Singer/songwriter Anya Marina has spent the past half-decade opening sold-out comedy shows for BFF and former roommate Nikki Glaser in theatres across America. Although I’m picturing drunken bachelorette parties talking over Marina’s indie pop as they fall into their seats, she tells me during a recent phone chat that the shows with her bestie were usually pretty great: “It is such a treat… Her audiences are smart and funny, and comedy audiences tend to like music, too… They’re seated and they’re not out to get schwasted, they’re just out to have a nice night.” Anya does, however, admit that the theatres in casinos can be a bit of a struggle, but says that’s nothing new to her: “Casinos can be tough, because people want to get back to gambling, or gaming… But, I mean, I was cutting my teeth in rock clubs and cafes in San Diego and got pretty used to people talking through my set [laughs].”
However, those recent years are just a small portion of Anya Marina’s musical career. January 25th was the 20th anniversary of her debut LP, Miss Halfway, whose title track wound up on Grey’s Anatomy and got her a record deal. I first encountered Marina in March of 2013, when she was supporting Tristan Prettyman at World Café Live, on an evening that just slightly earlier had French New Wave auteur Agnes Varda (who Anya says she’s a huge fan of, falling in love with 2017 documentary Faces Places) giving a talk a Penn, making for an amazing night in University City, if you could coordinate your schedule just right. But Anya Marina’s played the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection a lot over the years, including a recent show at our City Winery with Eric Hutchinson in fall of 2022, in addition to gigs back in the days of Tin Angel with Greg Laswell and Joshua Radin.
Last October Anya Marina released her latest full-length, Asteroid, her first since lockdown, getting married, moving to Kingston, NY, and sobriety. “You can’t not have your sobriety affect your whole life,” Marina tells me, explaining, “It helped me become more honest and strip away these layers of artifice. Like [2009 LP] Slow & Steady Seduction: Phase II was commercially successful and fun, but the song ‘Cut It Out’ was really just about a fun beat and fun sounds, and that’s fine, but when I wrote the opening line of ‘Asteroid’ – ‘I have tried to fix myself // Straighten out the bumps and flatten where I’m bent // Heal the parts that needed help’ — I felt really dejected… and it’s laying everything out there for the listener.” And Anya tells me the new songs have certainly been resonating with people: “A lot of men have reached out to me in the middle of the night, male friends, to tell me that they were rocked by a certain song, like ‘Asteroid,’ which isn’t really a song that I would expect that of [laughs]… I’m like, ‘I’m glad you had such a deep response, because it helped me… I mean, I got into it because I wanted to heal myself and help myself.”
“My producer was like, ‘This album sounds like money,’” Anya tells me, laughing, admitting that no one’s ever characterized her work in that way before: “I think he meant it would make a lot of money… but we have yet to see that come through [laughs].” Although she did quickly get very tight with Asteroid’s producer, Kevin Salem, known for his work with Rachael Yamagata, Mike Doughty, and Lenka. “He’s just insanely talented… We tracked ‘Waiting for a Difference,’ which was a big radio song, super-fast. We finished the song like 80% in the first day… He’s really organic and doesn’t overthink things.” While her previous studio LP, 2020’s Queen of the Night, was recorded over several months, Asteroid was completed in Salem’s barn studio in Woodstock in a few weeks: “I had three or four weeks off from touring with Nikki, and I was like, ‘Can we knock out a record in that time?’ He was like, ‘One, yes, I’m available whenever you need me. And two, I love your demos, and I really think we should preserve the intimacy of the demos.” Kevin and Anya also apparently have some overlapping musical loves: “He’s a Beatles head, like me, so he had the most amazing guitar sounds… doing ‘Gimme Sugar’ felt like John Lennon’s ghost was in here.”
