Anne Hills
Points of View

(2009)

$15.00

	cdbaby
	itunes

“Her affinity for choosing unforgettable material and her knack for writing heartfelt original songs have brought her to the upper echelon of her craft.” – AllMusic Guide

track listing

1. I Am You
2. Pennsylvania
3. Two Year Winter
4. The Farm
5. Alexandra Leaving
6. My Daughter and Vincent van Gogh
7. A Plain Song
8. I'm Nobody
9. The Moon's Song
10. Holy Now
11. Gardens
12. Romeo and Juliet
13. Leaf

After a decade of imaginative and rewarding collaborations with fellow musicians (including Tom Paxton and Michael Smith), Victorian-era poets (James Whitcomb Riley) and child naturalists (Opal Whiteley), Anne Hills’ eighth solo album, Points of View, marks her long-awaited return to her own original songs.

Anne’s multiple careers as an award-winning musician, poet, and social worker, as well as actress, writer, artist, wife, and mother, infuse the lyrics of her eleven originals with graceful poetry and real-life experience, and her empathic and caring spirit lights each song from within. The characters and situations she describes all ring true because they are universal, bringing Anne’s underlying themes of individuality, diversity, love, loss and resilience in a changing world to vivid life. Colorful natural images are woven into many songs, often providing a backdrop of peaceful perspective to human turmoil.

The CD’s bracing opener, “I Am You,” is a call to bridge the divides of race, gender and religion – a view of an America where society is shaped by our ability to see our great melting pot through the eyes of every immigrant or unwilling slave who arrived here and has became an integral part of our country’s experience. “I stayed here and fought for the truth and what’s right/And my dream is your dream, and my fight is your fight,” Anne sings proudly, “Young and old, gay and straight, every color and hue/I am all, I am one, I am you.” (An earlier version of this song appeared on a 1993 multi-artist benefit recording for the Carole Robertson Center for Learning Center, which aids families and children in need and presented Anne with its Award for Outstanding Service and Loyalty.)

After the wide-screen declaration of “I Am You,” Anne focuses on more specific, but equally pervasive, human circumstances. “The Farm” is a quietly despairing look at economic hard times and the way men often react to job loss – “I have given myself to these dreams/And how do I go on from here?” “Romeo and Juliet,” with music originally composed by jazz drummer Peter Erskine (Weather Report, Yellowjackets) for a choral workshop, is a near-classical retelling of those doomed lovers’ plight, and their final words hold hope of a reunion in the afterlife.

The natural world is the setting for “Pennsylvania,” the tranquil meditation of a lone motorist on a snowy highway, while “Two Year Winter” uses the season to measure deep sorrow. A cold, pre-dawn sidewalk is the starting point for “My Daughter & Vincent van Gogh,” a true story dedicated to Anne’s van Gogh-smitten grade-schooler and husband, about a family trip to a National Gallery exhibit; the morning’s darkness bursts into color as the little girl tangibly experiences each painting. You can hear the loving smile in Anne’s voice. Less fortunate children, those Anne helps as a social worker, are the protagonists in the deceptively breezy “I’m Nobody” – “I’m nobody and I don’t care/If you look in my eyes you’ll see nobody there.” “Leaf” bears the metaphor for a more general identity crisis, but one that will be resolved – “I can’t be done yet, I’ve got too much to do.” The broadest perspective of all comes from a heavenly body in “The Moon’s Song,” a lunar look at Earth with the reminder “Galaxies are born, planets come and go/Nothing in the universe stays the same, you know.”

Complementing Anne’s original songs, some co-written with longtime collaborators Cindy Mangsen, Michael Smith and Allen Power, are cover versions of Leonard Cohen’s vignette of a slow-motion break-up (“Alexandra Leaving”) and Minnesota singer-songwriter Peter Mayer’s “Holy Now,” an acceptance of life’s beauty.

Although Anne’s achingly warm soprano voice, guitar and banjo are the musical core of Points of View, the songs receive sympathetic and versatile coloration by co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Scott Petito, Grammy winning cellist Eugene Friesen, keyboardist Peter Vitalone, drummer Sam Zucchini, and occasional harmony vocalists Mangsen and Priscilla Herdman.