner and their toddler, Roxy. “When you perform, you know that everyone working at the venue is getting paid. Oftentimes someone cooks dinner for us, and they’re getting paid for that too. We all sit together and eat—the band, the sound and light people—it’s a communal spirit that’s also more mutually respectful than what you get used to over here. That same feeling spills over into the studio. We recorded in Copenhagen, and we’d often all sit and share lunch together. Oh, and lots of coffee breaks. The Danes drink so much coffee!”

Egge’s spent quite a bit of time in Denmark over the last five years, touring with The Sentimentals and building on the chemistry that permeates the new songs. And while 2015’s Bright Shadow found her backed by the string band The Stray Birds (a documentary about Egge also titled Bright Shadow will premiere at Austin LGBTQ-centric film festival aGLIFF in Spetember ), Say That Now is the first official recording she’s made in a band format. It’s got a more electric, pop-rocking feel than anything she’s released in years, but her deliciously medicated-sounding alto is still the focal point.

“It was a truly collaborative experience,” she said. “The sound and feel of the record is actually intentional. After playing certain portions of my material live, we decided we really wanted to go there and write a collection of songs that rock a little harder and deeper. We went with the idea of clearing out the way for a stronger melody to emerge. It was such a fun direction to take and a very different experience for me to have four people sharing the words.”

Say That Now was written and recorded under time constraints, which Egge says forced her not to over-think the process (“There was no time to stare endlessly into my crystal ball”). The quickened pace informs the 10-song collection with a sense of off-the-cuff immediacy. From the charged, eroticized anger of opener “Take Off My Dress” through the edgy guitar wails in “Spider” and the clap-along pop riff of the title track, Egge sounds completely in charge despite singing songs co-written with her male bandmates. She says there were a few outtakes left behind because she couldn’t sell them as effectively.

A folkie songstress at her core who Lucinda Williams once called, “…the Nina Simone of Folk,” Egge feels a renewed sense of responsibility to use her craft as a vehicle for positive change.

“Having a child has changed the landscape of my life in terms of shifting priorities,” she said. “Everything matters a little more now. I want my daughter to grow up to be someone that helps people and is engaged in the world, but this is also such a volatile, scary time in our culture. It makes me feel like maybe I’m not doing enough. The songwriting is my calling and it helps me get a better feeling for who I am and what I have to offer people. I feel like if we all could figure out who we are and what we’re here for, it’d bring us closer to becoming more compassionate beings. Plumbing that is part of what this collaboration is really about.”