Denison Witmer’s latest record Anything At All is a collection of short meditations, lyrically simple tracks that contemplate the beauty of the everyday, the meaning of friendship, and the qualities of a good person. Beginning as an exercise to stay musically productive during the pandemic, the folk-rock singer-songwriter was eventually approached by good friend and frequent collaborator Sufjan Stevens to transform his simple songs into a whole record. Over the years, the two worked together to write and compose ten tracks that seek to serve as a list of brief wisdoms and life lessons Witmer has learned throughout his life. Now, he finds himself ready to share them with the next generation of listeners.

Ahead of the album’s release on February 14, Northern Transmissions spoke with Denison Witmer on the making of Anything At All, finding inspiration from children’s literature, and deepening friendships through his collaboration with Sufjan Stevens.

Norther Transmissions: So, Anything At All comes out in a month; that’s exciting news! Walk me through the production of the album: how you created it—especially since it comes so near after your last album [January 2020], which was a collaborative album with Uncle Denny—and the music and themes that you drew from this album.

Denison Witmer: Well, the timeline of my last three records is kind of strange. I mean, I made an album called American Foursquare that came out in 2020, and right when that record was finished, I decided to just try to do a songwriting project where I wrote a song a day and recorded it into a single microphone. I wasn’t sure if I was going to release it or not. And that was in January of 2020. I think that a reason I did it is that I was reacting to the fact that, when I make albums in the studio, everything is so meticulous. We think through all the arrangements, there’s a lot of people involved, and I just wanted to do something fast and very simple. And so, that was my Uncle Danny record! The thing is, it actually came out in February of 2020, but it didn’t end up on Spotify or anything like that until much later. So that’s why it looks like it’s more recent, but it’s actually not—it’s actually from 2020.

Anyway, as far as Anything At All is concerned, after I made American Foursquare, I didn’t want to wait so long to make a new record, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to get started.’ I started writing some songs—obviously having a lot of time on my hands over COVID lockdown to sit with my thoughts—but I wasn’t able to get anything started because I’ve got two little kids. I’ve got a really busy life; things were just too complicated for me to get back into the studio. And at that time, I was working on some carpentry projects for Sufjan [Stevens], and I was talking to him about it. He was like, ‘Well, what do you think about getting a couple songs started? We could book a couple of days in my studio; we could just see how far we get in a few days.’ So that’s what we did.

For those first few days, I think we recorded about six songs, and we got a lot done. I say that we were 80% of the way there, in terms of just like, broad stroke arrangements. I then went to Seattle and I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to finish this record really quickly.’ I went to my friend Andy Park, who made American Foursquare with me, and I thought he and I were just going to wrap the record up and be done. For a week, things were looking really good, but then I came home and was like, ‘Ah, I’m not sure if this is exactly how I want the record to sound. I don’t know what I want to do.’ I played it for Sufjan and he was like, ‘I don’t know why you went back to Seattle so fast and tried to finish this.’ And I said, ‘Well, I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.’ He responded, ‘No, I actually want to work on this whole record with you.’ I didn’t realize that until after I had been to Seattle; I didn’t know that Sufjan wanted to be more involved! I think that I took his generous offer of saying that he wanted to help me with some songs and misunderstood that. I think what he really wanted to do was make a whole record with me.

Once I knew that he wanted to be more involved, I decided to reapproach the entire project from ground-up. He and I listened to all the songs: we listened to everything I added in Seattle, and we had some really good conversations about what worked and what didn’t, as well as what his visions [for the record] were. For a few different reasons, I decided to just hand the songs over to him and let him see things through. I mean, we’ve been friends for a really long time, but he’s never fully arranged any of my songs from start to finish. He’s only ever been a guest musician on my records, which means he just shows up for a day, adds a bunch of parts, disappears, and then it’s up to me to finish it. So, I thought it would be really fun to see what would happen with my songs if he took them and went the whole way with it. But also, I mean, I’m not an idiot: if Sufjan says he wants to work on your music, you say yes! I’m aware of this because I’m his friend, and I’m aware of the number of albums that show up at his house with notes that say, ‘If you’d ever like to make music with me sometime, I’d love to!’ And they’re sometimes like, pretty big-name artists, too. So, I was just like, ‘This is a cool opportunity not just because Sufjan’s got a brilliant, musical mind and it’s really fun to work with him. but also because we’ve been friends for so long and it was a good chance for us to spend time together.’ So that’s the beginning of Anything At All.

