Anika Pyle is Making Room for Sticky Feelings
In April, office sat down with Pyle to talk about Wild River, her musical evolution, and her spring tour. Read on for the full conversation.
How are you doing today? How has your week been?
My day is good. I'm kind of down to the wire to get ready for this tour that starts in May. So every day feels a little more stressful than the last. But my calendar is sorted out now. And yeah, it's a beautiful day here in Philly. So I'm just trying to keep— what do they say? Keep your nose to the grindstone. Trying to just check things off my to-do list but yeah, I'm good.
So how did you get started in music and writing?
I've been singing and writing songs since I was five years-old, and I've always been drawn to writing in any format, so writing poetry, writing songs. I used to write a lot of stories as a kid. I think it was an accessible medium. All you need is a pen and a paper, and to write a song, all you need is a voice. I grew up kind of a poor little kid who had not the easiest home environment, so I think I was really drawn to creating a different world for myself through writing. Singing was a soothing activity for me, so I was always listening to the radio, and making up my own little weird songs on the playground. I sang in choir throughout school, and then I was also involved in musical theater. At the same time, I started writing my own songs. I would open for my friends punk bands in barns and garages, and played some shows at school. When I moved to New York, I was like, 'Oh, I'm a serious person. I don't play music anymore.' I didn't even take my guitar. It was my intention to study acting, and then I was like, 'Oh, that's useless too. Art is dumb. I'm going to study something else and be a scholar.' And I found that very depressing. My first year in New York was super hard. I was really sad and overwhelmed, so coming back to music was a life-saving activity for me. I had craved this creative outlet after studying so academically. When I graduated from school, all I wanted to do was sit and write poetry. I didn't want to do else. I didn't want to be this serious, adult person; I just wanted to create. So as tough as that period was, it was really helpful to see how essential a creative practice is to my spiritual well-being. When I graduated from school, I started a punk band with some friends of mine, and we ended up playing all around town and being able to go on tour and have some I guess what one might call ‘small industry success,’ some nice articles written about us. A lot of great, fun opportunities came from that. And that sort of like launched my so-called career in music, and I've been evolving ever since. That's the long-winded nutshell.
Several years ago, you made the decision to leave New York for Philly. What was that transition like? How is the music scene similar or different?
I'm originally from Colorado, and then I moved to New York City, 'the Big Apple,' when I was 17. When I moved, I went for school, and then I was in New York for almost 10 years before moving to Philly. I had met many people who lived here from playing music, so it was kind of a nice transition. I had a community that I was already a part of. My partner lived here at the time, so it was really a warm welcome. Definitely. Like everything in New York is just a little bit different than it is in other places. Because it's such a big city, there's so many people, everything is pretty dispersed. So one of the biggest differences is Philly definitely felt like a more accessible city, lin terms of creating art, sharing art, being in community with people. Just because in New York, you just have to hustle so hard to just survive. I really had to come down off of New York moving here. My energy was like still at an all-time high. It was so different to be like, 'Oh yeah, my friend lives down the street. I'm gonna go to their house for coffee,' which is something that never really happened for me, living in New York, because, you know, someone lived in Bensonhurst, someone lived in Queens, you know what I mean? We all just sort of lived dispersed. And so the music scene felt a little more accessible in Philly than in New York.
You mention accessibility a lot. Can you talk a bit more about how you cultivate or practice accessibility in your art? What does accessibility mean to you?
There's so many ways to approach the idea of accessibility. I mean, the first thing that I think about is monetary accessibility. So all of my music is free to download on Bandcamp, and you can pay what you want. That was something that a good friend of mine instituted early on in his career, and I really liked that because it's nice to have the option to have it if you can't afford to buy a record. I remember being the kid who couldn't buy merch, could barely afford it to get to a show, and so I think that that will continue to be a principle of mine throughout my career.
I don't know if this would really fall into the category of accessibility, but I try to use my music as a platform to do some fundraising for causes that I care about. I guess you can think about that in terms of a larger accessibility framework, like accessibility for existence. Funding trans healthcare or trans youth services, or Black progressive politics, and thinking about if I'm generating income, how can I divert some of it to making the world, in general, a more accessible place?
