Anna B Savage - Rebirth of a singer-songwriter

In the space of just three records, the first of which, A Common Turn, came out in 2021, Anna B Savage has carved out a leading role in the world of female singer-songwriters. The young English songwriter, now based in Ireland, began her journey with an album deeply tied to her personal life, in particular to a toxic relationship, which gradually opens up to a new light as its author reclaims her life. A musical journey, then, closely bound to the British chanteuse's lived experience and her femininity, drawing on her torments and passions to shake listeners to their very core.

A path that is also stylistically unpredictable, drawing as much on the tradition of Leonard Cohen and his heirs as on the folk songs of Sandy Denny and her Fairport Convention, while also often threading itself with electronics. Crucial, in this respect, is her choice to change producer with every release. Anna's shifting moods thus always coincide with a new guise for her songs, just as her look changes, along with the way she looks back at us from her album covers. First a creature of darkness draped in somber colors and gothic feathers, then a fresh-faced girl, finally free and a touch flirtatious, and finally a woodland creature immersed in the lichen of Irish forests.

There was never any doubt that music would play a fundamental role in the life of London's Anna B Savage. Daughter of two opera singers, she spent her earliest birthdays in the green room of the Royal Albert Hall, thanks to a curious coincidence: she was born on the same day Johann Sebastian Bach died. Every year her parents were booked to perform at the Bbc Prom dedicated to the German composer at the historic South Kensington venue.

After a quiet apprenticeship, in 2015 Savage released her debut Ep, a record produced by DM Stith and accompanied by scant, sparse press notes, yet capable of hitting the mark thanks to her deep timbre and personal lyrics that voiced often unresolved insecurities, questions and doubts. Four songs that intrigued two such different artists as Father John Misty and Jenny Hval, who were quick to catch her live at a London music temple like Cafe Oto before taking her under their wing and bringing her along to open European dates on their tours.

This sudden, somewhat unexpected success failed to dispel Savage's insecurities - if anything, it likely added new ones, which, combined with a romantic relationship turned toxic, quickly undermined her songwriting ability and even her mental health, calling into question her future not just as a musician. Her parents tried to help by giving her small administrative jobs, but it wasn't easy for her to realize just how damaging a relationship she had entered into, not only with her partner but, above all, with herself. The end of that toxic bond was the first building block of a process of reconstruction and rebirth that led the English artist to find herself again, take back control of her life and, finally, rediscover the strength to express her vocal and compositional talent.

You know that typical scene in crime dramas where the detective pins photos, references and clues to a wall to track down a serial killer? Savage did something similar: over the course of a month she printed out all her lyrics, stuck them on the wall and drew lines connecting them to corresponding ideas, making sure she'd covered every important theme in the lyrics, linking them together, cutting any repetitions and weaving in her own personal and cultural references (Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Spice Girls, female pleasure, Nick Drake, mental health, her passion for birdwatching and for Edwyn Collins, former leader of cult Scottish band Orange Juice), stitched like talismans into her music.

The next step was made possible by her contact and subsequent collaboration with William Doyle (FKA East India Youth), whose ambitious yet elegant production helped give the songs their finished shape. Together, they created A Common Turn (2021), a debut album made up of ten anything-but-conventional tracks, full of sudden and felicitous flashes of inspiration, in which Savage's vocal range and timbre weave together with remarkably original harmonies.

After the brief incipit of “A Steady Warmth”, built from dark, distorted echoes, the English artist begins voicing her doubts and insecurities with disarming sincerity and candor, as in “Corncrakes”, where a graceful opening of guitar and voice gives way to a stop-and-go pattern leading to an anxious acceleration that culminates in a breathtaking closing line: “I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to. I don’t know if this is even real. I don’t feel things”.

But Savage can be gentle and wild at once, as in the vocal interplay of “Dead Pursuit”, which lays bare all her past fears (“Three years and still worried it’s a mediocre album. I swear I tear myself limb from limb. I don’t remember how to be me. I’m not the same”), revealing a vocal and compositional maturity that's remarkable for a debut.

The sudden shifts in pace that run through most of the tracks are never out of place, as in the layers of sound that ripple the placid sea of guitar and voice on the splendid “BedStuy”, before surging into powerful, ancestral upheavals in the surprising mutation of “Two”. Just when the sound seems dark and dense, or intimate and melancholic (“Baby Grand”), there's a more or less decisive change of course capable of catching you off guard, always delivered with absolute emotional intensity.

And while the near-title-track "A Common Tern" manages to leave you breathless by evoking the ghosts of Jeff Buckley, "Chelsea Hotel #3", beneath an apparent calm, lays bare her fragilities and her relationship with sexuality, underscored by a voice that is authentic, vulnerable, yet capable of turning strong and hypnotic in the song's climax, when she arrives at the simple realization that, beyond all doubts, the fundamental thing is to take care of yourself: "New Year's resolutions. I will learn to take care of myself. Take care of myself (if you know what I mean). Take care of myself".

