On the latest edition of West of Twin Peaks Radio, BFF.fm host MJ chatted with local artist Anna Hillburg about her new EP, Dangerously Impressionable. Listen to the episode for the full interview, plus an hour of local music, and enjoy a few excerpts from their conversation below!

MJ: Tired Girls was one of my favorite albums of 2023, and I regret to this day not having you on the show for that album! A critic described it as "the exploration of the exhausting life of the contemporary woman." Fast forward to 2025, and women are even more imperiled and frightened and panicked...things are way worse. So how do you follow up Tired Girls? You completely switch it up and come out with an electronic dance therapy banger. It's brilliant!

Anna: [Laughs} Thank you! Yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head.

MJ: So tell me the genesis of the idea of doing an electronic dance album?

Anna: So I guess I would say that Tired Girls felt like some sort of climax. As you've noted (which I really appreciate because sometimes people don't understand), I write with a very heavy emphasis on women, and I care a lot about women. I'm a teacher. I love to hold spaces for women. I love women in my life, and I just want to uplift women as much as possible. And with Tired Girls, I felt like I sort of explored the pain of the different stages, and then more bad shit kept happening.

I think even for my own sanity, I was just a little bit like, I can't listen to sad things, and I can't engage my soul in writing sad things right now. It kind of coincided with some other things in my life of trying to be a little more present in my body and paying attention to dance, which had been nagging at me a little bit....[I realized that] I had dealt with a lot of the psychological things with women through my last album and I hadn't really, like, let myself embrace my body. It made me realize so many things that women experience, like shame around their bodies or hiding their bodies...there's so many things that go on with the body, and sort of exploring freedom in that.

I also think that with the explosion of dance music like Chappell Roan and things like that, like, I love that stuff so much. But, it's always for younger people. It's always like this celebration of the younger body, which is great, too. Obviously there's all kinds of bodies and all kinds of people, but it seemed to me that joyous, moving music was very for young people and all of the content [of the songs] were things that I don't identify with as much anymore as, like, a grown woman. Like, "why don't you love me? I'm drunk on the street." [Laughs] It's always about, like, unrequited love and sexuality, which is a really important part of youth. But there are other things to be joyous about and be concerned about and to be noted as you become a woman that have just totally been dampened down. Like, there's not a lot of expression in that department.

MJ: Do you actually remember the moment, or was it a longer period of time when you said, I'm going to do a dance album?

Anna: Looking back, everything was kind of conspiring to become something, even though it didn't feel like it at the time. But there were little things, like the band that I played with for Tired Girls, like, my drummer had a baby and was busy, and the piano player had other projects, and I couldn't, you know...I wanted to feel more autonomous, like I had control of everything. Not to go too deep into it, but I have some, like, woman people-pleasing programming that I have to de-program. So with band members, I'm always like, "Oh, are you okay?" Blah, blah, blah. And there's something very freeing about setting everyone else aside while they were doing their own thing and being like, "I don't have to worry about what anybody wants. I don't have to worry about hurting anybody's feelings. I don't have to worry about who's available. I don't have to worry about anything. I don't have to worry about a label. I don't have to worry about anything. I'm just gonna do everything myself." Because, obviously, I love all of my collaborators, but sometimes when you have other elements, like, "is somebody else happy?" it does influence your decisions. And I needed a little freedom from that, I think.

MJ: It's a great EP for the times, because I find myself so tired of worrying about everything. You know, it's like you said, Tired Girls...it's beyond tired at this point. It's to where we're hurting ourselves, you know, emotionally by just watching the world today. So it's so freeing to dance.

Anna: Truly, yes, absolutely.

MJ: And obviously, that's why you leaned heavy into that.

Anna: I did lean heavy into that. I wanted something that felt good. I wanted something that was more under my control. I wanted something happy. Also, after making a record, I wanted, like, a clean slate, a hard left turn, kind of like...what's like the total opposite of chamber pop? [Laughs] Like, what's a new place to go?

Listen to the full interview with Anna on West of Twin Peaks Radio! Dangerously Impressionable is out now ~ listen to it here. Want to read more about Tired Girls? Check out our 2023 interview with Anna about her last album.