‘It was a journey, and now being on the other side of it, it’s been really nice to reflect on it,’ is one of the first things Denison Witmer says to me about his newest album, Anything At All. Anything At All is a splendidly charming assortment of songs with mesmerizingly enchanting instrumentation, poignantly honest songwriting, soothingly relaxing melodies, cheerfully upbeat choruses, and fabulous vocals. One of the best ways to describe the record is it feels like a warm blanket.
His longtime friend Sufjan Stevens produced the record, marking the first time he has ever produced one of Witmer’s records. The dynamic of being close friends found its way into the studio. Witmer tells me most of their time together is spent doing things like watching movies, going on hikes, or hanging out. Stevens also knows Witmer’s children very well. ‘We hang out as a family, and I think there is that element of the comfort level of being close friends with somebody,’ he says.
Along with being close friends they have a great working relationship too. ‘We recognize with music there’s a time for unfiltered creativity and then there’s a time for saying, “OK. We actually have to edit this down and make some decisions here, and these things have to happen on a timeline, on a checklist, and there’s an execution part of it, which I love. I do that in my other jobs, so it wasn’t hard for me to recognize that some of this is creative work, and some is just work.’
The writing process for Anything At All was similar to how Witmer had written before. ‘Lyrically my songs have always just been a journal of where I am at in that point in my life,’ he reflects. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever abandon that. Every time I try and write from a third person or different voice or in some other way it always feels very contrived and never felt great to me. I just stick to what I know. That’s always worked for me. I use songwriting as a place to figure things out. It’s more of a place where I go ask questions and try to answer them for myself.’
The writing was highly influenced by the children’s books Witmer was reading to his children during the pandemic. He tried to emulate lyrically the same life lessons they had. ‘I was drawing lots of inspiration from these children’s books that I was reading to them because I thought they all had these beautiful life lessons, and they were stated very simply and very purely. I wanted to approach a lot of the lyrics with the same harmony or see a harmony to that style of writing.’
‘Slow Motion Snow’ sees Witmer taking things in a different direction. It nearly runs for eight minutes and has a much longer narrative than the rest of the tracks from Anything At All. ‘That is very much a byproduct of Sufjan having ideas that kind of extended things,’ says Witmer. ‘That song itself is very meditative, and the lyrics call for that feeling of something being drawn out and happening over a long period of time.’ Initially, the song was written for Witmer’s side project, Uncle Denny. ‘I record a song every day on a single microphone, and I do that for a month and then just release the whole batch of things on Bandcamp,” he explains. When he presented all the demos for the record to Sufjan, he included the demo of ‘Slow Motion Snow.’ ‘I was like, “I’m just gonna include this one to see if he bites. To see if he has any interest.” He was like, “We definitely need to do this one.’”
Once the two of them started working together on ‘Slow Motion Snow,’ it expanded and got more intricate. ‘When we started out, we just made sure it felt like just a groove, and then we tried to fill the space with lots of airy open feeling,’ comments Witmer. ‘In true Sufjan form, he just heard all these vocal arrangements, and every time another verse came around something else layers in there. There were strings and some other stuff. He was just like, “I just want to let this bleed out and go for a while.” I thought we were gonna fade out, and he was like, “No, we’re just gonna let it go.” It is somewhat intentional because, in a lot of ways, it is the last track of the record because the song that follows is only a minute and a half. I think that Slow Motion Snow serves this great purpose: to let the second half of the record build to a peak and explode and expand. Then the following song, Brothers Keeper, is just like a very short benediction, in a sense.’
Another outlier lyrically is ‘Clockmaker.’ ‘Lyrically, it is very much a snapshot of a single day,’ says Witmer. ‘I think I just wanted to tell the story of this amazing woman I met that I worked for. I’m a carpenter as well. It’s one of my jobs. On that day I was called to go over a few blocks away from my house and just repair a door for an elderly woman.’ This seemingly ordinary job turned into something special as Denison had a wonderful time chatting and connecting with her. He continues, ‘We just got talking, and it was beautiful. It was during the time of social distancing and everybody being clammed up, and it was a moment of not being that way. We were both masked and from a distance and we were just talking and talking. Then I ended up going over to her house the next day for lemonade just to hang out on her porch and just talk some more with her because she was so cool.’
Alternatively, the recording process was quite different, especially since Stevens produced and recorded the album with Witmer. ‘Having been a friend of his for a long time and having an understanding of how he works creatively, I kind of knew what I was getting into, but at the same time, this is the first time he’s ever produced and arranged any of my songs from start to finish,’ exclaims Witmer. ‘He’s played on my records before but he’s never taking the helm of like, “This is how I want it to sound. This is the key you should do it in. This is the tempo. This is what I’m kind of picturing.’”
As far as the sound goes for Anything At All, Witmer let Stevens dictate the inception of where it would go, but it was also a collaborative process. ‘We kept a creative space where we could just explore whatever he was envisioning together,’ says Witmer. ‘I know that Sufjan has a particular colour that he paints with. He’s got a very strong aesthetic in the way that he arranges. So, I followed his lead with that, and then he was highly conscious of the moments when things were getting pushed too far into overly orchestrated or things that he would lean into his own albums. But then, if you’ve heard his acoustic songs, you know that he can pull it back and still make a very nice simple arrangement.’
