Anna Hillburg is a classically-trained trumpeter and wildly creative singer-songwriter who has contributed to acts such as Shannon and The Clams and The Dodos. As a solo artist, Hillburg is following up the country-tinged chamber pop of her last album Tired Girls with an 80s-inspired dance pop EP entitled Dangerously Impressionable.
Ahead of her set next Thursday, May 22nd as part of the Total Accord concert series co-hosted by White Crate, we heard from Hillburg about her path to the trumpet, her thoughts on Bay Area music, and what drove the left turn in her songwriting.
What’s your earliest connection to music?
I grew up in Long Beach in southern California, and my first exposure was band music education. As a kid, I had really good band teachers when I was growing up and took up the trumpet. So my earliest memories of music are of somebody putting an instrument in my hand and being like, “this is what you do now.”
Earlier, I remember being in preschool and sitting in a circle singing songs. I remember secretly looking through my parents’ record collection and discovering music that way. A lot of classic rock and stuff like that.
What brought you to the Bay Area?
I left LA right after high school. I had a short stint as a job playing trumpet at Knott’s Berry Farm, and then I was like, I should probably go to college. I moved up here to go to Berkeley – go Bears! – and that’s sort of when academia broke a little bit loose for me. You just have to be so narrow. If you want to play trumpet in academia, you have to be in the symphony and you can only study that.
But I had so many other interests. I wanted to sing, I wanted to write, I wanted to learn other instruments. I was super interested in music, so I just broke free from that after college into the Bay Area music scene and just went crazy, played drums and bass in bands and learned guitar and piano and played on everybody’s albums and just got really deep into the scene after that.
Did you have a favorite classical composer to play?
When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate avant-garde music. I just liked things to be very clean. So I loved my Schubert and my Schumann and my Beethoven. Now I can get a little weirder, but back then I was always like, “Ugh, I have to study Stravinsky.”
Has the Bay influenced your art?
It has definitely influenced my music-making in a way where there’s a lot of inspiring people around. There’s a lot of rich history of musicians here. There’s a lot of people holding on as much as they can through all the changes and trying to live here and do it. The inspiration of watching other people do such amazing creative things. And then, yeah, I guess just being inspired by my friends that are here.
Are there any artist-centered communities in the Bay that you love?
My label Speakeasy Studios is owned and operated by this woman from The Aislers Set, Alicia Vanden Heuvel. She has a lot of country people on her label, so I’m kind of the wild card on her label. But she’s so supportive and, because she’s been through the industry, she taught me a lot. I had never done a professional cycle of getting promo and printing things and getting introduced to the music industry. She’s both educating and helping to release local music that might not otherwise be released. So she’s a great center of my universe here, for sure.
And even though it’s a little rackety club with not the best sound, I feel like the Makeout Room’s a little bit of a clubhouse for us. We’ll always find something weird going on there. During the pandemic, there was the Sad Bastards Club, a night where they just let you do sad music, which is nice because loud clubs don’t always want to hear the sad music.
Tell us about your upcoming release, Dangerously Impressionable, out June 6.
It’s an electronic dance album, which is weird but rad. I took a pretty hard hard left turn from my last record. Tired Girls came out in 2023 and it’s very acoustic chamber pop. In a way, I feel like I kind of peaked. I’m really proud of that record. I feel like it’s really a solid record. Sometimes when you’re making an album, you’re like, “I’m going to pepper in the good ones.” And then sometimes you’re like, “Oh, these are all good. This is going to be a good record.”
A couple things happened where my drummer was having a baby and less available, and I had actually started renting a place in Nevada City. I spend part of my time up there in the country, and so I’m not around as much with my band, but my boyfriend has a bunch of synthesizers. So I’d just be walking around with my shoes off, watering my little garden and hearing these sounds and melodies.
There’s something nice about electronic music, where you don’t need to rely on anyone. And that’s not saying that playing with other people isn’t the best thing, but sometimes, especially as adults trying to get together with your friends in their 30s and 40s, it’s fucking impossible, right? Everybody’s tired, everybody’s busy, everybody’s trying to hustle and survive. We’re not in our 20s where it’s like, let’s hang out five days a week and go to band practice. But with electronic instruments, the drummer’s right there. The bass is right there. The microphone’s ready for vocals. The horn is right there, so you can do it all yourself. It’s freeing in that way.
What does all that mean for the live show?
It’s going to develop. It’ll be interesting. We’ve been researching how to play it live. We’ve never done that before. And my boyfriend who helped me make the record was like, “We’re not playing on stage with a laptop. Absolutely fucking not.”
But it’s been pretty in demand. People have been like, “When are you going to do this live?” So I have a feeling that we’re going to end up doing it for sure. And I have grand plans for it actually, because I want to make a fitness dance video. It’s a 20-minute long EP, so I want to have an actual dance that goes through the whole thing that is repeatable. And because of all the music videos that we made, we also have smoke and laser machines. It could be live music, it could also just be a dance experience, the Dangerously Impressionable dance night and it’s 80s-themed and there’s smoke and lasers and there’s some moves that everybody knows. So I have some ideas.
The Total Accord Show is going to be some new band songs and some classics. I’m actually pulling out some stuff from older albums that I forgot about that I was like, “Oh yeah, these are great.” So I feel like we’re going to do all band stuff.
Are there other artists you’re excited to see at Total Accord?
I obviously love Al Harper, who’s opening at the El Rio show. She’s got a beautiful kind of dreamy songwriting style that hypnotizes me. I’m looking forward to seeing her, especially outside on the patio, hopefully on a sunny day. And then at the Great American Music Hall show, I think that Seablite and Luke Sweeney are going be great too.
Is there anything that you think is missing or that you’d love to see change in Bay Area music?
There’s always something new bubbling up. I feel like there’s a strong hip hop scene, indie rock scene. If anything, we just need more support. San Francisco is a city that’s known for music, and if there’s anything missing, it’s support from our city to keep our venues there, helping artists stay in the city through housing affordability, and creating more public spaces, making things easier for people to survive as musicians and thrive as musicians.
I love this town because of the music and the history of the music and the Fillmore and the 60s and all that stuff. We’ve got to do more to preserve that. But I don’t really know what the answer would be for that. I feel like the musicians are there. We just need a little bit more support, which is why people like you and Tyla and everybody are awesome. We’re doing it ourselves.
One of my best friends, Joanne, is a bar manager at Vesuvio in North Beach. I don’t even think Jack Kerouac Alley was open for drinking outside before the pandemic. She fully got the license to serve outside and to bring the music to the streets, and somehow got that done on her own. I’m always like, you should be the mayor. That would be the change that I want to see.
Sat May 22 at El Rio (day show)
Anna Hillburg, Al Harper, Josiah Flores (DJ)
