The Still Tide

Anna Morsett spent most of her life on the coasts, but it wasn’t until she moved to landlocked Colorado in 2013 that the guitar-wielding songwriter discovered The Still Tide: Both her band, and the calm current she had long been seeking in her own life. “I came here from the coast, noise and city tangled in my hair,” she sings on the first single from The Still Tide’s fourth EP. “Found you like forgiveness, swept clean by years of mountain air.”

Morsett is now firmly entrenched in the Colorado music community, having played with Ark Life, Porlolo, Brent Cowles, Natalie Tate and These United States. But she very much remains the undulating current of The Still Tide, a seductive, shoegazey collective that marks a shifting tide with Each, After The new EP is essentially Morsett’s solo debut, while still fully supported by guitarist and co-founder Jacob Miller and a rotating ensemble that currently consists of drummer Joe Richmond (Churchill, Tennis). “I always wanted the full band sound, Morsett said. “But I also wanted the freedom and the anonymity to kind of cruise around on my own.”

Morsett is as enigmatic as her sound is alluring. She describes herself as both a shredder guitar chick and a nerdy loner. A frontwoman and an anonymous face in the crowd. She is seemingly always in transition, like a wave shapeshifting between low and high tide.

Morsett grew up in Olympia, Wash., under a sister-infused musical foundation that included Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix and Andy Aledort guitar lesson books. She dove head-first into the headwaters of New York and came up for air five years later, almost by accident, in Denver. That’s where she and her collaborator Miller were able to develop The Still Tide, which was soon named 303 Magazine’s best up-and-coming local artist. But with Each, After, Morsett is stepping up to the mic and fully claiming it, and The Still Tide, as her own. “I think I was hiding behind the band, for whatever reason,” she said. “But now, I’m ready.”

She calls Each, After, with its carefully placed comma and chill vibe, as “a sweet landing spot for these beautiful open guitar riffs that didn’t really fit the vibe of the last record,” she said. “I love the power of having that full band experience, but I also love the immediacy and intimacy of these tender little things. I’m trying to figure out how both of those vibes can fit in the same world.” Morsett tantalizingly describes the EP’s four tracks as four very personal and true ruminations on past breakups. Tantalizing, because the fourth song is a reflection on a woman she hasn’t met yet. “That last one, I guess, is kind of for the next person,” she said. “It's the hope for someone, I guess.” When the time comes for The Still Tide to rise again.