FEATURE:
Spolight
Anna B Savage
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HERE is an exceptional artist…
who is releasing the in|FLUX album on 17th February. Although not brand-new on the scene, I think she is an artist that some might not know about. The upcoming album will definitely take her music to a new audience. I am looking forward to it coming out, because the songs from it that have been released so far are remarkable! You can pre-order in|FLUX. Anna B Savage is someone who everyone should know about and listen to. I will come to a couple of interviews with Savage in a bit. First, here is some brief biography:
“Anna B Savage studies our MA course in Popular Music Practice. She’s a London-born, Dublin-based singer-songwriter who has toured with Father John Misty after her debut 2015 EP caught his attention. She later toured with Jenny Hval and received praise from press internationally, including NPR and The Guardian.
In January 2021, Anna released her debut album A Common Turn via City Slang records. The album caught Rolling Stone Magazine’s attention, and Anna was subsequently named in their ‘Artists to Watch’ list 2021.
Apart from being named one of Rolling Stone’s ‘Artists to Watch’, Anna has been extremely busy. Not only has she released a short film to coincide with the album, but she also embarked on a UK and European tour at the end of 2021”.
I can’t find any print/online interviews from Savage from this year – I am sure that will change closer to the album release -, so I am forced to go back a little further. In any case, there are some great past interviews that chart the career and growth of the sensational Anna B Savage. Prior to her 2021 debut album, A Common Turn, Savage was interviewed by Loud and Quiet. In fact, this interview is from 2020. There is an interesting ‘angle’ to the interview which you will discover from the opening lines:
“It’s the next step from Anna’s breakthrough EP, that came out in 2015 followed by an abrupt silence. “Yeah I kind of disappeared,” she says. “I wasn’t having the best time in my own brain – that was the first thing that happened. People were nice about my first EP and I just wasn’t expecting it. I just thought I am never going to be able to write anything as good as that ever again. It’s quite funny as I released a single yesterday and people have been saying this is so great but my brain is already saying, ‘you’re never going to write anything as good as that again’, so I am like, ‘oh no not you again, shut up!’. I am better at batting my brain away today – that’s the difference between now and then.”
Back in 2015, Anna’s fragility echoed throughout her frank and honest debut; listening back now, it’s a startling collection of songs that earned her tour slots with the likes of Father John Misty and Jenny Hval before cataclysmic life changes halted her progress. “After the EP I broke up with someone and moved back to London. How can I put this, I was small and timid and just so uncomfortable in my own skin so I had to build everything back up. There were building blocks put in place right from the bottom, I had loads of different jobs and I was just following things that I love. I was always desperately trying to write music, but I was thinking everything I am writing is shit, it felt like pulling teeth, it was so painful. I was just thinking, why can’t I do this anymore?”
As if Anna’s new single, ‘Chelsea Hotel #3’, wasn’t shocking enough in its scream for female autonomy and pleasure, it ends with a glorious lyric about Tim Curry in lingerie. Anna smiles in recognition.
“I think it was the first time that I ever felt something downstairs and thought, ooooh what is going on? I was watching Rocky Horror Show for a first time when I was 10 or 11 and I remember that being the moment where I thought what is happening down there!” Anna gleefully namechecks influences like these throughout every song she’s written, almost as if she can’t help it.
“These are the things peppered through my album – there is Spice by the Spice Girls, Funeral by Arcade Fire, films like Y Tu Mama Tambien; I literally namecheck all of them. I don’t know if I do it on purpose so much, but I know that it’s very important to me that there are streams and rivers and to know what stuff is flowing in from where. I spent so long when I couldn’t write, and when I was finding it so hard to create anything I was struggling with the idea of people plucking this amazing stuff from out of thin air and they were just able to do it, wake up one day and just do it.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Barloc
It’s clear Anna takes pride in her body of work – the first EP in 2015 was a solo labour of love; for the album she enlisted the help of William Doyle, an artist in his own right who was looking to develop his production skills. “It was a dream,” she says. “I had spent nearly 3 years up until he got involved, where I had tried different things but ran out of money, but he put out a thing on social media saying I am looking to produce things and if anyone is interested please get in touch. Within twenty seconds I was typing away to him. I knew the kind of audio world that I wanted it to be in – really intricate and with tiny metallic audio things going on – I didn’t know how to do it. He understood the world that I was trying to create – it was perfect.”
I ask what it was like to suddenly find yourself in a room with another headstrong musician. “William is such a joy,” says Anna. “I tend to go off on red herrings – oh shiny things. He is very good at not doing that, saying, you know, maybe we should do a bit more work now. Just spending 2 or 3 days with him for over 6 months was great. I was embarrassed though, not knowing all the terms. I would say I want it to be earth and mud with sparkles, so he was very patient.” The pair finished the album before sending it to City Slang, a much-admired label who quickly signed Anna to their roster. After years of toil it was a moment to cherish.
