ANNA MCCLELLAN

those earliest roots are often the deepest and no matter how vast a point of separation may be, an unbreakable tether will always remain. bound but not anchored to her native nebraska, the sounds which emanated from her home state continue to echo throughout her life as music remains her true form of expression and method of digesting the world around her.

Hi Anna and thank you for taking the time out to speak with us at Musicology An incredibly honest and transparent record, the album is a beautiful collage of personal and open sentiments. No finer example is that within your single ‘Endlessly’ and its achingly frank line “Reaching out to you with a broken palm, I’m not afraid of loving open wounds and all”. Such genuine and considered feelings are not always easy to personally express let alone musically convey, yet you do so with honest ease. Is this your approach toward all of your music and getting from a place within to a place out in the open?

Mm, thank you for saying that. I definitely believe that vulnerability is a muscle. I really struggled with personal expression in my formative years. I held everything in. I wanted so badly to be understood but I was terrified. I found songwriting and it felt like a safe place to be honest. It’s like talking but to no one specifically so I wasn’t so self-conscious about how someone would react. And over time, slowly through practice and lots of you know, shitty experiences, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable being vulnerable, in songs and in my relationships.

Reinforcing the point, your video clip to Endlessly is equally beautiful, true, and unashamedly open. Can you explain the choice of using personal snippets of everyday life and the exceptional moments in life to extrapolate the warts and all approach to love and share with us where some of those shots were taken?

Yes! The style and nature of the video really came by necessity. I’ve been moving around a lot the past year so I was like, let’s just make this really simple and circumstantial. I had my loved ones film me in situations we were already planning to do. The video is edited together takes of me singing the whole song in one shot. It was whatever happened, I wasn’t allowed to redo it. We started the footage gathering process in LA and did some stuff at Griffith Observatory. The walk up the hill is pretty classic and epic. It was a wonderful afternoon with Mychal. A couple weeks later I took the train to Austin and figured that would be a great place to get some shots so the one of me on the train was done at sunrise. I was kinda shy cause the guy across the aisle was just waking up and I didn’t want him to see me hahaha. The rest is filmed in Austin by myself and my bestie Ryan, who also co-produced the album. Just us hanging out and then me being like ok film me.

The subject matter you explore throughout the record is obviously derived personal experiences, can you share with us some specific moments and events that provided the lyrical backdrop to some of your tracks?

Yes, mostly what I think about in life and in music is relationships. I over idealize romantic relationships as the ultimate form of connection, so I write about that a lot. Sometimes I wonder if I muck up my personal life to create interesting things to write about in song. I wonder if I am selfish. I don’t have a great track record for dating. But it’s a chicken or an egg situation. We are all complicated people with complicated emotions. I am just trying my best to connect I think. Much of this album was written during and directly after a pivotal relationship. It was long distance so we would have these short bursts together that were always intense and passionate. We spent a week in New York. We met up in Annapolis for a long weekend. Annapolis is a very strange place. He is a songwriter and a poet and the whole thing was very poetic, though ultimately unsustainable. It will always be incredibly special to me. The whole first verse of Dawson’s Creek is about coming home from school and watching tv on the couch. I used to jump off the ledge of the couch onto the cushions during commercials so I picture that. Or hearing the parents car coming down the driveway and being like, ‘They’re home! Be good now’

Your vocal range has such breadth, whether it be from the quivering, on the limiter style as on ‘Hold You Close’ and ‘Speechless Hill’, to the forceful and certain as in ‘I’m Lyin’ and ‘Co-Stars’. Is your choice driven by the instrumentation on the track or the sentiment within the song?

I think the two go hand in hand. I’m still very much in the process of learning how my voice works. I don’t feel like I have much control of it. So yes I suppose the nature and cadence of the words dictate how the lines are delivered. ‘I’m Lyin’ is probably the most powerhouse of a song I’ve ever written. I wanted to write a song like Weezer or something so I’ll thought, how does the guy from Weezer sing? And then try to do my own spin on that. The song doesn’t really sound anything like Weezer but that’s kind of the thought process.

Central to your music is that of the piano and of all the instrumentation you work with, do you find it to be the most expressive, most fitting for the emotional and auditory connectivity, or perhaps a little simpler in terms of it being the instrument in which you are most familiar and use to flesh out your tunes into fully fledged pieces?

I think the piano is the most amazing object to exist. Each one is so full of personality and stature. You don’t sit down at a guitar. Sitting down at the piano always makes me feel shy like it knows something I don’t and I want to find out but I can’t just ask outright. I've learned so much about life at the piano bench. It’s a relationship that I have a lot of reverence for. A relationship that has held me and helped me when people can’t. I’ve probably spent more time sitting in front of the piano than actually playing it.

Taking your tracks into the studio and having co-producer Ryan McKeever and Another Recording Company Studios engineer Adam Roberts add their respective charms, was their contributions well scripted and guided by you as to what additions and extra treatments the tracks were embellished with or was it very much a hands-off approach from you and they were left to their own devices and free to contribute in any way they saw fit?

I was very hands-on. More so than any of my previous records. I definitely could not have made this album without Ryan and Adam. They were so supportive of my vision and knew when to push back on my ideas but mostly just enabled me to create the songs as I heard them. Ryan’s biggest feature is ‘Costars’. He has a writing credit on that and played most of the instruments. I love his keyboard part on that song! And Adam is very good at listening to me and doing what I ask but also sneaking in engineer/mixing stuff that is imperceptible to the listener but adds a lot. Stuff that goes over my head. We all worked so well together! And had a lot of fun.

What indelible imprint has your native Nebraska left upon you that still resonates and influences your signature sound?

Gosh this is a great question! Most of my formative influences and bands that I still draw from today are my friends/peers from there. I’d make a list but it’s too exhaustive. The one project I would shout out here is Nutrition Fun, a band that I’ve played in as well. But Andy who writes everything is one of the greats. Also S1SW, an amazing rapper/poet/musician and also one of my best friends and also an amazing chef. I would say there is an elusive Omaha sound but I would never know how to actually describe it. There is an endless amount of amazing music and art and shit coming from Omaha and Lincoln throughout the ages that flies way under the radar. It’s so rich in culture but most people you meet say, so what’s Omaha like? And you have to just be like, ‘it’s cool’.

In terms of what music gives you that nothing else does, as you move through your years and for that matter your records, is it fair to say that 2018’s Yes and No, 2020’s I Saw First Light, and 2024’s with Electric Bouquet, are true reflections of where you were and now are?

I think it very fair to say that. I write to glean meaning from my life. The songs are a place for me to be completely honest with myself. I often learn how I feel through writing lyrics and seeing what comes up. It’s a beautiful relationship and tool. I feel like I’ve spoken to music as a relationship a lot in this interview and I don’t want to over iterate any point but that is truly how it feels.