Anna McClellan's new EP South of Dodge is a meditation about learning how to leave. She wrote and initially recorded the songs in Omaha, Anna's hometown, during the stretch before she moved in 2023. Omaha had always been difficult to separate from her music, her family, her sense of herself. It was where she learned to write songs on piano and keyboard, where the city’s particular geography, weather, and emotional weather worked their way into the songs almost by accident. The title comes from Dodge Street, the major east-west artery that cuts through Omaha, a line McClellan grew up with and a useful marker of where she came from. “A piece of me lives forever south of Dodge,” she says. The EP, South of Dodge, out Nov 20 on Exploding in Sound, is her way of drawing a line through it.


The cornerstone of the recordings was simple: bass, drums, guitar, vocals, recorded live at ARC Studios with Adam Roberts engineering, before McClellan had any real idea what these songs would become. Years later, settled in New York, she and Adam, who splits time between Omaha and NYC, decided it was finally time to finish them. What began partly as an exercise, something fun to do with songs that had been sitting around for years, became a way of looking backward without quite being able to return. McClellan has since had to rethink the way she writes, too. She spent much of her life writing at a keyboard, but after leaving Omaha, without easy access to a piano, the guitar became less a deliberate reinvention than a matter of circumstance. Now she is learning the instrument in real time, figuring out how to make an indie-rock song with six strings instead of keys. “How do you write an indie-rock song on guitar?” became its own kind of question.


That distance gives South of Dodge its peculiar charge. These songs were made by someone who was still trying to understand herself through alcohol, romance, desire, and the particular misery of wanting immediate relief from your own life. Listening back now, McClellan can hear the person she was reaching toward, even if she doesn’t always recognize the person doing the reaching. The songs belong to a period of movement and self-invention, when Omaha kept pulling her back even as she was trying to get out. A collaboration with Gloorp, sits slightly outside the rest of the record, requiring its own treatment and opening another small window onto that transition.


McClellan has lived in different places since then, moving from the middle of the country to the West, to Austin, and eventually to NYC, accumulating lives along the way. But Omaha remains lodged somewhere in the architecture. South of Dodge feels like the moment she finally stops mistaking that fact for an obligation to return. It expresses the deep love she has for the place that raised her while also acknowledging the confusion of too many days hungover in a small town scene. The city shaped her, and it always will; this record allows it to become history. You can love something and let it go. In that sense, the EP is less a resurrection than a tying-up of loose ends, an important piece of McClellan’s musical catalog finally clicking into place. The songs have waited for her to become someone who could finally finish them.