I have been thinking a lot about that with what it's like to play shows. I have some younger fans that can't get into bars, and I have some friends who only play all-ages shows. I'm trying to think about if that's something that I want to adopt as well. Right now, I'm not a large enough artist to dictate exactly how a headliner wants to take me on tour, but I can refuse the show if it's not all ages. But trying to think about these specific points of access, like, 'Am I playing venues where you can get in if you have a wheelchair?' Those kinds of questions. As I am playing more shows now, I think the largest point would be creating emotional accessibility for people. Something that I really want to do with my live performance is create a space for vulnerability, and create a space to access naming and identifying and feeling emotions. I don't think that I have many skills except for moving people into their feelings, and I find that to be an important practice. So the live set that I'm putting together right now for the tour is inviting people to access these deeper emotions and also has some somatic theory, like, 'What does it feel like to be in your body? What does it feel like to experience music in the body?' which I think is something that everyone in every body that is inhabited can benefit from.
Wild River is your first solo record outside of your work in chumped and katie ellen. Can you talk a bit about that process of releasing music under your own name, rather than with a group?
That was a very liberating experience for me. It's hard to figure out how you want to present your projects, and what they mean. With chumped, it was very clear what it was, but with katie ellen, it was a little more murky. It was just a totally different experience from my first band that was like, 'It's the four of us, so we'll never need anything else.' We split everything four ways, even constructing songs. But then with katie ellen, it was like, 'I don't really know if I want a solo project, but I want to have a band, but I don't know how to present it, and I like the idea of it being an alias.' I think that gave me some anonymity. So, it was really liberating to be to make a record by myself, with the help of my producer, to make the artwork, to press the record, to distribute the record— it was a really empowering, challenging, and life-changing. process. It's definitely weird to make t-shirts with your name on them. I can't get used to it. I tried to take my name off the t-shirt, but I guess it's supposed to be there. So I don't like that part, but everything else is pretty good. It's kind of scary. I sought some advice of other friends of mine who had been in bands, and then, started to release solo music and use their own name, and most people were like, 'It's hard to go back from that, but it gives you a lot of freedom.' And I have felt that. It unlocks the ability to do whatever I want, whereas, sometimes, if you're in a band, you feel pressure to recreate the same sound or approach, and I like that [going solo] is like, 'This is me, and I'm multifaceted, and I'm super weird, and I'm going to do something different every time, and that's okay.'
You’ve been very open about the struggles you’ve experienced with grief and trauma, especially in Wild River. How have your experiences informed your approach to writing and art?
When I wrote Wild River, I feel like I didn't really put it together. Like I had songs that I wrote in response to my father. I had songs and poems that predated that, but had some worth in the material and the feelings that I was trying to really come into, and I did it as an exercise in trying to access my own process. I have a hard time feeling grief. I went immediately into logistic mode. My sister and I are my father's next of kin, so it was dealing with a lot of, 'Where does this box go? How do you do someone's taxes when they're dead?' All these little, weird experiences that I never really anticipated. And I found that I was shutting out some of my own honoring my father and I's relationship, and dealing with some of the challenges of our relationship. So I used Wild River as a way to hold space for those feelings. My intention with sharing it with people is that in being honest about my process and some of the things that I was feeling; I hoped that it could create a vessel for other people to tap into those sticky feelings that you tend to push away or that don't always come up and you kind of have to pry at them because you don't want to touch them. I used to have a sticky note that said, 'What are my intentions for Wild River?' and I really just hoped that it would hold space for others processing grief and loss. I think that music is such an effective emotional tool. Not only the process of making it, but maybe even more importantly, the process of listening to it can help you tap into these areas that need tending to when you can't always get there just by using your own mind. It's like a talisman.
How has performing Wild River live changed your relationship with it?
