North Carolina singer/songwriter Anne-Claire steps boldly back into music with her breathtakingly beautiful “River,” the lush, orchestral lead single from her forthcoming EP ‘Do You Dream of Me Too?’ whose tale of interrupted love flows through unresolved yearning, theatrical sweep, and a dreamlike video filmed on Florida’s Ichetucknee River.

Stream: “River” – Anne-Claire

Longing can make the whole world ache in sympathy, turning flowers, forests, and open water into witnesses for a lover carried beyond reach.

Anne-Claire’s “River” gives that ache a lush, dreamlike form, its glistening orchestration flowing beneath a tender vocal performance steeped in intimate, unanswered devotion. Elegant and enchanting, the song glows with the warmth of enduring love even as every swelling chord bears the weight of absence. It’s a song about intimacy deepening just as separation takes hold, and the faith required to keep waiting when no answer comes. Anne-Claire leaves her heroine suspended between the life she remembers and the return she can only imagine.

Likewise, the singer/songwriter leaves her listeners suspended as well – spellbound by beautiful music full of unresolved yearning and theatrical sweep, and an accompanying visual that sends her drifting through the same uncertainty holding the song’s main character in place.

At fourteen I was married
Being bashful, never laughed
When called I’d always tarry
Ducked down, never looked back

At fifteen, I stopped scowling
Hid my smile behind a fan
Swept the dust, let you kiss me
Left plums on the sedan

Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “River,” the spellbinding lead single from Anne-Claire’s forthcoming EP, Do You Dream of Me Too? Arriving today alongside a stirring music video directed by Shoog McDaniel, the song marks the beginning of a bold new chapter for the North Carolina singer/songwriter, whose dynamic voice has spent nearly a decade moving freely across pop, soul, jazz, and theatrical songcraft.

A vocalist first and foremost, Anne-Claire has always let her voice lead the way. Her 2018 debut album, I Still Look for You, introduced an artist eager to explore the full breadth of her musical appetite, while the 2021 single “Jean Jacket” extended that restless spirit through a collaboration with Lost in the Trees’ Ari Picker. In the years that followed, she stepped away from recording and performing, built a thriving career as a voice teacher, and gradually found her way back to her own songwriting after the pandemic interrupted the future she had imagined.

Do You Dream of Me Too?, out September 4, is the sound of that return gaining confidence, scale, and dramatic force.

Co-produced with longtime friend and collaborator Jeff Crawford, the five-track EP surrounds Anne-Claire with a 12-piece orchestra and reconnects her with the grand vocal music that shaped her childhood – from Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to Barbra Streisand. Years of uncertainty have given way to bigger arrangements, nuanced storytelling, and an artist finally trusting the ambition of her own ideas.

Will you return upon the river
Won’t you please send a reply
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky
By the gate there’s different flowers
And pairs of butterflies
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky

Her latest material inhabits the space between desire and reality, where resolution remains close enough to imagine but too distant to touch. “Every song on this record is about people in difficult situations who never quite get what they want,” Anne-Claire tells Atwood Magazine. “They are either left wanting something more or questioning what they’re ended up with. This particular tune leaves the singer with her longing.”

Drawing inspiration from a poem by Chinese poet Li Bai, translated by Ezra Pound, “River” follows a young woman whose love for her husband takes root gradually within their young marriage. At fourteen, she meets that new life with bashfulness, lowering her eyes and retreating from affection. By fifteen, her guardedness has begun to soften: A hidden smile, an accepted kiss, small gestures of intimacy opening a shared world between them. Then, at sixteen, he departs to work as a fisherman, carried away just as their marriage has become real to her.

At sixteen you departed
Bamboo shoved you up the stream
Been five months since you started
At night the forest screams

Golden afternoons of autumn
Dust swirls in the spears of light
Even if you never come back
Your dust mingles with mine

Those opening verses compress years of emotional transformation into a few vivid scenes. Childhood gives way to tenderness, and tenderness almost immediately gives way to separation.

The tragedy lies in the timing: She has only just learned the depth of her love when distance forces her to live without it. Seasons pass, the landscape changes, and her surroundings absorb the sorrow she can no longer contain alone.