The result is an album that carries Witmer’s voice and vision. Additionally, listeners can clearly hear the influence Stevens had on the record. It is a delightfully stunning combination of the two, something that Witmer greatly appreciates. ‘The highest compliment that I’m getting for this record, which I really appreciate, is where people say, “This definitely sounds like a Sufjan record. But it also sounds like a Denison record, meaning these songs are so clearly yours, and the writing is so clearly yours.” It’s a really nice marriage of the way we both create, and it could have very well not been that. I’m thankful that it is.’
One of the best examples of sounding like a ‘Denison song’ and a ‘Sufjan song’ is ‘Shade I’ll Never See.’ The demo that Witmer sent Sufjan took a major turn in the studio. ‘It’s just me sitting in my kitchen playing it, and it is just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, and it’s very meditative and rolling,’ exclaims Witmer. Once they got into the studio Sufjan added a few more things to the song. ‘He started building all these other arrangements around it. We started working on the bridge of that song, and things got really busy and big, and I could see he was turning over some ideas in his mind.’
What exactly were these ideas in Stevens’ mind? Witmer recalls, ‘He took parts of the arrangement which were at the end of the song and brought them all to the beginning. We just like redid everything with this whole new thing that has a very Sufjan-like vibe. One of the things he said to me about that song is, “Now that it’s much more structured and a little bit more rigid, we gotta redo the vocal. I want you to sing the lyrics a lot more angular. I want you to sing in the beat, and I want you to land on everything. Don’t drawl on the words. Just close them faster.” As soon I did that and he added the little echo track, I was like, “OK. This is like Illinois. This sounds like a Sufjan song.’
Another song with a strong balance of being a ‘Denison song’ and ‘Sufjan song’ is ‘Older and Free,’ which Witmer describes as being a ‘very folksy Denison song.’ ‘I had a pretty clear idea of wanting it to sound like an old ‘70s folk song where it just had this really beautiful, lush bed of instruments and the vocals kind of floating overtop it. Just the nature of the lyrics, I wanted it to have a very rolling quality. A lot of that ends up being Sufjan’s piano lines, some of the recorders that come in and out, and some of the big moments where there’s just big guitar strums on the downbeat.’
In Anything At All, there are many gorgeous vocal harmonies, especially in ‘Focus Ring’ between Stevens and Witmer. ‘Most of the time, it’s just me and a guitar on stage, so when I get to the studio, I have this opportunity just to expand things, and Sufjan’s arrangements are always very harmony-heavy,’ says Witmer. ‘I love being able to have harmonies in my songs because I hear them in my head, but I never get to do that on stage.’
‘Confessions’ and ‘Lost In My Head’ finish much differently than they started. Both tracks start very simple, soft, and gentle. They both end very grandiose and beautifully euphoric. ‘I think that’s a byproduct of the emotional sentiment that’s expressed in the lyric,’ comments Witmer. ‘There is something in both those songs where I’m starting with this simple idea, and then it just keeps going up and up and up and ramping and building into something bigger, which I don’t know what we call that? Do we call it personal epiphany? Do we call it realization? I don’t know. But I do like the fact that the arrangement of the song follows the trajectory of the lyrics in that way.’
One of Witmer’s favourite moments on the record is the endings of ‘A House With’ and ‘Lost In My Head.’ ‘Everything disappears back down to just that last line,’ he smiles. ‘I love the feeling of the whole song bottoms out, and you’re almost kind of floating a little bit. Then there’s the last lyric to close things out. I find it very reflective and poignant.’
For ‘A House With,’ Witmer and Asthmatic Kitty Records created a short essay contest asking people to write what ‘home’ means to them personally. ‘You never know when you put something like that out in the world if people are even gonna be interested in doing it,’ comments Witmer. ‘The amount of responses we got was really beautiful and hearing people process what centers them and what home means to them personally was just great. People wrote about many different things being their sense of home, including, nature, a specific item in their house, a feeling, or another person. ‘I’m just here for anybody who is willing to write anything that connects with them deeply. We need that time of processing. We need to look at our lives with a sense of reflection and try to make sense of things. I just find it so important to reflect.’
So, what does Anything At All mean to Witmer personally? ‘To me, it is a statement of generosity and caring, which is the theme of this record,’ he reflects. ‘I think a lot of times if we’re in a community, if we have close family or friends going through a rough period of time, we’re quick to say to them, “If there’s anything at all you need, let me know. I’m here for you. I can help you.” I think people are very good at doing that to others, but sometimes I think we’re not very great at doing that to ourselves. We have a tendency to put up more guard rails on ourselves than we do with others, I think, when it comes to healing and seal-realization.’
Extending the same generosity towards oneself is just as important. ‘If there’s anything at all that I need, what is it? It became a question. What are the things that I need to be a better, more caring, loving person in society who is also trying to be better and grow? That’s what this record is about. It’s about answering that question.’
Witmer ends the interview with some wonderful words about extending generosity towards oneself. ‘Look at yourself in a generous way, and instead of being discouraged, just accept that you’re on a path and that you can only do what you can do. You can only realize what you can realize. Be patient with yourself. Take your time. Do your best. One of the things Sufjan and I set out when we made this record is we had a couple of different rules to follow in the studio. One of them was, “Finished is better than perfect.” We kept coming back to that sentiment which is basically just do your best. Do your best, and then it will be done. It might not be exactly how you imagined, but it will be done.’
Anything At All dropped on February 14th on Asthmatic Kitty Records.
Photo Credits: Lindsay Elliott
