Fittingly, Ana Egge makes her Monterey County debut at SandBox, a venue born from venture and risk. SandBox did not exist until Grammy-nominated cellist Michelle Djokic and her husband decided to move to Sand City from the Bay Area in 2021. It was deep in the pandemic and their move was an anxious one.
“I had lost all my work,” says Djokic, an active member in San Francisco’s chamber music world and founding member of Concordia Chamber Players in Pennsylvania. “Musicians didn’t have anything going.”
But good ideas can come from absence. Egge’s SandBox appearance will feature songs from her latest album, Sharing in the Spirit, which was conceived and produced in a unique way.
“Every song on this record that I wrote came from dreams,” Egge says. “Some of them had really clear words, music and melodies. Some were just ideas.” She would then sing into her phone and, after finishing a song, reach out to her manager.
“We would immediately go into the studio and work on that song,” she adds. “One song after another. There was a sense of energy and insistence, like, ‘Let’s do this now!’”
There remains an innovative spirit to Egge’s music, even through a career that has spanned three decades and a dozen albums. Originally from Canada, Egge moved to North Dakota and then to a commune in New Mexico.
“I was first exposed to my parents’ music, but I always had an inner compass for what I liked,” she explains.
Egge began writing her own songs as a teenager, and made her first EP, Ana Egge, when she was 17. After high school, Egge moved to Austin, Texas and recorded her first full-length album, River Under the Wheel, in 1997. The collection was lauded by critics and musicians alike.
“I had a big, exciting wave that I rode for a while doing work with lots of incredible artists that I really admired,” Egge says.
“People comment on the lack of vibrato in my voice,” Egge jokes, then zooms out to the big picture: “But I feel lucky and grateful every night to be in a room with a bunch of strangers having a good time. That’s the meaning of life, right? Friends and family being in public together, enjoying life, making that sort of peace happen.”
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