It almost feels like a meditation or a prayer, in some ways, to honor the feelings that were present when I was making the songs. It's a connective activity to speak directly to my dad, which I think was a profound experience when I was writing the songs. Especially “Orange Flowers,” which I wrote the day after I found out that my dad had passed. I kind of just got up and was like, 'I don't know what to do.' I wanted to send him a message, and so I think that now playing the songs live feels definitely like a meditative space where I can get in touch with some of the things, the people that I have lost and want to pay homage to. It's definitely a really powerful experience to play these songs with other people. I wasn't sure if I would ever have a band to share these songs with, and I really have found that to be a comforting and illuminating process. I feel like sharing songs with others and creating together is always a scary experience, but definitely when the songs are really intense and emotional and kind of sad, it's really nice to have some other people to share in that. I haven't had much opportunity to play them live— I think I've only played like five shows with these songs— so I'm excited to see what happens in May when I'm playing them every night and reapproaching them with others.
The process of making art involves so much trial and error. In "Failure III," you say, “Everybody is a failer// Nobody is a failure.” As an artist, can you elaborate on your own experiences dealing with failure, and how you’ve learned to get through it?
I think the sentiment of that particular poem is meant to say that everybody fails. We all f*** shit up, all the time. In our careers, in our personal lives, in our relationships-- nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes. But we are also more than our mistakes. The entrenchment of a label, like failure, doesn't really leave room for growth or grace for the human experience. Not only making art, but also running an art business, it's all about making mistakes. Some of the best advice I ever got was from a wise old woman named Bim, and she is very talented visual artist. She was just like, 'Can you just let yourself be bad at something?' You can't get good at something, unless you're bad at it. I mean, there are people who have talent, but talent is developed through trial and error. And so is your life, just developed through trial and error. As a person who struggles with perfectionism, I think it's very hard to accept failure. It's been a challenge not to look back at some of the moves I've made in my career and be like, 'Damn, I should have done that differently.' But I didn't. And we accept that, and then we learn. Wisdom is sort of the accumulation of mistake-making, so that we don't make the same mistakes. And some of us like to make them over and over again. But, I don't think that you can allow yourself to create without allowing yourself to fail. As another wise person once told me, 'It's all just a patch on your coat.' It's all just a little bit weird, and you put it together, and at the end of your life, you have a big beautiful blanket. Some squares you like more than others, but you can't make a quilt without a bunch of different, weird little f****d up squares.
Can you talk about some of your creative influences? Any artists in particular whose work has informed your own?
Oh my gosh, so many. It's so varied. I take a lot of inspiration from my friends who are creating. But I feel like some of the most influential pieces of art, for me, have been books. There's a book that I always come back to, it's called Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. It's a young adult literature book. It deals with death and dying; city versus country; identity and family. It's just something that I keep coming back to, and have thought a lot about in my life, and has a direct throughline to Wild River. There's a reference to a lake in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which I first experienced through this book when I was eight years old, and then later experienced it in real life, and it was so beautiful that it has just left a lasting impression on me. I'm really inspired by nature. I wouldn't say that nature is necessarily an artist, but something that is the original artist. The way that nature forms the Earth that we live in is just so incredible, and I think the natural world is the space that I've come back to, to center myself and experience creativity. But I also really loved the Spice Girls as a kid, and I think that just keeps on coming up for me. So, so many inspirations. But I would say a lot of my inspiration comes from reading books and being in nature. Musically, it always changes, and is all over the place, always. I've been really into Brandy Carlille's music, and I've been obsessed with the new Hurray for the Riff Raff record— those are my two current contemporary inspirations.
In the last year, you’ve started a Patreon. Can you talk a bit about how that community has impacted your creative practice?
Oh, yes, I love my Patreon. My Patreon is a great accountability tool. It keeps me writing every month. It keeps me playing every month. It keeps me thinking about my creative practice, and constantly reevaluating what I'm doing, and it keeps me connected, which was the biggest reason why I started it in a very kind of lonely, disconnected time. I play a live stream every month, and it's really nice to just see the same faces. Whatever I want to do there, they're there for, and I know that they really want to be there. So, it opens up this space of experimentation and honesty and it's really nice to have. It's like my 'accountabili-buddy.' I love to follow what my patrons are doing, and I've just formed so many beautiful relationships out of it. It's been really, really nice. I love it.
Your set to go on tour in the spring. Are there any other upcoming projects that you would like to tell us about?
Yeah, so I'm going on tour, and later this year, I'll be releasing some new music that I'm really excited about. I just got the mixes back. So nothing to formally announce, but planting a little seed that I'm working on releasing some things with some visual components, and I think it'll be really nice.
