Portland, OR · American primitive

Marisa Anderson

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Guitar soli as landscape painting — blues, minimalism, and open air, the American primitive tradition carried gently forward.

Anderson was born in 1970 and grew up in Sonoma, California, listening to church music and classical records with her mother and country artists such as Doc Watson and the Oak Ridge Boys with her father. She started playing guitar at ten, later took lessons from California guitarist Nina Gerber, and read folklorist Cecil Sharp's collections to learn blues, British, African and Appalachian styles.

She attended Humboldt State University before dropping out at nineteen, then spent roughly a decade without a fixed address, organizing political protests around environmental causes, Native American sovereignty and the anti-nuclear movement, including a period in Mexico playing guitar with a circus for anti-government guerrillas during the Chiapas conflict.

In the late 1990s she played four sets a night at a cowboy bar in New Mexico as a member of the country-folk band the Dolly Ranchers, and after settling in Portland following the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, she spent six years in the improvising Evolutionary Jass Band.

Her playing draws on country blues, gospel, Mexican and Appalachian folk forms and minimalism, often built from repeated figures that shift slowly rather than from conventional song structures, with a dry, unadorned tone and a good deal of space left around the notes.

Her solo records began with Holiday Motel in 2006, followed by The Golden Hour, Mercury and Traditional and Public Domain Songs, and a run of albums for Thrill Jockey. She has collaborated with drummer Jim White, guitarists William Tyler and Tashi Dorji, and guested on Sharon Van Etten's Are We There.

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American primitive