And then, as you know, [Sufjan] had kind of a rough patch there where he got sick [in 2023]—he ended up in the hospital. We were supposed to finish the record a week after he went into the hospital: all that was scheduled, so I was faced with the decision to either put it on hold or finish it myself, which I didn’t really want to do. Ultimately, what I decided was to shelf the album and wait until it seemed like there was a clear plan from him as to whether or not he wanted to finish it. I wanted him to make that decision. After he was healthy enough, he came back to me and said, ‘You know, we should start thinking about these songs again, and we should wrap it up.’ And so that’s what we did!

The whole thing ended up taking longer than I thought, but I’ve also made enough albums now to know that creativity always has its own timeline. It becomes this other person in the room. There are always the people that are working on the project, and then there’s the project itself, and sometimes the project itself tells you what it wants. And in this case, it had its own timeline; we had to follow that. Ultimately, those long breaks in between the bursts of creativity ended up being very good for us because it gave us perspective and time to live with the songs—time to figure out what we wanted to do arrangement-wise. I think we’ benefited from that.

NT: I also bet that being on the Asthmatic Kitty label, which is an independent label that Sufjan’s heavily involved in, also contributes to your benefit in that you get to say when your album’s released. Whereas with bigger pop artists, they typically have to move in the three-year album cycle, which can put a lot of pressure.

DW: In some ways, yes, and in some ways no, it’s not. Asthmatic Kitty was also going through some changes at that time, where they were restructuring and there were a lot of staff changes. What ended up happening was that I turned the album in March of 2023, but we just could not find a date to release it until now, February 2024. So, it’s actually been finished for a while, which is a little bit of a kiss and a curse in the digital age. Part of me is just like, ‘I should just put it out. I can just get it out so quickly; I don’t have to wait for anything.’ But we wanted to do right by the label, and I still really believe in the album format: the structure of song sequencing, all of that kind of stuff, because I’ve been making records for twenty years. Like, that’s just the way that I know how to make records. For me it was worth waiting just to know that I could get some beautiful vinyl packaging, and it would all time out.

NT: I like what you said about the sequencing of the album because that was actually my next question! What I found very compelling [in Anything At All] is that it reads like an album of short meditations. There’s a nice split—both within the songs themselves and within the track order—where there are musically plain songs that have to do about the everyday, and those that have these grander, more cosmic themes and orchestral arrangements. Some of them are very short, and then there’s “Slow Motion Snow,” which is eight minutes long. I was wondering what kind of narrative were you trying to build with the sequencing of the songs, as well as this meditative approach to the album?

DW: Well, it’s an interesting question. I mean, you’re right. The songs are intentionally simple lyrically, in some ways, and that’s because I felt like they needed to be very direct. I’m not trying to dumb anything down here, but what I’m about to say is like…Okay, so I have two little kids, right? I was spending a lot of time reading children’s books, and what I really enjoyed about reading them, especially if you find really great ones, is that the messages are sometimes very simple, very direct, but they almost carry this intense weight of a life lesson or a point to get across. I wanted to try to write intentionally not cleverly. I wanted to just to be very simple, but I wanted to make sure that I got that meditative spirit across in the albums.

I did challenge myself to write about the mundane because I think there is a lot of gravity to how we spend our time, and the compounding nature of the way we spend our time. What we do day-in and day-out maybe doesn’t always feel like it has much meaning, but then as you see it stretch before you or behind you, you realize that it does. I was looking for those patterns: a song like “Lost In My Head,” for instance, is very much about trying to come to terms with what is going on inside of me as I’m just sitting in silence for days on end. The end of that song is also trying to deal with capturing an idea, or learning when to let it go, or learning how to just let it pass through you—so it’s almost a song about creativity in that sense…

It’s definitely a nice balance of Sufjan and I when it comes to [composition] because if it was just me, the songs would probably be arranged a lot more simply. Sufjan always hears things in the spaces that he wants to fill in. He can be a minimalist when it comes to arrangements, but he oftentimes likes to pack things in there. With a song like “A House With,” there were parts of that where he was like, ‘You actually have room for more lyrics here. Like, you could add an echo here, you could do this, etc..’ He’s a lover of concrete nouns and those types of descriptors, so he would challenge me while I was writing and while we were arranging, and he would say, ‘You know, I think you should fit something in here, like next time come up with an idea that might work.’ And then I would present it to him, and we’d figure out how to fit it in or not. I think he did a good job of keeping things small when they needed to be, and then putting his fingerprint in there to let things explode and get big.

