Meet the Minnesota farm girl opening for Stevie Nicks

After getting signed at age 21 by a manager who helped launch Lorde and Tori Amos, Anna Graves moved to Nashville and then Los Angeles thinking her music career was well on its way.

Turned out, though, the budding singer/songwriter had to return to her family farm in southern Minnesota to really get things moving.

“I was ready to quit the business until I came home and found my way again,” said Graves, now 28 with a new record deal and some big opening gigs on her calendar.

Following a June tour with Seattle hitmakers the Head and the Heart, the poetic Americana-pop balladeer is playing her biggest gig yet in her home state warming up for Stevie Nicks at Grand Casino Arena (fka Xcel Energy Center) on Wednesday. She’s also issuing a new single this week, “Burn On,” beginning the rollout for a new album coming next year via famed folk/roots music label Rounder Records.

Talking via Zoom from Los Angeles last week — she was out there working on her upcoming record — Graves seemed more interested in discussing her Minnesota roots than all the various, sometimes seemingly random indicators her career is about to take off.

Case in point: That morning she excitedly learned that another of her singles, “Hollow Bones,” made a playlist in Harper’s Bazaar magazine selected by none other than “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” singer Shaboozey. Her song and his hit couldn’t be more different.

“Pretty cool,” Graves simply said.

“I could’ve died happy after playing with her just once,” Graves said, “and now I get to do it in my hometown, too.”

As if being a relatively unknown singer opening an arena concert doesn’t seem daunting enough, Graves is opting to play Wednesday’s gig entirely solo without a backing band. That is also how she performed on the recent trek with the Head and the Heart.

She said she “just feels more confident” performing solo: “I don’t have three other players to worry about, who’ll get messed up if I mess up,” she said. “Plus, there’s just something more raw and immediate about playing by myself. It’s how I write these songs, and how I’m most comfortable expressing myself.”

That inclination toward going it alone seems less surprising when you learn how Graves was raised.

She grew up on a rural horse farm in Webster, Minn., 35 miles south of Minneapolis, in a house without a TV and an artist for a mom, Anastasia, who urged her children to think creatively. That didn’t really stick with Anna’s older brother Connor, though, who soon gave up playing a guitar he got as a present and instead wound up becoming a scientist.

“This little guitar I essentially found in the trash just became something that I never wanted to put down, and I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was really young,” she said, recalling the exact song that turned her onto the craft.

“My mom was always playing music in the house, and I remember hearing ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman and asking her, ‘Why do I feel sad and happy at the same time?’ And she was like, ‘Art does that.’ I remember something just clicked.”

Anna started playing gigs in the Twin Cities in her mid-teens and was introduced to many other musicians in town via journalist/songwriter Jim Walsh’s Mad Ripple Hootenanny songwriter round-robin shows, which she remembered being “just such a lovely and supportive environment.”

She headed to Belmont University in Nashville for college, but it was really the music industry there she was interested in. After becoming a regular in writing sessions with other songwriters and working up her own demos, she wound up getting signed to Lava Records via its founder, Jason Flom, whose other past protégés besides Amos and Lorde include Katy Perry and Paramore. Later, her contract was picked up by Island Records, home to U2.

Just when it seemed like she had found her break, though, Graves instead wound up nearly having a breakdown.

“It was like a five-year span of just kind of like not really knowing who I was or what to do,” she recalled. “I feel like I was under pressure to create successful pop music and fit the mold of a pop star. I had moved to L.A. at this point, and I just completely lost myself.”

The secret to finding herself again rather ironically but literally was at her fingertips, as she tried to reshape her image into more of a pop-star look.

“I had gotten these long-ass nails, and they were so spiky and cool, but I couldn’t even play guitar when I had them,” she remembered. “I traded playing guitar for having long nails, and I knew I had lost my sense of what music meant to me.”

That’s when and why she moved back to the farm in Minnesota in 2023. And that’s when she started writing many of the songs she’s working on now for her album with Rounder.

You can hear the Minnesota influence in a lot of her newest songs, including the farm setting in “Trail Horse” and the “cutthroat weather” referenced in Shaboozey’s favorite, “Hollow Bones.” That one was partially inspired by all the birds she sees in her rural setting (whose light skeletal makeup allows them to fly).

“I can tell you ‘bout the hell that I’ve been through, but that ain’t who I am / ‘Cause the truth is, I’m just a bluebird with nowhere to land,” Graves sings in her earthy but elegant voice, akin to a Midwest Kacey Musgraves.

But more than just the literal influence of her surroundings, Graves believes her newest songs were also strengthened by the self-confidence and all-out self-love she felt being back around her family and her familiar surroundings. Case in point: “Trail Horse” isn’t really about Graves’ equine interests. It’s about blazing her own trail in her music career and not falling into overtread terrain.

“You don’t really know how far you’ve lost yourself until you go home and find yourself again,” she said. “It wasn’t just that I had lost my center, I also wasn’t feeding my soul, which is really what’s important to songwriting.”

The release date for Grave’s album is still to be determined, but she’s all set on its title: “America’s Greatest Burnout.”

Opening gig: 7 p.m. Wed. with Stevie Nicks, Grand Casino Arena, St. Paul, ticketmaster.com.