Listen To “A House With” HERE

Pre-Order/Pre-Save Anything At All HERE

“This might sound strange, but this song started as kind of a joke,” said Denison. “I often walk around my house playing a small classical guitar and making up goofy songs to make my wife and kids laugh. This song started that way — I was watching the birds on our feeder and naming them as I saw them, then I went from room to room naming the plants we have in our window sills. I recorded an iPhone voice memo and forgot about it. I’m not sure what motivated me to share it with Sufjan, but I think it was because I knew he is a fan of concrete nouns and words that are interesting phonetically. He ended up choosing this from the batch of demos I presented to him. I am glad he did, because it ended up being one of my favorite songs on the album. Sufjan didn’t like the original lyrics of the last verse… I remember him saying “In the first two verses you are telling us what you are doing and how it fills your heart, but you never tell us WHY. You should try to answer that question for yourself.” I rewrote the ending and It was at that moment that things clicked into place for me.”

“A House With” follows the release of “Focus Ring” (feat. Sufjan Stevens), a plaintive ballad that AV Club called “exemplifying the act of ‘extending generosity,’” while Clash hailed it as “beautifully soothing [with] a simple, homespun feel.” The heartfelt lead single “Older and Free” is also out now, which Stereogum called “a beautifully lush piece of indie-folk.”

Anything At All is a new collection of ten vibrant and pensive folk-pop songs with Denison and Sufjan working more closely than ever before on a cohesive, elegant creative effort. It finds Denison in a suitably reflective mood, mining sublime revelation from an ordinary, domesticated life. Topics like bird watching, carpentry, houseplants, and hiking offer insights into bigger, existential questions about life, death, meaning, and purpose. Whether it’s spent making clocks, gathering berries, planting trees, or putting the kids to bed at night, these songs suggest that a life lived with thoughtfulness and care can lead to deeper joy and fulfillment.

“This is the first time I’ve engineered and produced an entire album of songs for Denison,” said Sufjan. “We did a lot of it in my studio in the Catskills, which is a homey, informal space, not intimidating at all. So I think the songs capture some of that: the isolated, private, casual nature of upstate New York. We also took our time, worked in blocks between long breaks because of Covid and adult-life stuff. So there was a kind of touch-and-go nature to the process. Nothing feels hurried or immediate. A lot of big changes were happening in our lives and in the world around us, so the songs came to represent a kind of safe haven from all that.”

He continued, “I like the simplicity of the songs he wrote, how they’re mostly about domestic life, family life, housekeeping etc. And yet there’s a lot of spiritual and emotional insight too. The songs have a nice balance of the sacred and mundane. You get a good sense of how a hammer or a postcard might come to represent something more transcendent. Denison’s songs find a lot of wisdom in the everyday routine of things.”

Recorded sporadically over a period of two years, Anything At All was primarily created at Sufjan’s Catskills studio during the pandemic, with additional sessions recorded by Andy Park, in Seattle, WA. Contributors include Stevens and Park as well as Sam Evian, Hannah Cohen, Sean Lane, and Keenan O'Meara amongst others. The album’s musical aesthetic marries Denison’s folksy vibe with Sufjan’s signature bells and whistles: lush strings and woodwinds, women’s choir and an occasional jazzy saxophone weave their way around Denison’s matter-of-fact vocals and acoustic guitar. These are simple folk songs with bursts of awe and wonder.

Although they’ve been close friends and collaborators for over 20 years, Anything At All marks the first time Sufjan has produced and arranged any of Denison’s songs from start to finish. Throughout the process, he steered Denison in new and challenging ways, questioning his lyrics, pushing him to explore the things that had been left unsaid, deliberately or otherwise. What might have been a challenge simply reinforced their bond, the process becoming a comfortable space for the pair to spend time being in a creative mindset together. Perhaps the album’s greatest gift is the balance Denison’s songs find within Sufjan’s signature production. While there’s an occasional push and a pull between their two styles, the finished record makes for a gorgeous marriage: Denison’s more plain-stated style, and the spaces he intuitively leaves, gently colored by Sufjan’s unique style.

“We had so much fun just being in each other’s company,” continued Denison. “Even though the motivation of the project was to make a record, it became as much about the process as it was the outcome. It was a nice reminder to keep moving forward…to keep working on the things that inspire me with people that inspire me.”

Track Listing:

01) Focus Ring

02) Older and Free

03) A House With

04) Making Love

05) Clockmaker

06) Confessions

07) Lost In My Head

08) Shade I’ll Never See

09) Slow Motion Snow

10) Brother’s Keeper

Denison Witmer:

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