Marisa Anderson brings church and state together with a little pedal-steel improv
Nothing teaches you patience quite like walking across the United States. Marisa Anderson did just that in 1990, when she dropped out of college to join the Global Walk For A Livable World. So, it makes sense that the Portland, Ore.- based guitarist’s musical life has unfolded at an unhurried pace.
Singing hymns in Sunday school first inspired her. “That feeling has stayed with me throughout my life,” says Anderson. “I’m not religious, but I do believe in transcendence, and I believe that music has the wonderful function of helping us achieve it.”
She’s played in country quartet Dolly Ranchers and an eclectic improv ensemble, the Evolutionary Jass Band, but didn’t make her first album until 2009. “And that was only because Eric Isaacson at Mississippi Records demanded that I do so,” she says.
That year, Anderson tracked 12 guitar and lap-steel instrumentals for The Golden Hour, her debut solo record. In concert, she toggles between reverberant reveries, celebratory gospel themes and tense anthems like Spanish Civil War tune “Bella Ciao”; her between-song narration shows how the old stories relate to our current culture wars.
“I want to highlight the fact that these songs come from somewhere and are not a random aesthetic response or decorative choice of notes and phrases,” she says. “Those old church-and-state songs are beautiful propaganda, and they worked! I like to free those powerful melodies from their words and set them in motion into the future. Music is alchemy.”
Anderson’s fourth and latest LP, Into The Light (out in June), is a one-woman-band a air, constructed from layers of guitar, piano and pedal steel that often seem to be in conversation with each other. “The pieces are improvised and basically unmapped,” she says. “It’s important to me that each record I make propels me into uncharted waters. I don’t want to repeat myself.”
—Bill Meyer
