Brooklyn-based musician and songwriter Daneshevskaya—a.k.a. the moniker and Lithuanian middle name of Anna Beckerman—recently announced her beautifully understated debut EP Bury Your Horses. Out on August 20th, the EP was introduced with its lead single “Dr. Johann Averies,” and now Beckerman shares another wistful track off of the forthcoming record. “Sally and Bob were the names of two fish I won at a fair when I was four or five years old. I thought Sally and Bob were the coolest names,” she explains. “The song is a little bit frustrating, about feeling stuck or exasperated with yourself, and feeling like you’re so far away from the person that you used to be.”

Blending elements of classical music, chamber pop, art rock, country & western, even chanson, Bury Your Horses explores the loss of friends, lovers, and acquaintances, and embraces the marks those relationships left on her life rather than struggles with the absences left behind. “Sometimes the songs were smarter than I was. When I was being very emotional or super sensitive, somehow in these songs I was able to be happy for other people even as they were leaving. I was able to wish them the best,” Beckerman explains of the tracks that she wrote across the past five years. “All the songs tie back to the gratitude I have for what being left has shown me.” The result is an eccentric and inviting debut that toggles gracefully between melancholy and humor, mournfulness and playfulness, whimsy and gravity.

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.”

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. 

Photo Courtesy: Madeline Leshner