Album of the Week | Daneshevskaya: Long Is The Tunnel

New York-based singer/songwriter Anna Beckerman’s debut full-length project as Daneshevskaya, Long Is The Tunnel, begins fully submerged. Rain is the first sound on the album’s opening track, “Challenger Deep,” the drops falling to announce the coming of a gentle fingerpicking. Next comes Beckerman’s voice, an understated captivation that stuns with its soft strength. She sings “Will you wait for me / Where there is no later on? / Will you wait for me at the end, the end?,” drawing out each word, pausing between phrases—her voice arriving wrapped in silk but sung with desperation. There is a heaviness to her vocal, something substantive to grasp onto despite her lilting melancholia. She reaches her hand up through the water’s surface, begging you to reach out and pull her from her drowning.

Beckerman’s artist name is her middle name, one that she recently learned she shares with her great-grandmother. She chose it to celebrate her Russian-Jewish genealogy, charting with her music the communities she came from and continues to grow into. Long Is The Tunnel is an eclectic and spellbinding project, featuring production from Ruben Radlauer and Hayden Ticehurst of Model/Actriz, and Artur Szerejko. Beckerman has spent the past months touring the US with Cambridge experimental-rockers Black Country, New Road, but Long Is The Tunnel is her moment to shine, though, as no one other than herself.

Though I had been familiar with her earlier EP, it was the moment when I heard “Somewhere In The Middle” live that fully hooked me. Even after the sprawling, multifaceted sets of both Beckerman and Black Country, New Road, all that played in my head on the drive hime was that “Somewhere In The Middle” hook: “Eyes sleeping like a fish / Beauty, brains and charm but I wish / It was/ Somewhere in the middle.” It’s gentle—laid back even—but so utterly hooky. Beckerman’s songwriting clocks in at the halfway point between Lucy Dacus’ “VBS” and Courtney Barnett’s “History Eraser,” but with an added baroque pop lushness that more than carries its own weight.

Standout track “Bouganvillea” showcases even more sonic experimentation and excitement, and Beckerman’s voice slides gracefully and meticulously up and down scales—as if with each new word and syllable, the apparition of her tone is dancing across the keys of a piano. There’s a palpable back-and-forth puppeteering on the song; even the lyrics speak to a confounding cascade of emotions and thoughts, as she sings “I do not want to keep you alive but I do not want you to die / Why are you mad at me when I didn’t try to help you out at all.” The track closes in on itself, Daneshevskaya’s paradox of love and longing. Graceful violins underset the following “ROY G BIV,” as Beckerman sings optimistically of the world’s natural organization: “It’s all in rainbow order on the way down / It’s all in perfect order.” She had been inspired by her own dayjob (when she’s not singing, she’s a pre-school social worker in NYC), and claims to have been admittedly moved by how kids’ worlds “hinge upon small discrepancies.”

Laced with distortion and supple synth notes, “Big Bird” aches through bursting percussion and Beckerman’s airy singing that thins out into a beautiful, angelic falsetto. “The biggest bird I’ve ever seen,” she intones. “I don’t know what the reason was. I can’t tell a dove from the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.” It’s an earworm melody that rises and falls and glitters, culminating in a field recording of birds flocking to some unknown destination. Long Is The Tunnel ends on a gentle, elusive and captivating note, as final track “Ice Pigeon” opens to twinkling piano keys—almost ironically so. It could soundtrack the opening to a music box of her own history but, firstly, it ties together the record’s surrealist charm—most emphatically when she sings “Everything that comes out of your mouth is gold / But it’s useless to me / Cause I know what it needs.”

I can’t help but picture a limply open mouth, liquid gold pouring from its lips. Perhaps this is what Beckerman looks like as her otherworldly tone flows from hers. Because, for Daneshevskaya, every act of loving is a sweeping display. Every noise, every melody and every sweep of instrumentation is a mark of claiming and reclaiming Beckerman’s lineage. Long Is The Tunnel reminds us that this world is a big place governed by some divine presence that we will never begin to understand. In Daneshevskaya’s world, this means we need to slow down, take all the joy we can from the small moments we share with the people we meet and release that joy back into the world as love.