Anna B Savage: “I can't be the only fucking one?”

The tougher the journey, the sweeter the destination. And so it is for Anna B Savage, who has certainly arrived in some style with her debut album, A Common Turn. By any standards, it is an outstanding record.

Considering her musical pedigree and upbringing, Anna has never really doubted her path in life. But there have been serious obstacles to be overcome along the way.

“My parents are both professional classical singers, so it’s part of my DNA,” she smiles. "I've always wanted to be a musician. That's been my one life goal of all time.”

Surrounded by music from the very beginning, it wasn’t long before Anna picked up an instrument. Her first moves were relatively conventional – but she was naturally curious.

“My first instruments were the recorder and violin,” she recalls. "Then I went on to the travel recorder, clarinet, piano, saxophone – and then guitar. I think my brother taught me when I was like 12 or 13."

Along with her natural ability, Anna’s musicality was nourished, she says, by listening to artists like Nick Drake, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, The Beatles and Stevie Wonder. Her breakthrough EP – simply titled, EP and released in 2015 – showcased her raw talent and songs that hint at a deeper vulnerability. But it’s her remarkable voice that really hits home. There are hints of both Joan Armatrading and John Martyn in her tone: deep, tender and soulful. Anna approves of the comparison.

“That’s sick! I haven’t heard that yet,” she enthuses. “That makes a lot more sense to me than people saying I sound like Joni Mitchell. I'm like, have you heard our voices? Is it because I'm blonde and play a guitar? “

Anna laughs.

"I'm a massive John Martyn fan,” she adds. "Around the same time I was listening to Nick Drake, I was listening to Solid Air consistently, so that means a lot.”

With just an EP behind her, Anna B Savage opened for Father John Misty during his 2015 European tour of I Love You, Honeybear.

“Oh my god it was fucking wild,” Anna admits. “I was so fucking chuffed, I couldn't believe it.”

Being a longtime fan, Anna was blown away even by the thought of sharing a stage with Mr.Tillman.

“I didn't ever tell him this,” she confides, "but on my freshers week at uni, instead of doing any freshers week stuff, I went to gigs. His was the first gig I saw that week and I went on my own."

That tour kicked off in the Roisin Dubh in Galway. After his soundcheck, Josh Tillman approached Anna. “What he said was: 'I saw you perform and I absolutely love what you do. I asked for you personally to be here, so you're like my friend coming on this tour, so if you need anything, just let me know’. He totally looked after me, it was pretty wonderful,” she recalls, fondly.

HEY, THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE

With the success of her EP and this idyllic start to her musical journey, Anna seemed to be officially on her way to bigger and better things. So what happened? Why wait five years to release an album?

“I was going through a period of super low self-esteem and imposter syndrome,” Anna says. “I got out of a shit relationship and, to be honest, I was trying to build myself up from not really knowing who I was. I was trying to deal with things that needed to be sorted out beforehand – like trying to work out who the fuck I was and what I liked.”

During this period of soul-searching, Anna took up some odd-jobs in London, followed by a move to Vancouver, in Canada. The change of pace on the other side of the Atlantic was welcome.

“Everyone is outdoors all the time,” she says. "People actually do stuff rather than just go to the pub – which I also like, but you know, it's nice to go canoeing and then have a drink at the end.”

Anna laughs again. It is one of the nice things about talking to her: she has a genuine sense of fun. While her time away from the maelstrom was healing for Anna, she never lost sight of the importance of music.

“It’s always been the thing that I've wanted to do,” she mulls, "so it is kind of weird that I didn't write an album earlier. It wasn't for a lack of trying, it just wasn't happening.”

Over the past three years, Anna has been much more focussed on writing the music for her debut album. She enlisted William Doyle, (FKA East India Youth, a 2014 Mercury Prize nominee) to produce the album.

“We had a mutual friend,” she explains, “and I was like, you know, 'Fuck it, I'm just going to ask him’ – because I felt like he would be the perfect person. I’ve always known that I wanted harder, kind of electronic elements in the music, but also being able to mix that with the warmth of an acoustic sound. I can bring the acoustic bits, but I didn't know how to get that electronic, harsh but still welcoming sound , if that makes sense?”

