by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Singer Anna Wolfe grew up in a haunted farmhouse.
"It was built by English settlers, and they had eight children," she said. "I don't know if they were the ghosts in the house, but that was the legend."
She made a truce with the ghosts early on.
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"I said, 'You can live here as long as you let me live here, and we'll leave each other alone,'" she said. "That seemed to work."
Wolfe said she's always been in tune with nature, and this helps her write songs.
"I'm very sensitive - many call me clairvoyant," she said. "So if there's anything like that around, I usually pick up on it. You go through life and you basically pick up on whatever's underneath and write a song about it."
She started writing when she was young, she said.
"I remember making up songs for fun when I was 7 and performing wherever I could," she said. "My grandparents used to hire me to play at their parties."
Wolfe grew up with a family full of artists and intense individuals.
"I've always been on the outside of the norm," she said. "If you're on the outside of things, you can see into things better. You have a fresh perspective that other people don't normally have."
Wolfe said she plays music for the joy of it and plays with total abandon that transports her into a different realm.
"I can't figure out if I'm an old lady or a little kid," she said. "I appreciate simple things, and I'm in tune with the earth, and I feel very close to God. That's what makes me real old. What makes me feel young is that I'm naive and innocent. I'm not yet cynical and I don't plan on becoming that way, but I still use my imagination and follow my heart."
She weaves stories into the songs on her new album, My Treasure.
"I grew up listening to very old folk ballads that told stories very poetically," Wolfe said.
One of her favorite parts of the album is the string arrangement.
"I love the string arrangements I made and heard in my head," she said. "I had somebody help me write them out. I could play them on the piano and then they were notated - turned out beautifully, I think."
She named Joni Mitchell as one of her favorite songwriters.
"She leaves room for the imagination and invokes images in my mind that are very rich," Wolfe said. "The story is much larger than just the words. The words that she writes opens your imagination up and paints pictures, but she doesn't really tell you what to think. Yet there's a message in her songs."
She said nature, traveling, other art forms, meditation and historical figures influence her.
"I'm inspired by revolutionary pacifists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King," she said. "Legends, like Joan of Arc - kind of these enormously archetypal paramount leaders like Jesus, Mother Teresa, these people who have done amazing things with their lives."
