Under her alias Daneshevskaya, Anna Beckerman writes tough-minded, tender-hearted songs about saying fond farewells. Some might be addressed to a lover, but most are about friends and acquaintances, those people whose lives intersect briefly with yours before they follow their own paths elsewhere. Bury Your Horses locates meaning in these absences and finds hard-won contentment with dwindling memories left behind. “I’ve always been excited by the vulnerability of being left,” Beckerman explains. “These songs were just reactions to people leaving my life, and I wanted to say goodbye to them and learn how to incorporate those memories into who I am.”
Music has never been a solitary pursuit for Beckerman. She grew up in New York State, the youngest child in a family that pursued music as both a profession and a personal obsession. Her father was a pianist and musicologist, her mother an opera singer. “Every family gathering was very musical,” she says. “We were always playing music together in a way that felt very safe. I learned to trust other people and have fun with it.” Similarly, her grandmother, a poet, encouraged her literary pursuits. “She was very involved in my life, and I was obsessed with her. She was like a celebrity to me. She was so creative, always sending me poetry she had written.”
Beckerman wrote songs in her bedroom as a teenager and kept writing after she moved to Brooklyn, finding inspiration in artists like Patsy Cline, who sings sad songs with gusto. It took a while before she realized that other people might actually want to hear her compositions. “I had no goals with music at all. My friend Maddy Leshner was one of the first people I ever showed my songs to. We would get together and play music all night, just the two of us, not even recording it. We were just doing this fun thing together as friends.” When Beckerman decided to post music on Bandcamp, she used her Lithuanian middle name—Daneshevskaya—as a tribute to her family.
Fittingly for an EP about the people who slip out of your life, Beckerman made this album with close friends, including producer/guitarist Artur Szerejko, string arranger Finnegan Shanahan, drummer Robby Bowen, and of course her late-night jam partner Maddy. This makeshift band recorded piecemeal, in their apartments or in studios; Beckerman tracked her vocals in her father’s office. “I tried to let go of the version of the song I had in my head and let in other people. I wanted people to have fun in their own way. I wanted to let them run away with whatever they saw in the songs.” Together, they add warmth and whimsy to these songs, as the chamber-pop strings and steady rhythm section draw out the vulnerability in her vocals and reinforce the something’s off quality.
Revisiting songs that were written during a five-year stretch, Beckerman found they had changed. They revealed new truths, new facets of meaning that she couldn’t have comprehended when she first set the lyrics down to paper. Finding herself reflected back in the lost friends and departed lovers who have helped to define her as a person, Beckerman has crafted a debut full of hard truths and tragic partings, but it’s also bursting with clever turns of phrase, unexpected moments of humor, and oddball references. She discovered that she could be her best self in her songs, making for one of the best debut EPs you’ll hear this year.
