**A Quiet Miracle: On “Riverside Hotel” by Michaela Anne (2016)**
When you find a great country album in the age of algorithmic playlists and viral singles, it can feel like stumbling across a secret letter written just for you—one left quietly on the windowsill while the rest of the world rushes by. Such was my discovery of Michaela Anne’s 2016 album, “Bright Lights and the Fame.” While she’s known in select folk circles, even fewer remember her first, self-released record, *Riverside Hotel* (2014), a too-often overlooked gem in modern Americana, and the album I return to when the noise in my life gets too hard to manage.
Let’s get this out in the open: I have a problem with nostalgia. I look back instead of forward; I scroll through old photos, not to see the faces, but to feel again the air of those moments. I want comfort, certainty, a gentle voice reminding me that the past isn’t lost. On *Riverside Hotel*, Michaela Anne doesn’t offer platitudes. Instead, she offers rooms—actual, softly lit rooms—where the anxiety-ridden among us can rest awhile and remember what hope feels like.
The album opens with “I Ain’t for You”—electric guitar humming against the pedal steel, her voice unashamedly earnest:
*“I ain’t for you, baby / No matter what you say / I’ve been building up these walls / And you ain’t gonna stay.”*
This could easily have been just another post-breakup song, but in Anne’s hands, it becomes something more private. The song doesn’t finger-point or dramatize heartbreak. Instead, it’s the sound of someone laying boundaries gently, trembling but resolved. Throughout my adult life, I’ve struggled with the idea that people can leave—friends, lovers, even family—and it’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit to believe that boundaries can coexist with generosity. In this opener, I found a small reflection of that learning, of “no” as something loving, even as it’s self-protective.
What’s most remarkable about *Riverside Hotel* is how quietly it deals with the everyday psychic struggles—doubt, guilt, the restless need to be somewhere else—all the things I hesitate to admit even to close friends. The title track, “Riverside Hotel,” haunted me during a period of transition when my own life felt like a series of check-ins and check-outs, drifting through borrowed spaces. Anne’s lyrics contain the kind of casual poetry that catches you off-guard:
*“Meet me down by the riverside hotel / Where the water sings you home / You can leave those worries out in the woods / And just let the current pull.”*
There’s a deep compassion in that invocation—the riverside as a liminal, healing place, halfway between loss and renewal. When depression loops my thoughts into a too-familiar refrain, I play this song—to imagine, if only for four minutes, leaving those worries in the forest. I can almost taste the river air, see the sunlight flicker against dust motes in an empty room. And something inside me softens.
Yet *Riverside Hotel* isn’t an album that just offers comfort; it interrogates, gently, the stories we tell ourselves. On “Lift Me Up,” Anne asks repeatedly—almost pleading—*“Are you going to lift me up, or just leave me here?”* There is bravery in her uncertainty; she doesn’t disguise her need, and she doesn’t apologize for it. For years, I equated vulnerability with weakness—a defense learned somewhere along the way. But listening to Anne, I realized that refusing to name our need condemns us to silence. Sometimes, voicing the doubt is itself a kind of salvation.
I am reminded most, perhaps, of the album’s closing number, “Ease My Mind”—a ballad with all the dust and ache of late-night confessions. It’s the loneliest song I know that still feels like company:
*“I’ve been running from the cold, from the shadow I can’t shake / Looking for a sign that I’m allowed to make mistakes.”*
It’s here that Anne seems to reach across the distance, her voice both tired and generous, the arrangement sparse and deeply felt. I wish I could sit across from her in some small bar and say, “Thank you—for giving me permission to be unfinished.” Because uncertainty, after all, is so much of our private sadness: the suspicion that, because we don’t have the answers, we’re somehow unworthy of joy.
What makes *Riverside Hotel* special is not just its songwriting or its deft arrangements—though both are exceptional. It’s that Michaela Anne understands the secret hopes of the reticent, the anxious, the ones who lean into silence but long for connection. She gives us a room, a bed, a soft place to land, at least for an evening.
Is it perfect? Of course not. Throughout the album, I sometimes wished the production would take more risks. There’s a gentle sameness to the sound, as if Anne or her collaborators feared that too much color would disrupt the quiet. On “If Only You Knew,” for example, the melody is beautiful but starts to feel predictable two minutes in. I caught myself wanting a twist—a sudden modulation, a sharp instrumental solo, some flare to break the trance. But maybe that’s not the point. In a world begging for spectacle, *Riverside Hotel* is content to whisper.
I began this review by admitting to nostalgia—my tendency to look backward, to linger in the rooms I’ve already passed through. What *Riverside Hotel* did for me was not to stoke that nostalgia, but to make it useful. It is an album that says: It’s ok to rest by the river, to put down your burdens for a song or two, to say softly, “I need,” and not flinch.
Few will ever discover Michaela Anne’s *Riverside Hotel*; fewer still will see themselves so clearly reflected in its quiet corners. But for those of us who do, it is a lasting comfort, a small miracle—one that lets us carry on, maybe even love ourselves a little more, when the day is done.
_Kroes den Bock_