Anna Tivel brings Animal Poem home to Mississippi Studios

Portland's own quiet storyteller plays N. Mississippi Ave next Saturday, Nov 14, with a 2025 album and a spring B-sides EP still settling in.

There are songwriters who fill a room by getting louder, and there are songwriters who fill it by making everyone lean in. Anna Tivel is the second kind, and next Saturday she gets to do it in front of the city that has heard her more than any other.

Anna Tivel plays Mississippi Studios on Saturday, Nov 14, at 9pm. It's a 300-capacity room on N. Mississippi Ave, about as close as a Portland club gets to a living room with a good PA, and it suits a writer whose songs tend to hinge on a single detail half-sung near the end of a verse. Tickets run through eTix; note that the ticketing page files the night under Margaret Glaspy's I Am Both Tour, so check the bill and set times before you plan your evening around a last-call arrival.

Portland is home base in more than a biographical sense. Tivel grew up in La Conner, Washington, and moved to Portland at 18, and in our own show records she has played this market 19 times, more than anywhere else. The November swing also takes her to Seattle on the 12th and San Francisco on the 16th, so Portland sits right in the middle of a short West Coast run rather than at the end of a long one.

What she's bringing is still fresh. *Animal Poem*, her seventh full-length, came out in August 2025 on Fluff & Gravy, the Portland label that has been her home for years. She co-produced it with Sam Weber. In an interview with The Bluegrass Situation, Tivel said she started writing the record about two years before its release, while thinking about the chaos in the news and how it bleeds into private lives; the piece framed the album as a pathway toward holding on to your humanity when the world feels inhumane. Jefferson Public Radio put it more plainly: songs that look for meaning in long drives and walks through her neighborhood, set against inventive instrumentation.

Songs that look for meaning in long drives and walks through the neighborhood.

The sessions didn't stop at the album. In March, Fluff & Gravy released *Animal Poem B-Sides*, a companion EP rolled out through singles including "Swan Song," "Saint of Scrap Metal" and "Memphis." Hearing those alongside the album gives a sense of how much she left on the cutting-room floor, and which of those songs have earned their way into the live set is one of the better reasons to show up.

If you've only met her through headphones, the live version is worth the trip. NPR's Ann Powers, writing about Tivel's 2023 Tiny Desk Concert, said her "remarkable empathy" lifts her folk-based, jazz-touched compositions "from mere stories to secular prayers." That's a big claim, and the best way to test it is a dark room on Mississippi with the bar noise dropping out mid-song.

Get there early, get a spot near the front, and leave your phone in your pocket for at least one of them.

Sources: Mississippi Studios — tickets (eTix), Nov 14, 2026 (etix.com); Anna Tivel — Ground Control Touring (groundcontroltouring.com); Anna Tivel — Bandcamp (annativel.bandcamp.com); Anna Tivel — Fluff & Gravy Records (fluffandgravy.com); Anna Tivel Makes Poetry in Music From Poetry in Nature — The Bluegrass Situation (thebluegrasssituation.com); Upcoming JPR Live Sessions — Jefferson Public Radio (ijpr.org); Anna Tivel: Saint of Scrap Metal — We All Want Someone to Shout For (weallwantsomeone.org); Anna Tivel: Animal Poem — We All Want Someone to Shout For (weallwantsomeone.org); Premiere: Anna Tivel shares new single — Under the Radar (undertheradarmag.com); Anna Tivel — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Anna Tivel: Tiny Desk Concert (wyso.org)