Exclusive Download: Ana Egge's Mournful, Gorgeous 'Hole in Your Halo'

Ana Egge

Patrick Fraser

Click to listen to Ana Egge's 'Hole In Your Halo'

Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based singer Ana Egge was inspired to write the songs on her latest album Bad Blood while dealing with family members struggling with mental illness. "Hole in Your Halo," one of the record's best cuts, was penned after visiting a family member in jail, and her subsequent struggle to make sense of their self-destructive impulses. It's harrowing, emotionally devastating stuff, but the production by Steve Earle brings out the delicate beauty in Egge's arrangements, as well as the fragile, mournful quality of her voice. Bad Blood will be available in stores tomorrow, but you can download the track for free here.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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