Within two minutes of ordering coffee, Anna Shoemaker pushes her hair back and grins.
“I wish I could tour forever,” she fevered. “I hope I don’t ever eat those words. Don’t get me wrong, I love New York. But, everyone’s serious and it’s nice to see people in other places just being happy and hanging out.”
The hangout for this particular conversation is Disco Death Records, a fresh-faced and buzzing coffee hangout complete with records in the front parlor and film photo center called The Basement Lab situated in its back room. It’s settled within Minneapolis’ Wedge neighborhood, all but 15 minutes from St. Paul’s Turf Club, where Shoemaker is hours away from another performance on her very first U.S. tour supporting rock duo Foreign Air.
“The cool thing about playing in New York is that you can only see certain acts when you’re there,” she said. “It’s cooler that people from all over get to sing with you on the road.”
When asked if fans had been singing her songs on this tour, the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn by way of Philadelphia singer (she’s currently listening to Philly’s own SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE) automatically lit up with a grin from ear to ear.
“Oh my goodness yes,” she said. “Even the new stuff. Two girls from Austin drove to Dallas and back in the same night and sang my songs at both shows. Like they didn’t care or probably realize it’s the same set! I’ve almost stopped mid-song because I cannot believe people really know my new music across the whole country.”
The “new music” is Everything is Fine (I’m Only on Fire), an LP released in March via +1 Records.
“I was so scared when that record came out,” she admitted. “With the pandemic, I had my album done for a while. After I put it out, I kind of had like a little breakdown. I was like, ‘I think this is stupid and I hate all these songs. This is torture. How can we take this off the internet? Can we?’ I was so scared. Then I actually listened to it like two months later. And I was like, ‘okay, you did this…like…you did this.’ And I actually really came to love it. I’m really proud of it.”
Still, she plugs away at writing new ones–even on the road.
“I actually just recorded some stuff with Foreign Air yesterday.”
She refers to them as ‘the best boys she’s ever met’ several times.
“And I’ve been working with my friend Constantine whose project is called Longer,” she revealed. “I feel like I say this almost every time I start collaborating with someone, but I will say there’s something about working with Constantine where I just think we really communicate well. We really understand each other’s reference points, in the same way that we don’t you know? There are a lot of philosophical gaps that are cool to explain to each other and like, I just feel really good working with him. So we’ve kind of been working on my next project together. It might be my next EP.”
Finished speaking about her music, she then turns out of her seat at the coffee bar, tossing her empty cup that was filled with a pour-over complete with oat milk just minutes prior, and faces the huge row of records sitting on the store’s floor. She hops over to the section labeled “Country/Blues/Folk” and shuffles through.
“Anything western just feels comfortable to me,” she says, staring over a Johnny Cash record. “Cowboys, horses, that charming twang.”
That checks out. Her latest album has a song called Scared of Your Ex (Brooklyn Cowboy).
She pulls out a Marvin Rainwater record.
“Can’t you just see him hopping up to a microphone and saying ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” she drawled before letting out a laugh. She also howls at a selection of metal album covers because of how ‘brutal’ they are.
Shoemaker said she likes records but the only CD in her car is The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. She’s also a fan of Sheryl Crow, and, admittedly, a Swiftie.
She then hurries back to the Basement Lab and poses in front of an LED sign.
“I used to shoot film, but not so much nowadays.”
Afterward, she departs from Disco Death as pleasantly as she arrived, and this time with a little more hope that there’s a whole wild world ahead of her, where everything is fine and she’s no longer scared of what she’s made.
There’s no saying what she’ll do once the tour wraps up. Maybe it’ll never end. It’s clear that’s what she wants.
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