Alt Pop/Rock queen Anne Stott in back with a dramatic, alluring and provocative new album. When she is not performing in theater or acting in film, Stott is the bewitching synergy between Joni Mitchell and Chrissie Hynde, performing sincere and engaging songs about social change and observation. After recently releasing the tracks “Water to Blood” (an Earth Day song) a dance remix of her track “I Can’t Hide” (Audible Yays), and her introspective requiem “Future Ruin” this summer, she has released her stunning, eighties tinged alt pop/rock album “Watershed Synapse Experience”, produced by her longtime collaborator and producer Barb Morrison, they/them (Blondie, Rufus Wainwright).
The album’s title, “Watershed Synapse Experience”, “signifies those moments that we get very rarely in life,” says Stott, “where our perception of something shifts one one-hundredth of one degree, and yet it changes how we see everything.” The album features guest appearances from Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb, The Julie Ruin) playing powerfully fragile piano on “Future Ruin” and “Terre Roche” (The Roches) playing guitar and bringing vocal magic to “Fifty Times Around the Sun”, a track that ruminates about the earth’s orbit of the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Background singers create a call and response chorus on “Water to Blood“, asking, “Time is here now/It’s not coming it’s come/What’s it gonna take/Water to Blood,” in what LA Blade called, “…the Earth Day anthem we forgot we needed.”
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Anne Stott Bio:
Anne Stott is on a relentless quest for transcendent creative expression. Anne channels her signature edgy compassion and earnest irreverence to write songs that light fires and heal wounds. She’s a good girl to the bad girls and a bad girl to the good girls who wants to break all the rules so we can love each other better.
Dividing her time between New York City and Cape Cod, Anne is a singer/songwriter of cinematic agitpop and indie rock, a multi-instrumentalist, an actor, a political rabble rouser and a creativity junkie. She has performed in a wide range of venues across the northeast and beyond, from busking in the streets of Provincetown to commanding center stage in historic New York City clubs.
Anne’s songs have chronicled a flourishing artistic evolution. Classically trained on piano before learning guitar, Anne incorporates keyboards, a resonant six string acoustic and a black Les Paul into the mix. Her first full length album titled Pennsylvania established Anne’s unique lyric voice within an indie folk rock sound. Love Never Dies, her second full length record, was co-produced with Jon Evans (Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan) and expanded into more eclectic song forms and strikingly cinematic touches. Peaking at #19 on the Relix Magazine Radio Chart, Boston Spirit Magazine noted that “Even [Love Never Dies’] most vulnerable songs turn loneliness into a life affirming anthem.” SHE Magazine said, “Stott is a bewitching cross between Joni Mitchell and The Pretenders’ front woman Chrissie Hynde. Run, don’t walk.”
The songs of Watershed Synapse Experience, Anne’s third full length release, are teeming with bold aural atmospherics that embody narratives ranging from intimate observations to global visions to astral flares. In conjunction with platinum producer Barb Morrison (Deborah Harry, LP, Rufus Wainwright), and two-time Grammy-nominated engineer and musician Jeremy Kinney, she devises an eclectic sound that evokes Eighties alt-pop and Nineties grunge filtered through modern moody sonic landscapes. Jagged guitars, spacious electronica, ethereal choral arrangements, spoken word refrains and trash can percussive sections are all employed to create the most pop yet most raw album of Anne’s career. “Working with Barb, there’s no talk of making a song fit into a specific genre or polishing off the rough edges, which is a huge relief and great pleasure for me,” says Anne. “I felt like the songs I wrote would all be respected for exactly what they were.”
The album’s title, Watershed Synapse Experience, “Signifies those moments that we get very rarely in life,” says Anne, “where our perception of something shifts one one-hundredth of one degree, and yet it changes how we see everything.” The album features guest appearances from Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb, The Julie Ruin) playing powerfully fragile piano on Future Ruin and Terre Roche (The Roches) playing guitar and bringing vocal magic to Fifty Times Around the Sun, a track that ruminates about the earth’s orbit of the sun at 67,000 miles per hour. Background singers create a call and response chorus on Water to Blood, asking, “Time is here now/It’s not coming it’s come/What’s it gonna take/Water to Blood,” in what LA Blade called, “…the Earth Day anthem we forgot we needed.”
From the first lyric of the album, “Sometimes it seems like I won’t make it…” through to the last, “Feel with me…” Anne’s unique perspective and unstoppable heart challenge you to look deep into your loves, your dreams and your fears, because she believes that, “songs can transform our heartbreak and struggle into greater freedom and beauty.”
Anne thinks of herself as being from everywhere and nowhere. She says, “I don’t have memories of where I was born. We lived in England for a few years, but I’m clearly not British. I grew up mostly in Minnesota, but none of my family is from there. And I went to New York City as soon as I could and still think of myself as a New Yorker, even though I’m a washashore on outer Cape Cod.” She grew up taking piano lessons, singing in the choir and acting in the school plays. She devoted her twenties to political action for pro-choice organizations, AIDS education and queer rights. She also tried to find respectable employment that stimulated her as much as creating, which turned out to be an epic fail. She returned to singing and immediately started writing songs. She cut her teeth on some of New York City’s most storied clubs such as Kenny’s Castaways and Rockwood Music Hall.
In 2007, Anne did a winter songwriting retreat in the summer tourist town of Provincetown, MA, home to whalers, poets and drag queens. When she learned that the town let musicians busk for the tourists in the summer she stayed for a season to play the street. It was then that Obie winning theater artist David Drake cast her as Kryla in his production of Poor Superman, bringing theater back into Anne’s life. Over the following decade they have collaborated on numerous plays. Favorite roles include: Heidi Schreck in Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me, Clara in the world premiere of Sarah Schulman’s The Lady Hamlet, Barbara in August: Osage County and Jack/Ernest in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Onstage and onscreen, Anne brings her vivid storytelling to multidisciplinary endeavors that include acting, directing, and producing. Scorpio Blonde, a one-woman theatrical presentation that debuted at the Afterglow Festival combined Anne’s songs with spoken word monologues. Never Washed: Scream Along with Billy, marked her film initiation as a director and producer. Anne gave a TED talk, “Getting Lost… To Find Your Creativity” at the first TEDx Provincetown and has a supporting role in the 2024 film Crookedfinger, athriller tinged family drama currently screening at film festivals in the U.S. and Europe.
Whatever medium Anne is mining, she shares her determined spirit, endearing heart and engaging humor with her audiences so we can mirror and transform these mystifying times together.