In terms of sequence, we went back and forth a bunch with it. Ultimately, there were a few songs I wrote in similar keys and even similar guitar tunings, and we just had to make sure they weren’t right next to each other because it would just sound like all the same thing. It took a little time to figure it out: “Slow Motion Snow” was a tough one to find where to put on the record because it’s such a big song. That really got huge when I was out in Seattle. We added the drums, and things just got really, really big, dreamy, and lush—it almost feels like the last song on the record. And then “Brother’s Keeper” sneaks in with this little benediction, which is only a minute and a half long. So yeah, I think it all worked out.

NT: I was also going to ask about the order of the last two songs in particular, because I feel like those, at least in my perspective, capture the split nature of the record. There’s so much love for nature within it, whether in the lyrics or [in the composition.] In “Slow Motion Snow,” you capture snowfall in a “Waltz of the Snowflakes”-esque, impressionistic manner. And then “Brother’s Keeper,” while it is simpler, also has a spiritual aspect to it. It has this idea of being good for the sake of goodness. So, when putting those two songs together and deciding which one goes last, did you think that was trying to drive home the point of Anything At All?

DW: I mean, if it was, it wasn’t intentional. “Brother’s Keeper” was one of the last ones that we recorded. I sat on it for a long time because I didn’t want—and this is going to sound weird—but I didn’t want to feel awkward about that song. Like, on the heels of [Sufjan] being sick, and me spending a lot of time actually just being a friend…and there was a whole collection of people who were involved in helping him get better, including myself, you know. (Ultimately, he was the one who got better himself; I mean, he is the one who had to put the most work in.) I definitely feel he and I have such a long history: there have been times in my life where he has really been there for me and cared for me. And there’s times where obviously I’ve had to care for him, too. I wanted to write a song that was short and sweet and had that message of caring, like you said.

It seemed like a nice way to wrap up, maybe as a little way of saying, ‘This is a record that two friends made together, and we care about each other.’ I feel very cared for by Sufjan, and just the fact that he took the time and put the energy in to make this record with me—that’s a very generous and beautiful thing for him to do for me as a friend. That’s not lost on me, so [“Brother’s Keeper”] is a little bit of a ‘thank you’ song too, in that way. I’ve never told him that though, which will be a sweet thing for him to find out.

NT: To go back to your earlier point about being inspired by your children and the children’s books: Another song that I wanted to talk about is “Clockmaker” because it stands out from the rest of the album in terms of lyrics and its storybook appeal. I wanted to know where your mind was when you were inspired to write that track.

DW: That’s the one song on the record that’s very much autobiographical. I had been working earlier that day at a neighbor’s house where I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The place actually has a lot of clockmaking companies: the original Hamilton Watch factory is here, and there’s Bowman, as well as all these different clockmakers. An elderly woman in my neighborhood needed something repaired at her house; she needed her front door fixed. I went over, and as I was repairing her front door, we got to talking. We had this beautifully long, kind conversation about craft, life, and parenting… After that day of working in her house, I just came home and I wrote the song, and it’s very much that little snapshot of one little picture of one day…She sadly passed away before she could hear the song, which is a bummer, but I did get to share it with her daughter, which was really meaningful.

NT: It seems like your album is a collection of things that you’ve learned from the people around you, and you’re giving it back out to others and reinterpreting it. Could you tell me—through specific songs, or even through instrumental arrangements—how the theme of friendship and community-building came forward in this album?

