PHOTO BLOG SHOW REVIEWS, REVIEWS JANUARY 23, 2024 BY JONATHAN WIDRAN
Photo credit: Megan Thompson
One of the more interesting personal facts noted in 17-year-old musical multi-talent Anna Duboc’s bio is the fact that the incredibly gifted, prolific and stylistically diverse singer/songwriter is an A student maintaining that average in her second year of high school AP calculus. She probably doesn’t need higher math to keep track of her social media numbers, but they’ve been pretty crazy, adding up to some 45 million streams on all platforms via a flurry of dynamic singles since launching her career at 13.
Writing about her life with the same emotionally expressive wit, narrative bite and vulnerable tenderness as culturally impactful icons like Taylor and Billie, Anna has amassed 220,500 followers and over 1.2 million likes on TikTok, 26 million views and nearly 40,000 subscribers on her official YouTube partner channel and over 31,000 followers on Instagram. Amazingly, all of her success to date are via tracks she produced with her mom, veteran pop songwriter and jazz vocalist Carol Duboc.
The release of her upcoming single (set to drop Valentine’s week) marks a unique turning point in that she wrote and co-produced “One Touch” – which was written when she was 14 – with Juan Ariza (Harry Styles). It’s the first release of an upcoming batch she calls the Unreleased
Series, featuring songs from her archives which she didn’t feel were right to share when she was younger but seem appropriate now. Gearing up for this next phase of her career, the singer made an impressive headlining appearance with a full, high-energy band at The Mint in mid-January. She follows with a gig at Genghis Cohen February 3.
When young artists are so successful so quickly in the streaming and video realm, one may wonder if they’ve got the goods live, vocally and performance wise. The great news is that Anna is as charming, soulful and engaging a performer onstage as she is a masterful vocalist/producer in the studio. Though she showcased it well into the set, one of the most fascinating revelations about the seductive, infectious “One Touch” is that in both lyrical content and driving slow groove, it’s up there with anything magical the Swifties are digging these days – and remember, Anna was 20 years younger than Taylor when she wrote it. The emotional core of Anna’s set was that one as the follow-up to her latest single “Poetry,” which allowed her to showcase her tender skills as a piano based balladeer and the powerful range of her voice, from a soft tenderhearted coolness to a towering emotion that sears the heart.
Anna’s ten song set, a run through some of her biggest streamers from 2021 to present, offered a dynamic range of rhythms and vibes, from the mid-tempo lite funk R&B/pop simmer of “80 in a Flood Rain” and plaintive, stripped down “Flowers and Graves” (backed only by the acoustic guitar of MD Enzo Iannello) to one of her most compelling songs “Plot Twist” (another heart-tugging piano ballad) and the sassy, moody pop-rocker “Mystery Lady.” She closed with songs titled “Sinking Feeling” (which displayed the angelic, Billie-esque side of her voice) and “Promises from Hell,” but all her fans were too full of her lively, charismatic sunshine by that point to give into the themes of darkness.