Ana Egge Announces New Album WHITE TIGER Out this June

Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Ana Egge will release her new album White Tiger via StorySound Records.

Today, Egge shares the lead single "Dance Around The Room With Me", which features Anais Mitchell on background vocals and Big Thief's Buck Meek on guitar. UPROXX said "The spirited and vivacious track is about traversing through life deeply attuned to each cursory feeling, even the ones that seem insignificant or sting mercilessly....In it, she declares a warmly buoyant mantra: 'Dance around the room with me / Start dancing and you'll see / How it opens up, opens up your heart.'"

Stream and embed "Dance Around The Room With Me" via SoundCloud:

https://soundcloud.com/storysound-records/dance-around-the-room-with-me/s-w8R8R

White Tiger features nine originals and one John Hartford cover, and so amply displays Egge's singularly articulate and affecting honesty and sensitivity as to once again deserve USA Today's accolade, "[Ana] can write and sing rings around" her contemporaries.

Ana got bit by the music bug as a teenager, and having grown up with parents who were, as she describes, "motorcycle-riding hippie farmers" raising four children on a farm in North Dakota, Ana took matters into her own hands, building her own guitar and moving to Austin, TX to soak in the vibrant music scene. The striking depth and unusual maturity of her singing, playing, and songwriting got her noticed, and she recorded her debut album River Under the Road (1997) with the legendary western swing band Asleep At The Wheel. The following year, at only 19-years old, The Austin Music Awards named Ana "Best Singer/Songwriter" and "Best Folk Artist".

Egge soon began hitting the road, opening for the likes of Iris DeMent, Shawn Colvin, and Ron Sexsmith. Later on she got to share the stage with John Prine, Sinead O'Connor, and Lucinda Williams who once said "Ana's an exceptional songwriter, listen to the lyrics...[she's] the folk Nina Simone!"

Over the ensuing years and eight subsequent albums, Ana has made good on her promising debut, going on to record full albums with The Stray Birds and The Sentimentals, and work with highly acclaimed producers such as Martin Terefe, Jason Mercer, Joel Plaskett, Stewart Lerman, and Steve Earle who's said "Ana Egge's songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she's telling us her deepest, darkest secrets."

Having lived in a small farmhouse on the North Dakota plains, a bus on the California Coast, and a hot springs commune in rural New Mexico, Egge's family were always on the move, scraping together dimes and hand-me-downs in order to get by. "We were always the outsiders," she says. "I was taught how to shoot a gun and how to enjoy alfalfa sprouts and tofu. I ran around barefoot and learned to ride a motorcycle when I was 5. I grew up with all the time and space in the world."

Through these experiences, Ana learned that her life was truly hers to create. She became possessed by a self-determined sense of who she was and what she wanted to do and as a result, moved to Brooklyn by way of Austin, where she is now married raising a child. But Ana has never lost touch with the free-spirited childhood and Western landscape that formed her, and this questing spirit is everywhere manifest on White Tiger.

That open-hearted sense of adventure is especially evident in the communal music-making of the album, most notably in Ana's collaboration with producer Alec Spiegelman (Cuddle Magic), whose contributions on reeds, keyboards, and vocals, together with his wind, string, and vocal arrangements, elegantly inform the whole. Other featured musicians include singer Anais Mitchell, guitarist Buck Meek (Big Thief), Billy Strings, drummer Robin MacMillan (Aoife O'Donovan), bassist Jacob Silver (Amy Helm, Joan As Police Woman), violinist Alex Hargreaves and violist Adam Moss (The Brother Brothers).

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

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