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Somewhere on Marisa Anderson's résumé is the phrase, "Once portrayed the ass-end of a jaguar." It was the mid-1990s, a few years after the Northern California-born guitarist dropped out of Humboldt State University and decided to live the next decade and a half without a fixed address. During that time, she walked across the country twice, joined up with various activist groups, lived out of tents, cars and buses, and got involved with a community circus troupe, which traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, visiting encampments of anti-government guerrillas and giving allegorical performances depicting the overthrow of an evil ringmaster by a group of rebellious animals. Anderson wrote the accompanying music, and appeared in walk-on roles as a "very bad juggler" and, yes, the hindquarters of a two-person jaguar costume.
Anderson's stint in
the circus ended, along with her period of itinerancy, in the early
2000s, when the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle brought her
to the Northwest and into a shared house in Portland. In a way, though,
Anderson, 42, is still an artist without a home. A folk musician more
enamored with sounds than songs, who prefers improvisation over the
constraints of tradition, she has endeared herself to Portland's
experimental community more than, say, the LaurelThirst happy-hour
scene. Even there, she doesn't quite fit in. A self-described Luddite,
she has no use for the pedals and computer programs of her peers working
in noisier mediums. Her latest album, Mercury, is 16 tracks of
rustic, stream-of-consciousness guitar instrumentals, recorded over the
past year at her home studio. It's music based in the American roots
tradition, filtered through the methodology of jazz.
"I'm taking the music that resonated with me my whole life and treating it in a way that I think is exciting," says Anderson from a booth at the back of Spare Room in Northeast Portland. "I like improvised music. I like people who are just playing by the seat of their pants. But the jazz language, that vocabulary isn't my vocabulary. And I don't need to play folk songs. I like folk songs, but I don't need to play them. I'm just not called."
As a songwriter with a
deep social conscience, however, Anderson is driven by the same desire
that spurs most folk traditionalists: to communicate her life. The
experiences from her rootless past are imprinted all over Mercury—not
on the words, of course, because there aren't any. Regardless, each
song is pinned to a specific memory for Anderson, reaching back to her
childhood in rural Sonoma, Calif. If the direct meaning of titles like
"Happy Camp" and "Furnace Creek" remain personal to her, the feelings
those references summon within her are imparted with such evocative
picking and strumming that lyrics would only get in the way.
"It's a challenge to have a full palette of emotional ideas and auditory interest without words," she says. "In folk music, country music, blues—we already know the words. We already know your heart is broken. We know times are hard. We can hear a sound, even, and we already know where it's going. So I don't need to say it again."
SEE IT: Marisa Anderson plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., on Sunday, June 16. 9 pm. Free. 21+.
WWeek 2015