It really does. The blend of Anna's pure voice and acoustic guitar – bolstered by unexpected electronic bursts and driving rhythms – creates an utterly modern and unexpected soundscape. On tracks like 'BedStuy' and ‘Two’ – songs that will surely bloom in a live setting – there are intriguing flickers of Portishead and Massive Attack.

CHELSEA HOTEL #2

As its smart and evocative title suggests, across the breadth of the album, A Common Turn navigates recurring themes, including female sexuality, self-doubt and, of course, birds.

With lines like "I also don't know how to please myself/ Taught that it was secondary to P in V/ So I first came when I was Eighteen," Anna doesn’t beat around the bush so to speak, on the topic of self-pleasure. I ask why female sexuality is such a noticeable theme throughout the album.

“I got to a point where I was just fucking pissed off,” Anna tells me, exasperated. “I thought, I can't believe I spent all of this fucking time, not thinking that I'm allowed to have any autonomy over this, and not thinking that I'm allowed to be sexual or talk about anything sexual or masturbate, or even think about it. I'd spent so long trying to mute those things, feeling shame, just pure shame of any sort of sexual side of me that I completely lost the ability to actually hear any of it. And I was like, I can't be the only fucking one?"

Anna’s Leonard Cohen homage in 'Chelsea Hotel #3' runs deeper than its borrowed title and opening line: "He was giving me head on my unmade bed."

“There had been a whole series of things that just kind of interlocked when I was writing that,” she says. “I was reading I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. It’s an epistolary novel, where she’s writing about this guy that she's fallen in love with. A lot of the book grapples with the idea of a muse and the idea of the autonomy of the muse, and how traditionally, those were very gendered things.

"The Creator was the male and the Muse was the female. The Muse didn't have a voice and the muse didn't have a say in how they were presented. Reading that book was a total light bulb moment for me. I was like, ‘Oh shit. I am allowed to talk about any of the stuff that has happened in my life’. It's just my experience. I'd been avoiding talking about certain things, and had read that 'Chelsea Hotel #2' was about Janis Joplin. She speaks in it, which I'm very pleased about, but it felt like a good gateway to that conversation of the slightly more muted muse, who in this case happens to be a super mega-star.”

Anna is most outspoken when talking about female sexuality, particularly female masturbation. In 'Chelsea Hotel #3' she declares: "Bought my first bullet at 23/ so then I knew differently.... And as we know practice makes perfect/ I will learn to take care of myself/ Take care of myself (if you know what I mean)."

“I wrote it, not expecting anyone to hear it, necessarily," she says. "Equally I was hoping that maybe someone would, and it would be like the permission-giver, that I got from Chris Kraus, to write that stuff. Maybe it could give a person the permission to have a wank.”

An admirable mission statement for any song.

AIN’T NO CURE FOR LOVE

Anna’s latest single from the record 'Baby Grand' is accompanied by a devastatingly beautiful music video, directed by Anna and her former boyfriend, Jem Talbot. Featuring footage of Anna and Jem, along with actors playing them as a couple, it's sure to catch you off guard with it’s palpable vulnerability. It’s hard to watch at times.

“Yeah, almost unbearable,” she says. "People were like 'You're making a video with your ex boyfriend, about your relationship? That’s fucking bold. That’s going to be fucking painful’. "

Thankfully this didn’t deter Anna and the result is a powerful visual companion-piece to the track. Although it can't have been an easy thing to do.

“Yeah, I mean it's hard. It's very hard. It's all very confusing and visceral," she says.

BIRD ON THE WIRE

Along with female sexuality, A Common Turn is littered with ornithological references: corncrakes, doves and of course, the common tern all feature. Anna B Savage has a genuine interest and love of our feathered friends.

"They’re actual dinosaurs,” she ruminates, "and we just think they’re normal. The huge journeys they do, their ever-presence, in one way or another. They’ve always held something of a fascination for me."

