Search - Anne Hills :: Points of View

After a decade of imaginative, rewarding collaborations with fellow musicians (including Tom Paxton and Michael Smith), Victorian-era poets (James Whitcomb Riley) and child naturalists (Opal Whiteley), Anne Hills' eighth solo album, Points of View, marks her long-awaited return to her own original songs. Anne's multiple careers as an award-winning musician, poet, and social worker, as well as actress, writer, poet, artist, wife, and mother, infuse the lyrics of the CD's eleven originals with graceful poetry and real-life experience, and her empathic and caring spirit lights each song from within. The characters and situations she describes all ring true because they are universal, bringing Anne's underlying themes of individuality, diversity, love, loss and resilience in a changing world to vivid life. Colorful natural images are woven into many songs, providing a backdrop of peaceful perspective to human turmoil. The CD's bracing opener, "I Am You," is a view of America through the eyes of every immigrant or unwilling slave who has arrived here and become an integral part of our society. Elsewhere, Anne focuses on more specific, but equally pervasive, human circumstances. "The Farm" is a quietly despairing look at economic hard times and the way men often react to job loss; "Romeo and Juliet," with music composed by jazz drummer Peter Erskine (Weather Report, Yellowjackets), is a near-classical retelling of those doomed lovers' plight. The natural world is the setting for "Pennsylvania," the tranquil meditation of a lone motorist on a snowy highway, while "Two Year Winter" uses the season to measure deep sorrow. A cold, pre-dawn sidewalk is the starting point for "My Daughter & Vincent van Gogh," a true story about a family trip to a National Gallery exhibit. Less fortunate children are the protagonists in "I'm Nobody" - "I'm nobody and I don't care/If you look in my eyes you'll see nobody there." The broadest perspective of all comes from above in "The Moon's Song," a lunar look at Earth that reminds us "Galaxies are born, planets come and go/Nothing in the universe stays the same, you know." Complementing Anne's original songs, some co-written with longtime collaborators Cindy Mangsen, Michael Smith and Allen Power, are versions of Leonard Cohen's vignette of a slow-motion break-up ("Alexandra Leaving") and Peter Mayer's "Holy Now," an acceptance of life's beauty. Although Anne's achingly warm soprano voice, guitar and banjo are the musical core of Points of View, the songs receive sympathetic and versatile coloration by co-producer/multi-instrumentalist Scott Petito, Grammy winning cellist Eugene Friesen, keyboardist Peter Vitalone, drummer Sam Zucchini, and harmony vocalists Mangsen and Priscilla Herdman.