Event

Ana Egge

Since recording "Bright Shadow", Egge's daughter was born and her mother died, and in retrospect, she says, the songs on the album mirror these intense and formative life changes. With a deeply supportive marriage to her wife of seven years, Egge felt for the first time that she could feel comfortable being beautiful on stage. "That might sound strange but it's true," she says. "After having our baby I felt the same kind of personal permission arise in me about being able to be comforting, giving, and sweetly mellow. On Bad Blood I was working through intense issues I'd been hiding from writing about for years, but with "Bright Shadow" I found myself beyond this trying or not trying. It's spiritual and warm and life confirming."

While on her previous album Egge sang, "We are fools to work against the wind," on "Bright Shadow" that sentiment has matured into a recognition of freedom and resolve. "I hitched a ride with the wind, and since he was my friend, I just let him decide where we'd go," she sings on her cover of Dolly Parton's "Wildflowers," continuing: "When a flower grows wild, it can always survive. Wildflowers don't care where they grow." On "Bright Shadow", Ana Egge reveals remarkable growth, as an artist and a person, recognizing that freedom comes less from fighting the current of the wind, but from being able to yield and follow. She offers her story to the American roots music tradition, an outsider, a wildflower, comfortable in her own skin. "Bright Shadow" is an album that feels at once unique and universal, a hard-learned meditation that, while the darkness can be true, the shadow is proof that the light exists.

Common Fence Music offers finest folk, roots and world music in an intimate 200 seat listening room. Doors open at 7 pm to the "Folk Tailgate Party." Don't forget your picnic basket!