The Met Cloisters houses some 2,000 works of medieval art—silk tapestries and woodcut illustrations, stained glass from Austrian castles—but for the moment, Ana Roxanne is not in a rush to see them. Instead, we’re on our umpteenth lap around one of the museum’s small gardens, as if we’re circling a thorny existential inquiry. “I hope it’s OK that we’re just walking,” she says softly. Because it snowed a few days before, the glass panes enclosing the garden are frosty; rows of potted plants line our path, lending warmth to the space. Tentatively, I ask her why she gravitates towards towering concepts in her quiet, methodical music. She hesitates at first, her voice trailing off as she tries to articulate her thoughts. “We’re so small—our lives are just a fraction of a second,” she says. “I think about this when writing, maybe there are depths within ourselves that we won’t ever know in our lifetimes.”
Deeply perceptive and unpretentious, the 34-year-old musician is the type of stranger that Humans of New York would salivate over. She is dressed casually today, in a navy windbreaker, tiny backpack, pink scrunchie, and Doc Martens scouted from eBay. And while she can be wry and low-key, tossing around opinions on Shania Twain or The Sopranos, her observations typically feel like the product of prolonged thought. Roxanne likes to store away passages from various media and revisit them years later in her music, a practice that she relates to the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, one of her favorite writers. “Kundera gives you many opportunities to think and consider certain concepts,” she notes. “I’ve enjoyed making music that could serve a similar purpose—a place to contemplate, a place to process.” On her debut EP, ~~~, she highlighted a striking question from one of his novels: “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?”
Slowness is Ana Roxanne’s mode of being. She is a slow reader, a slow eater; she’s always liked slow, sad songs. But late last year, seeking a challenge, she moved from L.A. to arguably the most tense, hurried city in the world, New York. As a remnant of her chiller lifestyle, she brought along her ’90s pick-up truck, which she drove this morning to the museum. Sitting atop a tall hill near the summit of Manhattan, The Cloisters—with its Gothic and Romanesque architecture—reminds Roxanne of the castles she visited while touring Europe with Weyes Blood in late 2019. “I’m obsessed with castles, how old and rare they are,” she says. “You don’t really see structures like that here anymore.”
Roxanne and I are here to discuss her debut LP, 2020’s Because of a Flower, and the gradual process of seeing herself as a serious musician. The album is a patient meditation on gender and self-identity, embedded with samples that have accrued intimate meaning: an astrology passage, French movie dialogue, the voice of the Italian castrato singer Alessandro Moreschi. On it, her voice is swirled and layered so that it sounds like fog drifting up to the heavens. Strolling around what is effectively a European monastery seems pretty fitting right now. One of our first sights at the museum is Jesus outstretched on the cross, suspended from a cavernous semi-dome. Golden light streams in from the windows behind him. “Wow,” Roxanne whispers, quietly snapping a photo.