Some of us never go home again. Not Anna Shoemaker. For the formerly Brooklyn-based, presently LA-based singer-songwriter, taking a step forward required taking a step back into a past life. So she packed up her apartment in New York and headed back to her hometown. The result is her emphatically earnest, incisively openhearted third album, Back to Pennsylvania (out October 16th via +1 Records). It's an evolutionary album—sonically, lyrically, emotionally.
Back to Pennsylvania, started (as so much great art does) in the beginning stages of a breakup in Brooklyn. Anna was weighted down by a sense of stagnation that required the kind of restart only returning home—to your childhood bed and bedroom, your parents backyard—can provide. So she went back to Pennsylvania. She sat at her hometown bar with her dad and his friends. She walked the sidewalks of her childhood. She spent time with friends who seemingly had it all figured out. Despite all the shakeups of her life—no more New York, no more boyfriend, impending tour dates, frequent writing trips to L.A.—Anna still felt static. But it was on one of those fateful writing trips to L.A. that she regained a sense of motion, writing the record’s titular single. And what was supposed to be a single songwriting session spun itself into 10 tracks reckoning with her new phase of life. Following her sophomore album, Someone Should Stop Her which featured stand-out single “Holly”, her latest offering has been preceded by acclaimed singles “Counting,” “Girl Song,” “Landmine” and the aforementioned title track about growing through pain, returning to your roots and reconnecting with yourself when shit hits the fan. In support of the new album, Anna will embark on her first-ever headline tour journeying across the US and Canada on her way back to Pennsylvania.
