Interview with Singer-Songwriter Annie Cilley

         Annie Cilley’s new EP is three stories told through song. Acoustic instruments, voices, strings, samples, and electronics decorate the worlds in which these stories take place - a forest, an ocean, and a haunted mind. Three Songs incorporates elements of electronic music, chamber jazz, gypsy jazz, and folk music. Annie’s background as a gypsy jazz singer, folk fiddle player, and electronic musician help inform her sound. The landscape of her birthplace, rural Petaluma, CA, informs the imagery in her lyrics and the whimsical stories that they tell. Here she talks about her new EP, the magic of hearing Billie Holiday sing Gloomy Sunday for the first time, busking, fiddle lessons from Jolie Holland and what inspires her music, the ups, the downs and the still evolvings of a life dedicated to the winding path ways of the song. 


AHC: What has this journey in music, so far, been like for you, the highs and the lows, and what life lessons do you feel you've picked up along the way?

Oh man, its been all over the map. It took me a long time to commit to music in a serious way. I used to float around in different mediums - poetry, theater, dance, visual art - but I really committed to music about 5 years ago, and since then its been an awesome and at times crushing journey in discovering myself - what it takes to develop a skill, how to take risks and set boundaries, how to fail, how to finish things. 


AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them?

My sister paved the way for me in a lot of ways. She took after my Dad’s interest in musical theater, so I did too. She played sax so I played sax. She sang in choir, so I sang in choir. She’s a songwriter too, and I got the chance to give back to her recently by helping her produce her first EP (Like a Babe, Fionna Lane). 

I was so influenced by my siblings - and MTV - that it took me a while to develop my own taste. When I was a teenager, one of my good friends showed me a recording of Billie Holiday singing Gloomy Sunday. I was completely transported. I think it might have been the first time I experienced that feeling, being entirely immersed in the world of a song.


AHC: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote? Or that first moment when you picked up a pen and realized that you could create whole worlds just by putting it to paper? 

I started writing poetry in elementary school. I kept it up, and it was probably what got me through the harder part of my childhood. I’d stay up all night writing so often that I started missing school because of it. Some of the poems were intended to be songs, but I didn’t begin setting them to music until my high school sweetheart’s mom dug up an acoustic guitar for me for my 16th birthday. The action on that thing was vicious, but I played on it anyway. I had a good friend who played banjo, and we’d write ridiculous songs together while we got silly with our friends. In the morning I'd sit on the front porch with my guitar and just play whatever came out. I think that's where I started writing some of my first songs.


AHC: Which musicians have you learned the most from? Or writers, artists, filmmakers etc?

My friends in the North Bay. I wouldn’t have the experience I have without them, and I may never have discovered some of my greatest musical influences had they not introduced me to their records. The music community in Santa Rosa, CA accepted me with open arms, and despite all my imperfections as an instrumentalist and person, they carried me with them on many grand adventures.


AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak?

I think a good song communicates. Writing a song is a method of distilling messy, complicated human experiences into simple lyrical phrases, something others can digest and hopefully understand. The moment I get the recipe right is fantastic - the best feeling.


AHC: Your EP 'Three Songs' is described as a record of stories musically decorated, each in their respective landscapes of a forest, an ocean, and a haunted mind, and that the landscape of your birthplace, rural Petaluma, CA informs a large part of the imagery on this record. Could you talk about the role environment plays in your songwriting process? is capturing that sense of place, (where we come from as individuals) a pivotal point of creation for you?

That sense of place, of where I come from, will always inform my work. So much of my emotional self is wrapped up in the landscape of my childhood. It was exceptionally beautiful and exceptionally painful and that combination has allowed me to frame it as a kind of fairytale, whimsical and dark at the same time. My highest aspiration is to create songs that feel like memory, or a vivid dream - to send the listener to that place of active listening, of awareness, a sense of feeling transported to the world of the song.


AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, the perfect vehicle through which to translate a feeling, a state of rupture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener?

Yes. Absolutely.


AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road?

Oh so many memories. Busking anywhere and everywhere with my best friends, tour-camping all over the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, taking a fiddle lesson from Jolie Holland in New York, seeing Tin Hat perform live for the first time, spending sleepless nights writing songs in the old victorian house I used to rent a room in.


AHC: What would be your dream gig, if you were asked to go on tour and open up for one of your musical heroes or heroines? 

I think an appearance on Sesame Street with Tom Waits and Bjork would be the way to go.


AHC: When you set out to write an album of songs, how much does 'where the world is' in its current moment, culturally, politically, otherwise, influence the kinds of stories you set out to tell?

My work is mostly about self-reflection and interpersonal relationships. We, as individuals, are inevitably impacted by ‘where the world is,’ and in that way, my work is affected.


AHC: Do you have any words of advice for other musicians and singer-songwriters out there who are just starting out and trying to find their voice and their way in this world? I know you're at an early moment in your own journey, but what are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process?

Some things I am constantly reminding myself - “its about the process, not the product”. Loving the fruit of your labor isn’t the same as loving what you do. If you find yourself struggling with the creative process, examine your methods. How can you make the process more fulfilling? More fun? Second, make the product for no other reason than that you believe in it - you want it to exist. We are such reward-centered creatures that it is easy to slip into a place of creating for the other rewards that come with it - the approval of family and friends, recognition, income - but it is the work itself that matters. You are the only you on this planet and the only you that will ever be on this planet. Make work that you believe in and it will have intrinsic value.


AHC: Do you have any new projects in the works you'd like to tell people about?

Yes! I am currently working on my second EP, Stranger, on track to be released Summer 2017. The songs explore themes of personal identity, death, growth, and the simultaneous vastness and smallness of existence.



For more visit anniecilley.com/

​anniecilley.bandcamp.com/

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