It’s been a good year for Anna St. Louis and her meandering folk tunes
When she moved to Los Angeles from Kansas City five years ago, Anna St. Louis wasn’t some starry-eyed striver with dreams of becoming a famous musician. She hadn’t even considered the possibility of making music as a profession. She just wanted a change, and she had some family out there.
“I wasn’t tapped into a scene or community, so I had to find new people and new music,” St. Louis says.
She had played in several punk and punk-adjacent KC bands, though. You can find decade-old footage on YouTube of St. Louis singing in the bratty act Crap Corps, and she appears on tracks from the rude-and-crude local band Hairy Belafonte. And around 2010, St. Louis started playing in sludgy psych acts like Torben and Bloodbirds. But then she was gone, off to L.A.
A few years into life on the West Coast, St. Louis posted a few demos online.
“I was kinda just experimenting with sharing it with people,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is so fun.’ It was something I was getting lost in.”
St. Louis gradually got a little more serious about the music. She came back to the Midwest and recorded some songs at a studio in Iowa, with the help of her former Bloodbirds bandmates, Mike and Brooke Tuley. She planned to release the songs herself. But then she shared the recordings with an old friend: Kevin Morby.
The two had been friends since high school and played on some of the same KC punk bills back in the day. When she passed along her music, Morby was in the process of creating his own label, Mare Records, which is an imprint of Woodsist, the prolific indie label founded by Morby’s former bandmates in Woods. (Woodsist also released Morby’s first two solo albums.) Morby loved the tracks. First Songs, as the collection came to be called, ended up being St. Louis’ debut and Mare’s second release.
First Songs showcased St. Louis’ knack for writing enchanting, minimalist folk and stirring country-blues tunes — these are songs that gently echo around your head for hours after listening. They made an easy fan out of Kyle Thomas, better known as the Sub Pop garage-rock titan behind King Tuff. He met St. Louis at an L.A. bar playing darts.
“I thought she had a very great energy,” says Thomas, “and then I found out she had grown up with Kevin, and it made a lot of sense to me.”
Before long, Morby and Thomas went to work co-producing St. Louis’ debut full-length, If Only There Was A River, which was released this fall.
“When she brought the songs to me, all of them were just on acoustic guitar,” says Thomas. “Her songs were great because they were kinda just a blank canvas to work on. That’s really where I have fun in the studio, giving each song its own personality.”
“[Kyle] had lots of comments and suggestions, and we talked a lot about how we write,” St. Louis says. “He gave so much to the whole recording process.”
Thomas says the fact that St. Louis didn’t start writing songs until her late twenties means she’s not hung up on rigid ideas of songwriting, which allows for surprising quirks and arrangements to find their way into the music. He recalls a moment in the recording of “Hello,” in which St. Louis made an unorthodox shift in time signatures, throwing him and drummer Justin Sullivan for a loop.
“It’s just something you don’t hear people do when they’re more stuck in their ways,” Thomas says. “I think she still has fresh ideas that only happen in the early part of a songwriter’s career.”
Since the release of the album, St. Louis’ profile has been steadily rising. Pitchfork gave If Only There Was A River a glowing review and called St. Louis “one of the year’s most promising new singer-songwriters” (which somehow still only equated to a score of 7.5). And St. Louis did a set of East Coast-Midwest tour dates opening for (and playing bass with) Waxahatchee. St. Louis says she, Sullivan (who performed on the tour in his band, Night Shop, and drummed for Waxahatchee), and Katie Crutchfield (who leads Waxahatchee) got to be a tight-knit unit on the three week trek.
“It was more of, like, a group effort,” says St. Louis. “I felt like we were all really invested in everybody’s sets and their experiences.”
The final stop of that tour came in Lawrence — a show on the final day of summer, at the White Schoolhouse, on the outskirts of town. A fire crackled out back as St. Louis performed from a wooden deck to a small sea of friends and fans sitting in the grass. The sun had disappeared from the sky about an hour before her set, leaving revelers with an unobstructed view of one of the brighter stars this area has produced in a long while.
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