Anna Ternheim

Anna Ternheim

the night visitor

text by MATT SWEENEY
portrait by ANNABEL MEHRAN

 

Anna Ternheim’s voice is like moonlight on a winter’s night: crystal-clear blue illumination. Its clarity shrouds her happy songs in melancholy, and gives strength and confidence to her sad songs. Her gentle but powerful lyrics — such as “with each gift comes a loss” and “bow your head for all the loveliness” — and her deft fingerpicking on the guitar come together to give people a rapturous musical experience. Anna is enormously popular in her native Sweden, but prefers to live anonymously in New York City. I produced her latest record, which was recorded in Nashville, at the studio of Johnny Cash’s longtime engineer, David Ferguson. Anna doesn’t think of herself as a country singer, but the strength of her singing and songwriting made it easy for a team of legendary Nashville…