By Natalia Dewhurst, Culture Subeditor
It’s 7pm on a Thursday, and I can hear Anna Erhard’s crystal-clear voice drifting over her band and into the deserted café where I sit waiting to meet her. She is rehearsing one of my favourite songs, ‘Teeth on the King’, from her new album, Botanical Garden.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’m geeking out over getting to interview Erhard. Having binged her discography over the past week, it’s safe to say I’ve become a fan. Then, sound check over, she crosses from the gig venue and into the coffee-shop half of Dareshack to join me.
The last time Anna was interviewed by Epigram was in 2023 over Zoom, and she had never been to Bristol, although she is a fan of its music scene from afar in Berlin, where she’s based. Now, though, she tells me this is her third time in the city, fondly recalling her last two gigs at the Louisiana and walks along the harbourside as a highlight of her time here.
The song she’s most excited to play during her set at Dareshack is ‘170’, her biggest song to date with over 180,000 listens on Spotify. She explains how playing quiet concerts in the pandemic, during which she released her first two albums, was disheartening. ‘170’ is the most satisfying to play for a crowd, she says, because people know the words.
One of my burning questions is about her writing process and inspiration. You can tell without having to interview Erhard that every song has a distinct story.
The album’s namesake song, ‘Botanical Garden’, is slightly based on a real person, Anna tells me conspiratorially with a chuckle. But she completely overdid it, combining this persona with an imagined character that came together to create the unique voice of the song. You can’t help but laugh out loud while dancing along to the upbeat indie bop that is ‘Botanical Garden’.
The bitter persona ‘rates two out of five stars for the botanical garden’, bemoaning how ‘there was no space for parking’ and ‘the peacocks looked depressed’. It’s these kinds of hilarious observations of the mundane everyday that make up a lot of her inspiration, Anna tells me. She combines these with an eclectic mix of sounds and excellent storytelling to transport us into a world that is entirely her own.
Similarly, ‘Not Rick’ has its roots in an everyday anecdote. Anna reveals how she was walking down the street in Mexico and followed a sign for tarot card readings. Who she encountered was not who you might imagine as a tarot reader.
'She was just a normal girl like you or me', Anna says, and she inspired the track. It was at a time in Anna’s life when she needed to hear something good, perhaps this was why she was compelled to follow the sign for the tarot reader that day.
But back to ‘Teeth on the King’. The song stands out as a different tone and vibe altogether coming in right at the end of the album. When I asked Anna about it, she explained that this song came from a different place. It was written on piano and has a melancholy energy, unlike the rest of the album, which is silly and fun.
Anna’s story goes that during the pandemic, her friends cancelled on going to a concert. The song reflects on the sadness and frustration she felt at the time, with concerts being scarce or even non-existent, and her experience of this being both in the audience and onstage.
The track, with its soft keys, laid-back drums and lilting melody, embodies the wistful feeling of wanting the world to be different. Anna tells me how she started trudging to the concert by herself, but when she got halfway there, she turned around and came back home.
It’s 'more like I used to write', she says, highlighting how the song is an echo from a past version of her songwriter self that she seems to have otherwise left behind - a very welcome echo that rounds off the album beautifully.
I finished off by asking Erhard what advice she has for aspiring singer-songwriters. She advised being confident, and the importance of finding other people you want to work with, before landing on her biggest piece of wisdom: to just keep doing your thing. Releasing her first two albums in the pandemic and now having far more recognition goes to show just that. You can’t plan it, but you can keep on going.
Featured Image: Noel RichterWhat's your favourite track from Botanical Garden?