The chorus releases all that waiting into a direct plea for his return. She asks for a reply and promises to meet him at the river’s distant edge, where the water seems to merge with the sky. Her devotion carries no demand or accusation; it survives through the hope of reunion, however uncertain that possibility has become. Even the river holds two meanings at once – the force that carried him away and the path that might someday bring him home.

Will you return upon the river
Won’t you please send a reply
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky
By the gate there’s different flowers
And pairs of butterflies
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky

Around her, Charles Cleaver’s string arrangement moves with the river’s own restless pull. The music gathers, crests, and recedes beneath Anne-Claire’s aching delivery, its vibrant chords repeatedly brushing against resolution without fully surrendering to it. Each orchestral swell raises the possibility of release before the current draws the song back into suspense, mirroring a narrator whose imagination keeps reaching the shore long before her husband does.

Anne-Claire sings from within that uncertainty rather than above it. Her performance remains tender enough to preserve the song’s sweetness, yet powerful enough to carry its accumulating grief. By the time the chorus returns, “River” has grown from an intimate story of separation into a sweeping expression of how love persists when all it can do is wait.

For all the emotional complexity flowing beneath its surface, Anne-Claire approached “River” with a refreshingly simple purpose. “I mostly just wanted to tell a story very clearly,” she shrugs. “The strings add this element of a children’s fairytale to it that I didn’t expect.”

Ducks float side by side
cattails snowing high

Will you return upon the river
Won’t you please send a reply
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky
By the gate there’s different flowers
And pairs of butterflies
I will come and meet you
Where the water meets the sky

That unexpected fairytale quality spills naturally into the song’s stirring music video.

Directed by Shoog McDaniel and shot on Florida’s Ichetucknee River, the visual places Anne-Claire directly inside the landscape that has carried so much of the song’s emotional weight. She floats through a lush, haunting world of water and wilderness, drifting with the current as though suspended somewhere between memory, dream, and waking life.

The setting gives physical form to the surrender at the heart of “River.” Water moves steadily around her, carrying her forward even as the song remains emotionally fixed on the person who has gone. The contrast is striking: Her body travels while her heart waits, held in place by a love whose future remains unresolved. Each image deepens the sense that the natural world is mourning alongside her, transforming the river from backdrop into witness, passageway, and keeper of all that distance.

There is beauty everywhere, but it never fully dissolves the sadness. McDaniel’s visual preserves the song’s sensual warmth while drawing out its loneliness, surrounding Anne-Claire with a landscape vast enough to hold both devotion and doubt. Paired with the orchestra’s surging current, the imagery makes “River” feel like a half-remembered fable brought vividly to life – romantic, unsettling, and caught beneath a spell it has no interest in breaking.

“River” also carries the force of a personal threshold.

Nearly five years after stepping away from her own recording career, Anne-Claire is returning with a clearer sense of purpose and a far greater appetite for scale. She calls Do You Dream of Me Too? “my breakthrough, a defiant push back into making music professionally,” and its lead single captures the confidence of an artist no longer waiting for permission to pursue the fullness of her vision. The music video echoes this sentiment as well, carrying that renewal into its final moments: By its end, Anne-Claire is dancing alone in ankle-deep waters, basking in the beginning of what promises to be a long and exciting new arc.

This renewed confidence took years to grow – in fact, it was her time away that allowed her musical vision to sharpen. Anne-Claire returned to the music that first taught her how expansive a singer could be, stepped into the co-producer’s seat alongside Jeff Crawford, and built arrangements capable of meeting her voice at its most dramatic. “If you are blessed to live long enough and if you are blessed enough to spend time making art, there’s an amazing thing that happens – you start to trust yourself and your instincts,” she reflects. “This time around I knew what I wanted.”

You can hear that conviction throughout “River.” Its elegance carries no hesitation, and its grandeur never apologizes for the size of its emotions.

This is more than a return to recording – it is Anne-Claire reclaiming her place at the center of her own music, armed with deeper trust, renewed ambition, and a voice ready to fill every inch of the world she has created.

Journey down Anne-Claire’s Anne-Claire -stirring “River” exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and catch up with the artist in our intimate interview below as she opens up about her long road back to music, the theatrical ambition behind Do You Dream of Me Too?, and the hard-earned self-trust carrying her into this new chapter. Let “River” sweep you into its current – and leave you suspended at the water’s edge, listening for a love still somewhere beyond the horizon.