There are official music videos for each of Asteroid’s 10 tracks, courtesy of Jesse Dufault, who directed the first six, and Scott Coffey, with whom Anya embarked on the task of creating official clips for the remaining tracks in a single day in New York City: “I wanted to film four short videos in a day, and I was running around and it was raining, and I did so much running in Washington Square Park that the sole of my shoe peeled off…” That batch includes the Beatles-eque “Gimme Sugar,” whose video was inspired by Louise Malle film noir classic Elevator to the Gallows, a favorite of both Coffey and Marina: “I watched the scene with the Miles Davis soundtrack, and I was like, ‘This is such an amazing scene! I wanna do something like this!’ It’s a light homage to that, though… But I did wanna do a shot where I almost got hit by a car, like that scene when she almost gets hit by like eight cars.”
In addition to the directors themselves, Anya tells me that her music videos are often based on ideas of her husband, indie rock icon and one-time Philadelphia resident Matt Pond. Pond had the idea to juxtapose footage of Anya figure skating competitively as a young girl with newly-shot footage of her returning to the rink for the first time in several decades for “Nothing Lasts.” He also talked her into transforming herself into, “an alien covered in body glitter,” for “Girl Shit,” something perhaps only a beloved partner could do… And, at the moment, the newly-married couple are actually on the road together, with Anya serving as support for Matt Pond PA (and Bathtub Cig handling opening duties) on a 10-date tour that will be wrapping up this coming Saturday, February 8th, at Johnny Brenda’s. “I’m nervous because I’ve been doing this thing for like five years for Nikki. I’ve been doing twenty-minute sets for four-and-a-half years. And playing clubs, that’s a different animal than playing a theatre,” Anya tells me.
At the time of our chat, the tour was still a few days away, and when I ask how she’s feeling about the change of pace, Marina admits that she’s a bit scared: “I’m pacing while you ask me that [laughs], but I’m excited. It’s time to grow! It feels like the perfect time to take a leap.” “I’m excited to play some of these songs… Opening for Nikki, you gotta play the hits, and sometimes I do medleys, to move it along,” she explains. And while her sets are yet to make their way to setlist.fm, Anya tells me she’ll be playing solo (perhaps with guests) for 35-40 minutes, likely with a song from each previous album, in addition to new material, and perhaps some requests… within certain guidelines: “From my catalogue, not ‘Freebird’ or Eagles songs, which will inevitably be asked [laughs].”
The tail end of 2024 saw Anya Marina and Matt Pond release a collaborative single, “Click Click Click,” which you may have heard on the January edition of Philthy Radio on Y-Not Radio, and which I find out is actually part of a larger project that the two are currently working on: “That’s gonna be the first song off of our record together. We’re four songs in, and we’re doing it with Kevin Salem.” “Matt wrote a song, ‘From an Outpost,’ and he had that demo, and I added a bunch of ‘Ooos,’ which I do a lot [laughs]… The way he helps me with videos, I think I help him with songs he’d just throw away,” explains Anya. “I’ll write a pop chorus, and he’ll be like, ‘No, no, no! That’s too pop,’” she tells me of their process, going on to joke, “This record should be called Compromise [laughs], although I think it’s going to be called Bodies of Water, because of our names: Pond and Marina.”
Anya tells me that she’s hoping the album with Matt will drop at some point this year, but admits that she may need to nudge him along the way. However, she’s also planning to release a record of demos from Asteroid (along with one new song, “Secret Service”), which is almost ready to go: “That’ll be in the next couple of months. I’m working on the artwork now… I think it should be called Little Asteroids.” Marina tells me she’s also looking forward to doing some more touring in 2025, with upcoming West Coast dates with Eric Hutchinson in March, and hopefully some jaunts exploring parts of the country that she hasn’t seen in a while, like the South. But she also says she’s just excited to take a break from the whirlwind touring of the past half-decade and get comfortable in her current home and life (She and Matt just recently honeymooned in Mexico, a year-and-a-half after marrying.)
“I think it’ll be a good time for refocusing and getting used to a different tempo in my life. When I was doing shows with Nikki for four-and-a-half years, it was every weekend flying, flying, flying… But now I can cook a stew if I want to, or get to know my neighbors a little better [laughs]. I’m going to meet my friend for a coffee date, and I haven’t been out to coffee with someone in the five years that I’ve lived here.”
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