Anne Malin Ringwalt is a Nashville-based singer and poet. She has just released a new “haunted lo-fi folk album” called Waiting Song with her partner William Johnson. In this interview, she talks about her musical influences, her different approaches to writing poetry and song lyrics, and the creative dynamics between her and her partner.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

Who are some of your musical influences, and how have they informed your work? Do you see yourself working toward or against them? Have they changed over time?

Tom Waits and Marianne Faithfull are probably my biggest musical influences. Real Gone is my favorite record. I appreciate how both Waits and Faithfull don’t settle, how they shift styles from record to record. Marianne Faithfull’s musical transformation is particularly interesting to me, how she found a new atmosphere for her sound as her voice transformed and darkened so drastically. I would say I work alongside them rather than toward or against, heartened to turn whatever corner I’d like just to see where that takes me musically.

Your partner, Will Johnson, did the instrumentation for the album. Could you please speak more about your work together? What's the creative dynamic like between you two?

My relationship with Will began nearly a decade ago in musical collaboration. The way he responds to my lyrics has become increasingly intuitive over the years. In mundane and creative ways, we continue to grow more familiar with each other. Especially because our work is relatively unsettled in genre, we have to stay adaptable to the music we create, always ready to envision and enact new sonic environments. This feels like a sacred way to connect as partners, too — we stay open to each other’s transformations, always moving alongside the other.

You are musician and a published poet. What is different about your process of writing music compared to poetry? What are some similarities?

Music is much more immediate for me. Once I write a song, I don’t revise the lyrics, instead allowing the production to morph around the language, to transform the language. Poetry calls for a different level of attention, in part because of the solitude I find in it. I alone am responsible for the environments of my poetry, whereas Will and I work together to shape our music. With both forms, I tend to operate in cycles, either reading/listening or creating in a pretty obsessive way. Reading and listening is how I practice and prepare for my own creative work, and vice versa.

You’ve spoken about how, in the song “Child,” you elevated some of the speaker’s habits and traits “to an almost mythical status.” In poetry, the lyric often works in service of the same goal. How do you decide whether a piece of writing will become a poem or a song? What does music do or say that poetry can’t, and vice versa?

Because of the distinctions between my songwriting and my poetry writing, I don’t preemptively decide when something will be a song or a poem. However, poem-like songs certainly enter the mix, like “Mountain Song.” Even though it’s spoken, I wouldn’t consider “Mountain Song” a poem — its musical environment is so linked to its being that it functions as a song. The churning guitar sounds, the radio-through-guitar, the distortion — my voice is just one small part of that musical movement.

In “Mountain Song,” the speaker sings, “and when I look in [the mirror] / I don’t see myself, I don’t see myself.” This song seems like a response to “Child;” both explore the speaker’s identity by naming of various modes of expression such as dress and speech. However, later in “Mountain Song,” she reveals, “When you look in the mirror, you disappear,” which was interesting since the album is so introspective. Could you tell us more about the speaker’s conception of self and how it changes over time?

Well, the wall between myself and this speaker is so thin that it might as well be me. A very subtle happening during Nashville’s shutdown was that I literally never saw myself. I wasn’t walking around downtown, accidentally catching my reflection in windows. I wasn’t looking in mirrors to assess my appearance. I wasn’t taking photos or being photographed. Suddenly, self-perception seemed divorced from appearance. I loved this. As someone whose lived experiences have been both slightly and severely marred by misogyny, and as someone who suffers pretty severely from body dysmorphia (note: the two are related), I don’t trust my ability to clearly “see” myself. The kind of nothings I describe in “Mountain Song,” in the lyrics you quote, represent the strange freedom I found during Nashville’s shutdown, a freedom I sought to share with my listener.

Similarly, in “Pearly Sleigh,” though at first the speaker wonders, “Do I control what I let in?” she eventually finds her resolve, saying, “I will give what I give to you.” What do you make of her newfound agency, and why is it significant?

This is an interesting and complicated question. I think wondering about one’s self-control and one’s limits comes from some place of agency. Wondering necessitates some level of deliberate awareness. However, “Pearly Sleigh” does move toward more solid ground in the second lyric you quote. Again, recognizing that the “I” of Waiting Song is more or less myself, I certainly try to be observant of what makes impressions upon me, but I don’t think it’s possible to be totally in control of these impressions. Still, I can be deliberate about what I give. This is a song for anyone who is made to feel that they have to give. What we give is significant — and it should come from us alone.

The speaker describes herself using traditionally feminine images and symbols such as pink silk, lace, and flowers. She also sings about “meeting the mountain at its peak” and “pushing through.” The relationship between the speaker’s femininity and her determination, which is often coded as a masculine trait, seems important, especially in songs like “Pearly Sleigh.” Could you elaborate on the role gender plays in these songs and in the speaker’s response to uncertainty?

In a way, this record is also a kind of performance of my feminism, so I’d like to quote Rachael Guynn Wilson on the instability of being a “woman.” In “conflict, montage, hesitation,” published by Matters of Feminist Practice, she writes:

What is a woman? Who gets to be one? And who is thrown sharply, uncomfortably, into womanhood by a word or gesture? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, they’re sure to be numerous and conflicting […] The ‘woman’ that animates a feminist practice is a scene of conflict.

My own gender identity, my own feminism, resides in a similarly unfixed framework, in its own conflict. I love it. I hate it. I’m indifferent. In “Shake It” by Tom Waits (off of Real Gone), he sings/says: “I feel like a preacher wearing a gun around.” I guess, in another way, with another simile, this is how I feel being a woman.

In your song “Sleep,” you sing about a “dream [the speaker] can’t contain.” How do we cope with the dreams/aspirations we can’t contain, especially right now when everything can feel untenable? What can we learn from them?

In this song, I’m specifically referencing a recurring dream I have in which several of my favorite places converge in a fictional landscape. That being said, and while this doesn’t directly speak to your question of ambition, I’ve been trying to find ways to identify connections between my waking and sleeping landscapes, the trees and rivers and lakes that surround me. My dreams remind me of the significance of certain experiences. My dreams tell me what to pay attention to.

How do you feel about putting out an album during a pandemic when you can’t perform it live? What do you make of the future of live music?

For a record about time and its traces/duration on the body/being, it feels as good as it could to not be able to perform Waiting Song live. Maybe our listeners will be moved to consider their own dreams and their own blurred times and landscapes more closely because they listen alone, or in pandemic-relative solitude. Will and I are aching to perform, though, and aching even more to hear other folks play live. I have no predictions for the future of live music, but I wish I did. I hope gathering and listening can be a common thing we share in soon.

In the final song on the album, “Hourglass,” the speaker sings, “We go on dancing.” What advice do you have for other artists working right now?

Vote. Find ways to connect and feel full. Find new things to listen to.

Buy Waiting Song and check out more of Anne’s music on her site

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.