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:: stream/purchase River here ::

:: connect with Anne-Claire here ::

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Stream: “River” – Anne-Claire

A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE-CLAIRE

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Anne-Claire: Well I guess that I am a vocalist first. I love to sing and my voice is my guide when I’m coming up with my compositions. I also don’t feel particularly confined by any genre, so I think folks usually find a couple of tunes they like.

Anne-Claire: Sure I can. I would highly recommend checking out the tracks ‘Give it Up’, ‘Loyalty’ and ‘Mosquitoes’ from my last LP, ‘I Still Look for You’ (2018). This record was a big growth moment for me. I was still pretty green and listening back I can hear us just really going for it. I had the distinct pleasure of recording this in one week at Mitch Easter’s (Let’s Active, REM) Fidelitorium studio in Kernersville, NC. I’d also definitely check out the 7” I made with Ari Picker (Lost in the Trees, Dante High) called ‘Jean Jacket’. Ari made such a killer remix of my tune on the B side; It’s not to be missed!

Anne-Claire: I am an eternal fan of PJ Harvey. Nina Simone, Barbra Streisand, Liz Phair – I grew up listening and absorbing their distinct voices and perspectives. They all gave me that feeling of ‘I didn’t know you could do that with music.’ I am most excited for the sheer scale of my musical ambitions and dreams these days. Bigger arrangements, orchestrations, more DRAMA!

Anne-Claire: This record is my breakthrough, a defiant push back into making music professionally. Literally days prior to lockdown, I finished recording a song with a producer I was really excited about. My head was full of all these touring plans and album ideas, and I found myself thrown into an existential abyss as the months of social distancing dragged on. I started to take baby steps out of this place around 2021 when I signed up for an eight-week songwriting class taught by Craig Carothers. Craig challenged his students to write a song a week based on prompts he came up with. It was a breakneck speed that left no time for handwringing or perfectionism, and I loved it so much that I took the course twice more. I didn’t really know what to do with these tunes, and only with a lot of spiritual searching and art therapy did I decide to make the leap to record an album with a handful of them.

Anne-Claire: If you are blessed to live long enough and if you are blessed enough to spend time making art, there’s an amazing thing that happens – you start to trust yourself and your instincts. That’s the way it’s been for me at least. I think this is a fully fleshed out, confident picture of where I am as an artist. With past releases I was second-guessing my ideas, letting the producer paper over any insecurities or just totally take the lead with crafting the composition. This time around I was in the co-producer seat with my trusted friend and incredible musician, Jeff Crawford. My lyrics are way more coherent, and the arrangements all fit perfectly with each other. This time around I knew what I wanted – and it ended up being a return to the music that shaped my childhood: Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Streisand. Songs for singers with a huge dash of theatricality thanks to the 12 piece orchestra I hired to play on every song.

Anne-Claire: I wrote this song based on a poem by Chinese poet Li Bai, which was translated by Ezra Pound. It follows the story of a young girl who, after a year of marriage, grows to love her husband. He leaves her behind when he goes to work as a fisherman, and she misses him very much. All of the surrounding nature mourns with her. I mostly just wanted to tell a story very clearly. The strings add this element of a children’s fairytale to it that I didn’t expect.

Anne-Claire: Every song on this record is about people in difficult situations who never quite get what they want. They are either left wanting something more or questioning what they’re ended up with. This particular tune leaves the singer with her longing.

Anne-Claire: I hope folks are taken with the string arrangement of “River.” It flows in crunchy chords that every so often hint at resolution. I also hope it gets stuck in your head! I hope folks get a chance to sit down by themselves or with someone they love and listen to this record on vinyl. Putting this record together really highlighted how important it is to make something as a group of humans. Being truly present with each other is one of the best parts of making music, and I hope that comes across. I’ve learned that it’s really really fun to collaborate with a big orchestra and I can’t wait to do it again!

Anne-Claire: Dissimilar South, DUNUMS, Skylar Gudasz, Rachel Kiel, Chessa Rich, Amelia Riggs

:: stream/purchase River here ::

:: connect with Anne-Claire here ::

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Stream: “River” – Anne-Claire

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