Ann Annie announces new album ‘El Prado’ + shares collaboration with Frankie Cosmos “the meadow” out now!

Today, the contemplative Portland composer and multi-instrumentalist Eli Goldberg, better known by the name Ann Annie, is proud to announce his sixth full-length album, El Prado, out October 3rd via Nettwerk. He shares the delicate and pastoral cut from the album, “the meadow,” featuring friend and fellow acclaimed artist Frankie Cosmos. After performing alongside Portland songwriters like Julie Byrne and Haley Henderickx, Ann Annie and Frankie Cosmos come together on this warm arrangement. As one of the only songs on the album with vocals, it features delicate acoustic guitars, orchestrations, and heavenly synth lines that swirl around a hushed vocal melody.

Frankie Cosmos reflects on the new song: “The Meadow lyrics are about looking inward and noticing changes over time, feeling warm and cold, distance and closeness. I was kind of just freestyling when I was writing the melody, and it came together into this sort of wistful story of a relationship – from sharing a stage, to sharing a kitchen, to feeling distance in the great outdoors. The instrumental is so pretty and pastoral, and the original instrumental demo was titled ‘the meadow’ which led me to that ending of the story.”

“the meadow” follows recent singles “reprise,” “the ocean,” “the field,” and title track “el prado,” which will all appear on his forthcoming album. 

LISTEN & SHARE “THE MEADOW” HERE:
https://annannie.ffm.to/themeadow_single

Eli Goldberg needed a breather. This is, to some extent, how it goes every time he completes a new album under his Ann Annie moniker — diving deep into the ether for a new sound, finding it, then walking away for a while to dream up the next destination. But the exacting process necessary to craft the dense, orchestrated layers of 2024’s The Wind in the solitude of his bedroom had left him drained. He began thinking of quieter, more intimate sounds, and found himself writing material that combined some of his interests from the very beginning of Ann Annie with more recent interests. It resulted in El Prado, an album of wide open spaces in which Goldberg’s past and future freely mingle. 

El Prado is the latest in a prolific streak comprising six albums since 2018, tracing Goldberg’s arc from a nascent musician in his late teens to the self-assured, adventurous artist he’s become now in his mid-twenties. In the beginning, he was drawn to ambient music for his own solace, making long tracks he’d use to meditate to, or that he’d listen to while walking through the woods. The music provided him an outlet to figure out who he was as a person, and in turn, Ann Annie has often gently shape-shifted according to new interests — sometimes being more synth-oriented, sometimes drawing upon Goldberg’s lifelong love of classical music, sometimes going folkier. For El Prado, Goldberg was drawn to ambient country and the dronier side of the ambient genre overall.

Like much of Goldberg’s work, El Prado is inspired by and trying to conjure the feeling of being in nature, having peaceful spaces in which to reflect. “The Meadow” and “The Field” led him to “El Prado,” Spanish for meadow or field. Goldberg was adopted from the Philippines, and it also happened to be the case that “Prado” was his biological last name. It felt like a cosmic convergence once he learned the meaning of the word. The album was, in a way, accidentally self-titled. “It fit because the theme of the album is going back to when I did more open, slower, abstract songs,” Goldberg says. It almost draws a line, back-tracking but also setting a path forward, with a name bearing multiple meanings for where Goldberg came from and who he became. 

Goldberg welcomed a few collaborators into the fold this time. Bryn Bliska adds aqueous synth textures to “Slow River.” And for “The Meadow,” Goldberg teamed with an artist he’s admired for a decade: Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline. He sent Kline a draft of the song, and Kline returned it with a full vocal and lyric. 

As Ann Annie travels across El Prado, some doors close and some new possibilities emerge. Goldberg felt content with what he’d achieved with certain techniques, and then began cooking up whole other sounds for where he’d go next. All of it, as always, orients towards parsing who he is and what he’s perceiving in the world. 

“I know what makes sense for me to make, what makes sense from a feeling, in the moment, in the now,” Goldberg concludes. “At this point in my life, I’m asking what I can do with all those things I’ve learned.”

TRACKLIST:

1. reprise
2. laurel
3. the meadow ft. Frankie Cosmos
4. home
5. the ocean
6. the field
7. el prado
8. slow river
9. for violet