Blues diva Ana Popovic a woman of many worlds

It may seem arrogant for an artist to title her most recent record “Still Making History,” but Ana Popovic wants fans to rest assured — she’s not using the title to brag.

Instead, Popovic told The Daily Times this week, she’s drawing on her experiences as a girl of three worlds — the Third World-like conditions of the Eastern Europe of her childhood, her time in Western Europe and her travels abroad in the United States — to make a statement on the changing nature of humanity.

“It’s not arrogant — it’s about private histories and global histories,” Popovic said. “It’s about how we change things we don’t like in our private lives, and how we can make the world a better place with good ideas. It’s a complex record about both things, and it was inspired by going to countries like Venezuela and Brazil, and reading about places in Africa.

“People in those places live in huge poverty, and the only thing we do in the Western world is to look at these things, to make resolutions, to think of different names. But what do we really try to do to help? To make it in the Western world, these people have to either get married, steal a passport, do crimes or get over here in weird kinds of ways.

“I think people who have ideas and are good at what they do should have a chance,” she added. “There should be sort of a test, a minimum of knowledge, so that if you are different in a way, you should be able to come and work and change your life.”

Popovic knows about obtaining such opportunities through hard work from person experience. As a young girl growing up in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, her father’s record collection was filled with music from foreign lands, mostly America, and Popovic’s early love of the blues would eventually become her career. Albert King, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf — all of those artists saw time on the record player in her household, and her father, Milutin, brought the music to life through his own guitar playing and nightly jam sessions with his friends.

At 15, Popovic picked up the guitar and began playing prodigiously, and after graduation, she attends the University of Belgrade to study graphic design. However, her desire to make music soon won out, and she found herself playing in a band that would eventually be booked at major venues across Yugoslavia and be featured on Yugoslav television. She traveled to blues festivals in Greece and Hungary, and she soon switched her studies to music by transferring to the Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands.

There, she formed another band, but the stress of watching her home country deteriorate into war led her to discontinue her studies. She was signed to Ruf Records in Germany shortly thereafter and traveled to Memphis to record her first album. While there, she played the Memphis in May Festival and soaked up the sights and sounds of one of the cradle cities of the genre.

In 2002, she won three blues awards in France, and her second album for Ruf, “Comfort to the Soul,” won her a nomination in 2003 for the W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist. Touring constantly, she began making a name for herself both in the United States and abroad, and in 2004, she won the prestigious “Jazz a Juan-Revelation Award” in Juan Le Pins, France. It was confirmation that despite her love of the blues, the young songwriter is equally adept at other genres of music. And with experience, she’s getting closer and closer to making the record that’s the most personal, she said.

“‘Still Making History’ is the follow-up to what I’ve been doing before, and it’s a little bit more personal than my records before,” she said. “It’s about politics, love, friendship, time — it’s the most personal record I’ve made so far. I thought I had been answering so many questions all these years, and I finally wanted to write them all in songs. I thought it was time to write exactly about what I feel, to get some of my ideas out there and to make people think.”

Living in Amsterdam for the last two years and Holland for the last 10, Popovic has a unique perspective on the places she visits and performs that many of her fellow countrymen and women don’t have. She’s spent enough time in the United States that she considers in a second home, and while America receives its share of criticism from Europe for its foreign policies, there’s still much to be admired here, she added.

“To know a country, you really need to spend some time there, and there’s no better way to do that than to spend it on the road, seeing how people live,” she said. “It’s a big country, and it’s very difficult for people, more or less, to all have an equal chance. Europe is still very far from that. Europe is Europe when it’s about money and taxes, but all the rest, it’s not equal.

“I grew up on American sound, so whenever I go to the studios in the United States, I do it to get the sound I hear in my head. I’m looking for real American background for my music, and I’ve used all the opportunities I can to get it. I’ve never recorded anywhere else. It’s the genre I chose from the very start, and I wanted to come here and play the States, even when agents told me to leave it because there were so many good musicians in the States, that I really shouldn’t even try.

“It’s really fine to be on both sides of the ocean now, and I’m very happy where I am,” she added.