“We had so much fun making this album and just being in each other’s company,” stated Denison. “Even though the motivation of the project was to make a record, it became as much about the process as it was the outcome. It was a nice reminder to keep moving forward…to keep working on the things that inspire me with people that inspire me.”
Album highlights include the “beautifully lush piece of indie-folk” (Stereogum) “Older and Free,” the “beautifully soothing” (Clash) “Focus Ring” (feat. Sufjan Stevens), and the recently released “A House With,” which was featured on NPR Music’s “All Songs Considered,” who called it “gorgeous” and “a perfect marriage of Denison Witmer’s writing style and Sufjan Steven’s production style.”
Anything At All finds Denison in a suitably reflective mood, mining sublime revelation from an ordinary, domesticated life. Topics like bird watching, carpentry, houseplants, and hiking offer insights into bigger, existential questions about life, death, meaning, and purpose. Whether it’s spent making clocks, gathering berries, planting trees, or putting the kids to bed at night, these songs suggest that a life lived with thoughtfulness and care can lead to deeper joy and fulfillment.
“This is the first time I’ve engineered and produced an entire album of songs for Denison,” said Sufjan. “We did a lot of it in my studio in the Catskills, which is a homey, informal space, not intimidating at all. So I think the songs capture some of that: the isolated, private, casual nature of upstate New York. We also took our time, worked in blocks between long breaks because of Covid and adult-life stuff. So there was a kind of touch-and-go nature to the process. Nothing feels hurried or immediate. A lot of big changes were happening in our lives and in the world around us, so the songs came to represent a kind of safe haven from all that.”
He continued, “I like the simplicity of the songs he wrote, how they’re mostly about domestic life, family life, housekeeping etc. And yet there’s a lot of spiritual and emotional insight too. The songs have a nice balance of the sacred and mundane. You get a good sense of how a hammer or a postcard might come to represent something more transcendent. Denison’s songs find a lot of wisdom in the everyday routine of things.”
Recorded sporadically over a period of two years, Anything At All was primarily created at Sufjan’s Catskills studio during the pandemic, with additional sessions recorded by Andy Park, in Seattle, WA. Contributors include Stevens and Park as well as Sam Evian, Hannah Cohen, Meg Lui, Sean Lane, and Keenan O'Meara amongst others. The album’s musical aesthetic marries Denison’s folksy vibe with Sufjan’s signature bells and whistles: lush strings and woodwinds, women’s choir and an occasional jazzy saxophone weave their way around Denison’s matter-of-fact vocals and acoustic guitar. These are simple folk songs with bursts of awe and wonder.
Although they’ve been close friends and collaborators for over 20 years, Anything At All marks the first time Sufjan has produced and arranged any of Denison’s songs from start to finish. Throughout the process, he steered Denison in new and challenging ways, questioning his lyrics, pushing him to explore the things that had been left unsaid, deliberately or otherwise. What might have been a challenge simply reinforced their bond, the process becoming a comfortable space for the pair to spend time being in a creative mindset together. Perhaps the album’s greatest gift is the balance Denison’s songs find within Sufjan’s signature production. While there’s an occasional push and a pull between their two styles, the finished record makes for a gorgeous marriage: Denison’s more plain-stated style, and the spaces he intuitively leaves, gently colored by Sufjan’s unique style.
Track Listing:
01) Focus Ring
02) Older and Free
03) A House With
04) Making Love
05) Clockmaker
06) Confessions
07) Lost In My Head
08) Shade I’ll Never See
09) Slow Motion Snow
10) Brother’s Keeper
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