Anna May – Fireflies and Buffalo
Folk artist Anna May releases her new single, “Fireflies and Buffalo” and an extended cut.
“Fireflies and Buffalo sets the stage for a metaphor to unravel, juxtaposing two different forms of life with very opposite qualities that have found themselves woven together, somehow. The song explores these contrasts and is the framework for exploring a love lost too soon. This is one of my first songs where I’ve explored something anthropomorphic. I wrote the song in a moment of combined beauty and frustration – a summer evening in my hometown where I witnessed a very familiar New England landscape, shining with the fireflies that I knew in my youth, but with this kind of sordid bitterness that
I couldn’t get out of my system. I had just gotten off a performance on a boat and felt an entirely new perspective coming over me, almost as if I were seeing the world for the first time or in a way that I had not witnessed it for a very long time. Fireflies are a cliche for folk singers, but I wanted to use their beauty, strangeness and unique sense of disappearing in a non-conventional way. I wanted to utilize them for a more cutting, gritty and unexpected purpose.
I know what the song means to me, and I have to keep most of it a secret to protect the identity of the individual who it is written about, but there are enough clues throughout the song that would be able to let some people in on the joke, but I also love that people can make what they want of this song, while keeping it an obscure mystery. It will make listeners think, and their interpretation of the lyrics will most likely be something entirely different from what I had in mind because the song’s meaning itself is elusive. Structurally, I haven’t written in a way that is so open to interpretation, before this.
I was inspired by everyone from Bob Dylan to Pearl Jam, from America to Belle and Sebastian, from Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, to Lana del Rey, in writing this. In ways, I hear the song capturing the untouched bliss of Northern California, and then it is meandering somewhere in the Maine woods.
This song is the sum of a lot of parts of my life framed by a lost relationship. Some interesting, unexpected content shows up in this song, that I wasn’t truly conscious of when writing it. It is replete with subtext. It is a metaphor to talk about my personal life, but can also be perceived as an attack on patriarchy, with the buffalo as it’s representative.
The more time that I spent with this particular song, the more there was to add & change which made it a thoroughly fun writing process, and even more fun recording process.
It was a true exploration into identity and all the ways in which we define our identity .. and then, how malleable and shape shifting identity really is. My favorite breakup song ever is Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind, and when I wrote this, I said to myself :
I think I’ve written my Idiot Wind. The song is ultimately a juxtaposition of something rooted against something that can take flight, as reflected in random revelations about the nature of beings that I never actually considered until I wrote this.
This is a concept that I’ve really been exploring for my whole life, and subconsciously wrote about here, in the midst of writing about a failed relationship. And the big, possibly unanswered question will be : why on Earth am I insulting a Buffalo?
The chorus is the sincerity where the verses are the cleverness.
This is the breakup that has driven me crazy and has made me write more songs in a small amount of time than ever before.
This is a big riddle that likely won’t get figured out.
It has been a big inquiry into identity and into how various beings interact with one another, in the process of writing this.”
“The Cliff” was Anna May’s anticipated follow up single to her March release, “Elegy.”
Anna has opened for artists like Kacy Hill, Amythyst Kiah, The Arcadian Wild, People Museum, Jann Klose, Altan, The Michigan Rattlers, Kyran Daniel, Jacob Jolliff, Gold Celeste, Vinyl Williams, and Stella Prince, and has performed at Wildflower! Music and Arts Festival, Treefort Music Festival, the Art of Elan series at San Diego’s Central Library, and many more.
Anna was nominated for best Indie song of 2023 by Indie Boulevard Magazine, and her song “The Show” was KUTX’s song of the day in August 2024.
She has been a featured guest on NPR’s Great American Folk Show, on WKU PBS Lost River Sessions & was nominated for Best Americana Act at the New England Music Awards in 2024. Anna was recently featured on the WDVX Blue Plate Special.
#annamaymusic