DW: That’s a tough question to answer because I know in the past that I’ve made albums that have stood the test of time, and I’ve made records that haven’t stood the test of time. I’m still too close to this record to know what it means fully. I think a few years from now, I’ll be able to answer that question better, but I do know that I feel like I said everything I wanted to say while making the record. I feel like I have moments where I go a little too simple, you know? Like, the song “Making Love,” where I say, ‘Love is all around you, love is simple, love is true.’ These are known things, clichés in a lot of ways. But I purposely said, ‘Love is simple, love is true’ because it *is* simple. It *is* true. I also just turned 48; I’ve made a lot of albums where I’ve sung about myself ad nauseum. I’ve talked about my relationships, my belief structures, all these types of things. I think that I’m at point of my life where it’s okay for me to verge on a little preachy sometimes. It’s okay for me to make a record that has a couple of those songs that state, ‘This is how I see the world, this is what I believe.’ In some ways, [Anything At All] is really for my kids; I’m really writing a record for my children. I’ve been writing for a record for everyone, but I’m also trying to show my kids what a good person in the world is, and these are the things that are important to me.

With a song like “Brother’s Keeper,” I’ve never seen the world as, ‘Now put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.’ I know that there’s a certain amount of that where it’s necessary: like, if you are not functioning, it is impossible to help other people. But I do think there is a healthier balance where caring for other people and caring for those around you, or caring for the environment around you, ultimately is helping yourself. I think I’ve always struggled with that balance, so I guess this record is me sharing that opinion of trying to get out of your own way and care for other people, and that ultimately, you will be caring for yourself.

NT: So, now that we’ve been through the interview, and you’ve had time to think about the album from beginning to end, is there anything that you’ve realized throughout the interview that came through in the album that you want to discuss?

DW: Not necessarily. One of the things that I’m really trying to challenge myself with this year is being present, being in the in the moment that I am in and accepting every moment for what it is. And so I try—unless somebody has a follow-up question for me—I try to just go, ‘Okay, we had a good conversation. We covered all the bases,’ and accepted it for what it is.

There’s a song called “Shade I’ll Never See” on the record, and that one’s loosely based on an Eric Carle story called The Tiny Seed. I mean, it’s [referencing] an old Greek proverb—the title is based on old Greek proverb—but the story of the song plays out a little bit like an Eric Carle children’s book. I think that that song sums up the way that I see the world right now, that I’m aging into a phase where, for the longest time, my life was all about me. Because it could be! Now it can’t, and that’s okay. And so, what do I want to put into this world that’s going to outlive me, you know? That’s the beauty of making music; that’s the beauty of knowing that any art that I release into the world—whether it be in physical format or digitally, because digital stuff never expires really—is the thing that will outlive me. I have no desires for immortality. I have no ideas in my mind that I think I need to be grand. I have no ideas in my mind that my voice is super important. I just feel like if I’m going to say something, I have to speak from my heart and hope that sentiment carries.

NT: That is a very beautiful statement. I found the record very humble and nice. I loved “Confessions” so much; I think that one was my favorite because of the narrative that you built for it—this approach to learn from hardship and carry through, becoming a better person from it. But yeah, this has been an illuminating conversation.

DW: Thank you very much; I appreciate it. The hardest part with this next phase is that the record label must decide which songs they want to really push. The thing that I hate about the digital format is that it’s such a singles-based world now. There’s a fear that people are going to just hear the songs that are pushed to playlists and not actually dive into the whole album. And, you know, the dirty little secret is that I actually think the songs that we’re putting forward as singles and pushing to playlists may not even be my favorite songs on the record. I’m glad that you found the ones that I actually liked, too. I know I got a little chance to talk about some of the deeper cuts because to me, those are the ones that are more meaningful, and I really hope people spend time with the entire record, not just the first few songs at the beginning of my Spotify.

NT: Agree, I’m also an album person! I think…well, to keep it short, we need to stop prioritizing the playlist.

DW: It messes with musician’s heads a little bit! Sometimes that is the only way that I can get heard. That’s not really the way that my brain functions necessarily, but I do accept that’s a part of the way the business functions, and so existing in that business, you think, ‘Well, if this helps to bring people to the record, that’s what happens! But no, I miss the days of, ‘This is my album. Here it is: a complete work.’

order Anything At All by Denison Witmer HERE