With her new album, White Tiger, dropping, Ana Egge is keen to talk about her latest project. Another release that shines with her usual clear, sweet voice and laid-back guitar picking on a guitar she herself built many years ago, as youngster with an urge to become a musician.

Based in Brooklyn, Egge hasn’t really followed the normal musical flightpath, instead taking time out en-route to marry and rear kids, all the while keeping a hand on the wheel and pursuing her personal dreams whenever the chance or opportunity appeared.

In many ways, the influences that have shaped her own trajectory are evident, with hints of many classic, US singer-songwriters clearly swirling around in the ether—Iris DeMent, Mary Gautier, Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Lucinda Williams, even a splash of Joni Mitchell. When I mention this melange, Egge is immediately fired and forthright:

“Iris (DeMent) told me that with my voice, I can sing anything,” she quipped, with a straight face and abundant pride. “And I’ve always felt that nothing is too sacred or in any way out of my reach musically.”

With around ten albums now to her name, Egge has worked with many of the finest in the business including Steve Earle, Joel Plaskett and Jason Mercer, and picked up awards from the hard-nosed Texas music community where she kicked off her career in Austin, absorbing influences, sounds and sensitivities like a musical sponge, before cutting her own debut release, River Under the Road, backed by Asleep at the Wheel in 1997.

Being raised partly on the plains of North Dakota on her father’s farm and partly on a bus in California, together with time in a free-wheeling, expansive commune with her mother in New Mexico, Egge has a wealth of details, experiences and unusual images to draw upon in her own work when the muse takes her.

“We were always outsiders,” she said, looking back on her childhood, adolescence and maturity. And it’s always this striking, dropout background that peppers her writing with a searing honesty and searchlight that looks back, embracing differences while also roaming hungrily for the next musical trail.

When Shawn Colvin says ‘Ana Egge has the rare gift of being so eloquent and simple, she takes your breath away,” and Lucinda Williams exorts us to”listen to her lyrics. Ana is the folk Nina Simone,” you know this is an artist with fire in her belly, sensitivity, compassion and ability. In short, an artist to catch, savor and enjoy. White Tiger just might be opening you’ve been looking for.

—Iain Patience