“Yes, it’s totally cemented the hard work, but having done the album before I was signed, with just Will and then presenting the album, that was where the pride comes from. I have spent years honing this. So, City Slang saying yes was also very nice”.
I think I first heard about Anna B Savage when she released A Common Turn. A simply magnificent album, it rightly garnered a lot of praise and attention. As The Skinny observed in their interview from 2021, Savage distanced herself from recognising and embracing the praise that was levied at the album:
“The only person involved with A Common Turn who is still unaware of the praise that has been lavished upon it is its creator, Anna B Savage. The London singer-songwriter’s debut album has rightly been hailed as a provocative, grandiose and authentic first statement, but Savage herself refuses to engage with people’s reactions to it.
“I think it’s very unhealthy to be able to read what people think of you all the time,” she says. “My curiosity doesn’t dominate my self-protection. If people don’t like my album, it’s like, 'OK, you don’t like me as a person.' As a perpetual people pleaser, the worst thing in the world is for people not to like me.”
It is a policy that dates back to her debut EP in 2015. That release also got more than its fair share of positive feedback, including from the likes of Jenny Hval and Father John Misty, but Savage struggled to process the compliments. “The main thing was just having incredibly low self-esteem at that point in my life,” she reflects. “And then people having a positive reaction to it, it was a split between thinking, ‘they do not understand how shit I am’ and also, ‘well if they think it’s good, then I’m a piece of shit and I’m never going to be able to write something as good as that ever again’.”
Savage entered a period of radio silence as an artist for five full years following that EP. It was a difficult period of introspection, but after periods of therapy and “working really fucking hard” to like herself again, she found herself working on the set of songs that would become A Common Turn. Looking back, she accepts that she could never have given up making music for good, but at the same time, she never dared to expect that the album would be the success that it has been.
“There’s a difference between wanting it to happen, expecting it to happen and hoping it will happen. I was definitely in the want and hope categories, but I just didn’t see a way that it would. My main thing was getting the album done just for me.”
It is not altogether surprising that Savage would be so affected by outside opinions of her work, given the amount of her true self that is buried into the tracks. Her songs tell refreshingly honest tales of growth, self-doubt and sexuality, always striking a treacherous balance between fragility and defiance, all the while maintaining a wry, darkly comic worldview. Take Chelsea Hotel #3, an eye-wateringly frank account of a sexual encounter that finds her resorting to mental images of 'Tim Curry in lingerie' or Y Tu Mama Tambien for satisfaction.
With the album having been out since January, Savage recently completed her first run of live dates in over five years and is now gearing up to play at The Great Eastern Festival in Edinburgh on 27 November. “They were fucking amazing!” she says about her return shows. “I was quite nervous about it, but I feel like it really went incredibly well”.
I will round off with an interview from Atwood Magazine. As the incredible Anna B Savage prepares to release her second studio album, with new songs garnering a lot of love and support, I want to spend a bit more time nodding back to A Common Turn:
“ATWOOD MAGAZINE: THIS ALBUM IS SO VIVID, AND THERE IS SO MUCH OF YOU IN IT. SO MANY ARTISTS ARE PERSONAL WITHOUT GIVING YOU THAT CONFIRMATION THAT THEY’RE THE SPEAKER – BUT YOUR NAME IS RIGHT THERE IN THE LYRICS. WHAT IS YOUR WRITING PROCESS AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT TO YOU TO HAVE YOUR TRUE VOICE THERE?
Anna B Savage: My writing process is a little bit painful. I find it really hard to write generally, I think because I’d seen it so much in popular culture that songs just appear and that you don’t have to work for them. That is absolute bullshit. It’s such hard work. I don’t think enough people talk about the intense craft that goes into it. For me, I feel like one of the reasons my [experiences] are so front and center is because it’s one of the only things that I feel qualified to talk about. I don’t know if qualified is the right word. But I’m always amazed when artists come out with something that’s super political and very broad. I’m like, how do you feel confident enough to talk about that? I don’t even trust my own feelings [laughs]. And that’s what I’m trying to talk about. No one’s gonna tell me that I fucked up because I’m just trying to express myself as best I can.
“BABY GRAND” SEEMS TO BE VERY MUCH ABOUT THAT FEELING.
Anna B Savage: I basically wrote that song after a specific night that happened. And I mean that it’s literally laid out almost exactly as it happened. I think one of the reasons why it’s so precise, and why I decided to include so many very specific things like the Edwyn Collins owl mug, or the specific albums that we listened to, was because I wasn’t able to understand what I was feeling in the moment. I thought that at least if I have these touchstones that are real, then I have something to move between – I can ricochet off of them inside my head, if that makes sense.
