Without The Blonde

Anna’s journey began with being hauled around Fairbanks, Alaska with the saving grace of summers at her Grandparents in the mountains where everyone played guitar and banjo. She spent lots of time alone in the woods, the snow, cabins, apartments, the ladies restroom lounge at her Mom's work, and under tables at Laundromats, singing songs mostly in her head but sometimes out loud to the trees and animals. She was moved at 7 to an organic-farming chicken-raising no-electricity alfalfa farm on the Snake River in Huntington, Oregon where open space, juniper trees, a hillside junk pile, abandoned animal corals and lilac bushes created fond memories but homemade ketchup, squash, and headless chickens running around the front yard did not. She secretly memorized all the songs in her Mom’s record collection. A year later she was moved to oh-so-dairy farms Wisconsin, living in small towns up and down the Mississippi River. She would fall asleep every night imagining singing the songs on the radio. At 14 she hitched a trucker route to California, returning in four months to move to upstate New York, then Montreal, where she turned 16, had her first broken heart and wrote lots of bad poetry. She was packed up, moved to Chicago, and forced to finish a terribly boring high school in the suburbs before escaping to the City. She started playing guitar but only some Bob Dylan songs, and liked to lay down on the wood floor of her apartment with all the lights off to sing along to Billie Holiday. She was going to college for no good reason, working at an ungodly hour of the morning for an even worse reason so at 21 snow-shoveled her car in and out of a parking spot for the last time, packed up a '77 Pontiac Grand Prix & headed out to California to stay, except for a 3-year Reno, Nevada sojourn a while back. Fast-forward to today where she lives by the ocean with her two sons, is totally into organic farming, and never kills chickens. The rest is in the songs.