The second track on the album ‘Corncrakes' truly encapsulates the freedom of a bird. The song quickens to a hypnotic tempo, almost meditative as Savage repeats the words: "I don’t know if this is even real/ I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to."

The near-title track 'A Common Tern' is about Anna B Savage freeing herself from a bad relationship – and ultimately escaping the toxic relationship she had built with – or within – herself. The moment she decides to change coincides with the sighting of the bird of the title.

“For me, ‘a common turn’ is those moments of decision where you think ‘I’m not taking this anymore', whether it’s the way someone else is treating you or the way you’re treating yourself,” Anna explains.

MOVING ON

Despite the deeply introspective, warts and all subject matter of her songs, Anna is anything but a melancholic interviewee. There’s lots of loud laughter and positivity throughout our call. She is particularly chirpy when I mention that some of her unexpected lyrics made me laugh – "Tim Curry in lingerie" – for one.

“I love it when people laugh, it makes me so happy,” she says. “I’m so glad because I think they can come across as only very distressing and sad. I think they’re kind of funny.”

Like her music, Anna is honest, warm and intelligent.

“I'm a bit of an open book. It's interesting,” she ponders. "I'm in therapy at the moment and I'm realising that I've always thought that I’m a very open and vulnerable person but now it's like, ‘Ooh, I don't know if I actually am'. I'm open and vulnerable in certain things, but then there’s some things that are so deep down buried that they're much harder to access. I’m working on it.”

Anna's music reassures the listener that here’s strength and liberation to be found in being honest and vulnerable.

“I think things don't eat me up from the inside if I'm open about them,” she reflects.

Still: this record is full of self-doubt and question marks: "Is this even real? Do we have what I think we have? How did I get to this point? Is anyone listening? Or the album’s opening question: 'Do I understand this?"

Has Anna found a way to free herself of expectation, or is the pressure to prove herself still present?

“One-hundred percent. I think that's why I had that unintentional hiatus,” she admits. “It's interesting, I feel like in the last couple of years, and around writing this, there's definitely lots more of the autonomy that we've been talking about. Just doing stuff for me. I recorded this album by basically accosting Will and giving him all of my savings and being like, I just want to record this. I wasn't signed at the time, I didn't have a manager. The only person I still had in place was my booking agent, who is incredible and has been with me since the beginning. I thought, I've missed my chance, so I'm just going to do this for me.”

Nick Drake was famously hard on himself for his lack of commercial success during his lifetime. I ask Anna how she defines success, compared to her hero Drake.

“Success is always that one step ahead of you,” she says. “The concept of being able to pay my rent and live a nice-ish life with money that I make from music – to me that’s success. I'm not super far off it but I'm not there yet.”

With her debut album released this week, what's the overriding feeling?

“I’m still in a bit of disbelief. I've been thinking about this for a really, really long time and working towards it for a really long time. Working on the album took a long time, Covid meant that we delayed it a bit, so I guess I'll believe it when I see it.”
She laughs again.

Anna B Savage moved to Dublin last September where she’s currently undertaking a masters degree in music. What spurred the move?

“Again, it’s that autonomy thing,” she says. "Covid has taken all of the plans that I've made and all of the ideas that I'd had, so I really want to move somewhere else. I want to have a bit of an adventure and I wanted to challenge myself and make myself feel a bit alive again.”

Speaking of the C-word, I ask Anna what she's missed most during the on-going pandemic.

“There's something about communal dancing in a sweaty space, even if that space is outside – but there's just loads of people packed in. The communal experience of music is so important to me.”

Indeed we're all guilty of taking such simple pleasures for granted – but not after this surely?

“I feel like after two years we’ll all have forgotten about it. Humans are weirdly adaptable,” Anna reflects.

For now, we'll have to make do with daydreaming about our freedom in a post-covid world.

“I'm gonna be wearing my finest outfits every single day, proper feathers and shit,” she laughs. “I'm probably gonna want to go out to bars and flirt with people: putting my hands on their knee or like scratching their shoulder, and then maybe having a cheeky snog or something? It’s going to be carnage.”

A Common Turn is out now via City Slang.