The guy who directed the video for “Baby Grand” is the guy [Jem Talbot] who I’m talking about in the song. And there is footage from that night in the video. He was my first boyfriend, and we’ve made a film together. The video basically acts as kind of a trailer for this film that we’ve spent the last three years making. The album and the film have had similar timelines, so the two projects are kind of in constant conversation with each other, even though they’re completely separate. “Baby Grand” was written about one of the first nights that me and Jem had been filming together. It feels difficult to explain, because there was so much uncertainty. There were so many question marks and so much not wanting to be presumptuous. As a way of not being presumptuous, I was like, “Okay, I’ll just calcify this into a song.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz
“I SAW A DAVID LYNCH QUOTE WHILE I WAS PREPARING FOR THIS INTERVIEW WHERE HE SAID “WHEN YOU FINISH ANYTHING, PEOPLE WANT YOU TO THEN TALK ABOUT IT...A FILM OR A PAINTING – EACH THING IS ITS OWN SORT OF LANGUAGE AND IT’S NOT RIGHT TO TRY TO SAY THE SAME THING IN WORDS. THE WORDS ARE NOT THERE.” WHAT’S YOUR TAKE ON THAT? DO YOU FEEL LIKE TALKING ABOUT THIS ALBUM IS REDUNDANT IN SOME SENSE?
Anna B Savage: It’s fucking weird, I’m not gonna lie. Especially feeling like I worked so hard lyrically to make it feel complete and to feel like it was doing all of the things that I needed it to do. Talking about the album has put me in a really weird headspace. I’m already really self-reflexive, as you can probably tell, and adding that extra layer on top is kind of bizarre. I think this is where I always got stuck when I spent five years trying to write this album. I felt like every interview that I read where a musician was talking about their craft, it was kind of like, “Oh, it’s a slightly magical thing that just kind of happens.” Yeah, that can be true sometimes. But it’s only true if you’ve spent the six weeks before that working on a song every single fucking day and thinking about it just before you go to sleep and thinking about it when you first wake up in the morning.
Every time I write a song, I think, “I’ll never write a song ever again. Like that was a completely bizarre experience. How did that happen?” So to go back into my kind of memory bank and try to articulate like, “What was I thinking about? Why did I put those next to each other?” Maybe my subconscious was kind of explaining it to me more than I knew. I totally agree and completely disagree with that quote, because yeah, it’s really weird to talk about stuff when it’s all there. But equally, [talking about] it does afford something else.
DO YOU THINK THINKING ABOUT THINGS RETROACTIVELY LIKE THIS HELPS YOU TO UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN WORK MORE IN A WAY? OR IS IT MORE FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S BENEFIT THAT YOU’RE CONNECTING THESE THINGS?
Anna B Savage: I think it helps me a bit. I also think it’s quite fun to just run with what other people say. If people are like, “Oh, birds are symbolic of your emotions,” it’s like, “Yeah, yes they are!” [laughs] I’m going to try and work out a way to make that true for both you and me. If that’s what someone’s getting from it, then that’s fucking great. These [songs] are now living a life that’s outside of my own brain. Someone else can put their own stuff on it and that is so joyous to me that, yeah, I’ll run with it.
IN THIS GENRE, THERE IS THIS VERY COMMON DECISION TO MAKE A SINGER’S VOICE FEEL ALMOST BURIED IN THE MIX WITH A LOT OF REVERB. FOR MOST OF THIS ALBUM, YOUR VOICE IS SO PRESENT AND SO DRY. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION CHOICE?
Anna B Savage: I would say it was definitely a conscious choice. William Doyle, who also did my first EP, produced it and I remember him saying to me at some point, “You don’t need reverb on your voice at all. That’s ridiculous.” He is one of my favorite musicians in the world, so I was like, “Okay, I will never use reverb.” [laughs] I actually don’t love reverb because I do think that a lot of the time it hides and dampens stuff, and it makes everything a bit washy. Lyrically, I like things to be as clear as possible and vocally, I feel the same way. [William] was so sensitive to how he thought my stories and my voice would be best presented. I’m so grateful to him for fighting me on the couple of things that he did.
WHAT DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO TAKE AWAY FROM THIS RECORD?
Anna B Savage: I did this therapy course where you had to boil down what you hoped that you gave to the world. Mine was in relation to other people; I want to create and facilitate things that feel like they could be companions for feelings that are often difficult to express, but that I, for some reason, feel more comfortable expressing. I want my art to be a companion for people.
Looking ahead to the release of in|FLUX on 17th February, I was keen to highlight Anna B Savage. An artist I have loved for a long time, tracks like The Ghost and in|FLUX are among my favourite from the year. A breathtaking talent, next year is going to be a really exciting one for her. For anyone who has not discovered her music yet, make sure that you get on it…
RIGHT now.
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