White Tiger

White Tiger, Ana Egge's tenth album, has nine originals and one cover (John Hartford), and so amply displays her singularly articulate and affecting honesty and sensitivity as to once again deserve USA Today's accolade, "[Ana] can write and sing rings around" her contemporaries. She grew up with parents who dropped out, choosing to raise four girls in a lovingly cobbled together combination of a small farmhouse on the North Dakota plains, a bus on the California Coast, and a hot springs commune in rural New Mexico. Given her unconventional upraising, its not surprising that Ana has since been plotting her own journey, confident, fearless, and uncompromising. Shes been around the horn of life's experiences, having forsaken the Great Plains for Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and gotten married and become a mother, but shes never lost touch with the free-spirited childhood and the Western landscape that formed her. That questing spirit is everywhere evident on White Tiger. Western Movie finds a parallel for her freewheeling adolescence in the Tucson of Martin Scorceses Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, while Last Ride fondly recalls a motorbike romance on a California Interstate. Ana's later, big city escapades are chronicled in Girls, Girls, Girls, an evocation of a young lesbian first making the scene, while Dance Around The Room finds Ana as a more domesticated young(ish) mother serenading her 4-year old daughter. Musically, the album features wind, string, and vocal arrangements by multi-instrumentalist/producer Alec Spiegelman (Cuddle Magic) and guest appearances by Anais Mitchell, Billy Strings, Alex Hargreaves, and Buck Meek (Big Thief). Ana wrote the title song White Tiger as encouragement for a dear friend going through hell, and in need of her spirit guide (Keep your eyes on the tiger / Feed him, let him be your guide / Teach him freedom, that he might lead you / Through to the other side). Ana, herself, fiercely honest and compassionate, is not u