Vita and the Woolf - Anna Ohio (Tender Loving Empire)
Add Date: 09/01/2020
Focus Tracks: Home, Confetti (Clean Version), Feet
FCC Do Not Plays: Confetti, Paris
Formats: Non-Comm AAA, Submodern, NACC Top 200
RIYL: Florence + The Machine, Overcoats, Miya Folick
Artist Info: Anna Ohio is a fictional character created by Vita and the Woolf’s Jen Pague. But Anna Ohio, the album, is a very real pilgrimage of self-discovery. In it, the titular Anna struggles to find both personal strength and healthy relationships. The album’s interconnected songs tell a self-referential story about a flawed but strong character reaching for reinvention. It’s a story Pague desperately needed to hear.
There was never really any question about whether Vita and the Woolf’s Jen Pague was going to make music for a living. Fitting in was hard. Making friends was hard. Earning the approval of her family and peers was hard. But music came easy. Music was Jen Pague’s therapy; her savior; her life.
Growing up in middle-class suburban Pennsylvania, she looked around at the routine of family life and rejected it in full. The suburban isolation, the lack of culture, the white picket fences: “I felt a total disgust for the blandness of that life,” she says. “I didn’t want to be part of it in any capacity, even from a very young age. I wasn’t going to do what my parents did.”
The American Dream looked, to Pague, like an oppressive nightmare. She wanted a challenge; she wanted self-expression and freedom. And the heaviness always lifted when Pague saw her grandmother and great-grandmother at the piano—a habit she would soon pick up and excel at. “Music was interesting, it was sincere—and it was always part of me,” she says. “It was always my thing.”
Music may have always been Pague’s thing, but Anna Ohio, the new album from her longtime project Vita and the Woolf, represents the first time she has written and record an album that executes her own vision exactly. The new LP is what Pague has been driving at since she broke into the Philadelphia music scene at 20 years old, lugging her keyboard around and sneaking into bars to play open mics: It’s a vulnerable, honest album that disregards genre conventions in favor of the pure expression Pague has been looking for all these years. That, to Pague, feels like a new kind of success.
Three years ago, Pague watched with amazement as Vita and the Woolf’s achievements started to stack up: fawning press and radio attention in their native Philadelphia, support tours with Rasputina and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a successfully Kickstarted debut full-length (2017’s Tunnels) chock-full of sparkling bangers like “Brett” and “Feline,” and a real team dedicated to increasing the band’s awareness. The band garnered press in Billboardand Elle. M83 frontman Anthony Gonzalez name-dropped them in USA Today. Pague convinced herself that Vita and the Woolf was on a trajectory toward huge things. But in the finicky and ever-changing world of independent music, “You just can’t think like that,” Pague recognizes now. As the album’s natural life-cycle came to a close, the career-altering reviews and sold-out headlining tours (which had started to feel inevitable from the group’s early momentum) never quite came along. Pague’s mood turned. Having put all of her eggs in the rock band basket, she felt heartbroken.
“There’s a part of my personality where, when something doesn’t go my way, I just say fuck it,” Pague says. “And I go on a bender.” In the blurry months ahead, her band started to disintegrate and her relationships crumbled. Pague thought maybe her music career—which may as well have been her entire life—was over at 25. Even her mom’s support wavered: “Maybe music just isn’t your path anymore,” she suggested. But Pague didn’t know who she was without it. Everything in her life came into doubt. “I felt like a shitty person,” Pague says. “And I was a shitty person at that point.”
So Jen Pague did what American artists in crisis have long done: She moved to Los Angeles, alone. Moving to the West Coast had long been Pague’s Ace in the Hole, a last-resort plan she kept in the back of her mind. LA seemed like a place where a person could start over. But “love/hate” would be a generous description of her relationship with the city. “The sun beams down like fire,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the sky for months.” Still, Pague slowly adjusted. Between therapy sessions, aimless drives and job searches, she began to write and record toward a new album. She met encouraging new friends, and began working on new music in a place without the baggage of home. Pague’s songwriting and her therapy covered a lot of the same ground: Pague wanted to “reflect on, and then move on from adolescence” in a brand new setting, alone.
One of Pague’s goals was to become a better bandmate and a less-distant friend. “I’ve always been a loner,” she says. “I’m not great at letting people know that they’re needed and appreciated. That’s never been my strong suit.” But there was another, more urgent goal: Pague wanted to work on and oversee every aspect of a new album. Since the early days of her music career, Pague had been praised almost exclusively for her vocal work. Her songwriting, multi-instrumental prowess and production skills went largely unnoticed. It reeked of sexism to Pague, and created a chip on her shoulder that she wore like a badge of pride—even when naming her band after the affair between legendary writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. For herself, and for young women entering the music industry, Pague says, “I want to prove that I don’t need some dude behind a mixing board telling me what to do.”
Anna Ohio is facing down a lot of the same issues Pague is, though she’s living in abandoned shopping malls and fighting “the machine” while embarking on her inner journey. As Anna, Pague’s dreamlike examination of life under late-stage capitalism (“Home,” “Auntie Anne’s Waitress”) and desire for escape (“Operator”) are somehow more real than reality: They’re a direct line out from a soul-searching heart and mind. The sparse “Kentucky,” written about an emotional conversation Pague—or maybe Anna—had with her mother about her mom’s native state and the gambit of starting over, is particularly moving. But then Anna Ohio is a remarkably intimate pop record packed with both electric imagery (“My dog flies back to the 1960s / She lies around downtown New York City / And oh man, oh the bands, yeah”) and deep vulnerability. Thematically, this is a magic dance, between empowering anthems (“Mess Up”) and open-hearted diary entries (“Out of State”).
Where Tunnels brought stadium-level energy on almost every track, Anna Ohio is an exercise in subtlety and restraint. Pague is clearly capable of athletic vocal feats—as on “Home,” which finds her both belting out long, sustained notes and flirting with Mariah Carey’s famed whistle register—but that’s never been her endgame. Its patient (but hook-filled) compositions are lovingly decorated by her intricate and affecting piano and synth work. There are echoes of Elliott Smith in the understated guitar work. Longtime bandmate and friend Adam Shumski—a collaborator who has Pague’s complete confidence—plays inventive drum patterns that give the songs a rhythmic depth. The mellow moments support the explosive ones; the loving lyrical details support the big themes. Anna Ohio is Jen Pague’s vision through and through. She built it with her own hands. And suddenly the press and the renown seem secondary to what she has already accomplished: Pague wrote, played and recorded an album with the sound she had been searching for. And, through Anna, she told a story worth telling.
“Facing an ego, killing it, and then rebuilding. Confronting addiction, depression, and self-doubt through the overhaul of oneʼs personality,” Pague says. “I gave up something while writing this record. Anna Ohio holds my pain, the thoughts of not being good enough to date, hire, love, and respect. It holds my energy and refusal to quit being a human. It holds what I find beautiful when things somehow work out. And itʼs a tip of the hat to the people who support and love me.”