Don't be fooled by the fact that the songs always start out in an almost conventional way with voice and guitar, like the splendid “Hotel”, where Savage puts on her headphones to listen in the dark to “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake, hoping to fall asleep as soon as possible. Nothing is as it seems. Chiaroscuro, as is often the case in life, is also a fundamental part of this work, in which calm and desire go hand in hand with weakness and doubt. Vulnerability and insecurity are laid bare in the closing "One," which moves us with the open sincerity with which Savage describes her fraught relationship with her own body and the complicated approach to sex that results from it, before underscoring, with heavy guitar strokes, a resolve not yet attained: "Cause I want to be strong." And I'd like to be fine. And I hate that it’s fueled. Even in part, by my own mind”.

Perhaps her expectations had only ever been undone by the labyrinths of the mind, capable of blurring the fine line between awareness and fantasy, but who knows whether, after this record and with the acceptance of her enormous talent, Savage will manage to convince herself that she's become stronger. On one hand we hope so, but on the other, perhaps this questioning, this discovering of small wonders in everyday life, this letting herself be caught up in doubt, is exactly what makes her more真实 -- truer and even more empathetically close to us, since by now she's made us complicit in her fragilities. It's the vulnerabilities in each of us, more or less hidden, that we find expressed in whispers and power across the ten tracks of this disarmingly sincere record, made of tension and release, anxiety and catharsis. A spellbinding debut.

Stop haunting me, please

Just leave me be

From the moment A Common Turn came out, it was immediately clear that here was one of the most interesting singer-songwriters of her generation, unafraid to lay bare her traumas and her fragility. Several fellow artists — and we're talking names of the caliber of Father John Misty and Jenny Hval — have wanted her by their side on tour. We've also gotten to enjoy her deep, intense voice on two juicy features, in the work of young songwriter Hamish Hawk and techno pioneers Orbital, further proof of a majestic vocal and interpretive versatility.

A Common Turn was an album full of ghosts, specters assailing the subconscious of a young artist intent on licking her wounds after a toxic relationship, after one of those loves that devour you without giving anything back. And the sophomore record in|FLUX also opens with a ghost, fittingly titled "The Ghost". But Anna is assertive when she tells it "Stop haunting me, please/ Just leave me be"; she's almost mocking, in fact, as if trying to make the ghost believe it still holds some power, when really she's already free of it. Just look how serene she is as she gazes at it, how she looks at us with clear, icy eyes from the cover of in|FLUX, whereas on its predecessor's cover she covered them, as if hiding.

The growing self-awareness of the young London singer-songwriter has translated into a second album that adds plenty of new ingredients to her repertoire. The electronics may be less conspicuous than on William Doyle's production, but they're actually more present, injecting their beats among weaves of acoustic guitar, piano, saxophone and clarinet.

These new ideas were worked out by the British chanteuse together with new producer Mike Lindsay (leader of Tunng, already a collaborator of songwriter Laura Marling in the shared project Lump), brought in to work on demos Savage had pre-recorded alone, so they could finish them together. Lindsay's folktronic touch is unmistakable when electronic beats interpolate perfectly with acoustic guitar on "Touch Me", as well as in the feverish momentum of "Pavlov's Dog" or the bucolic glimpses of "I Can Hear The Birds Now".

The album's dark heart is its most tormented moment, and as such the one closest to A Common Turn: "Say My Name" grows out of a skeleton of folk chords into a vortex where piano chords, free-jazz saxophone sighs and anguished invocations come crashing down. The title track is equally devoted to art-pop — though tipped much further toward electronics — where, as the beats shift, Anna B Savage unleashes as many tones and shades as only a truly great vocalist can possess.

The album fades out amid relaxed beats, soothing whistles, gentle horn flourishes, and Anna whispering with self-assurance "I Think I Am Gonna Be Fine": it's a "The Orange" that carries messages entirely removed from what Savage had accustomed us to.

Beyond these new ingredients, in|FLUX finds the English songwriter tackling a more rounded song form than in the past. It must be said that, compared to her debut, this strips away a bit of the thrill, a bit of the unpredictability from the tracks on offer, but it doesn't dim a talent that will keep carrying Savage ever higher.

I Think I Am Going To Be Fine

The way Anna B Savage presents herself on her album covers is always very telling of what we'll find inside. On the cover of her debut A Common Turn, she appeared immersed in darkness, covering her eyes with her hands, a sign of the unease and pain haunting songs about trauma and unresolved relationships. The backdrop chosen for in|FLUX was still black, but there Anna scrutinized us with her icy eyes, presenting us with a batch of songs that were calmer and more self-assured. For her third outing, titled You And I Are Earth (2025), the musician's face literally emerges from a mound of moss and lichen. The return to nature, its rediscovery, certainly offers a fitting, primary way to read her third album. First of all because it was made far from crowded London, in the Irish countryside. The help of the extremely busy local producer John "Spud" Murphy and other talented local musicians such as Kate Ellis, Caimin Gilmore (both of Crash Ensemble), Cormac MacDiarmada (Lankum) and Anna Mieke then paved the way for the English chanteuse to fully embrace folk, always a fundamental backbone of her compositions, but usually surrounded by other influences. The synthetic jolts supplied first by William Doyle (East India Youth) and then by Mike Lindsay (Tunng) on the songs of her first albums thus give way to a different kind of vibration: Celtic and pastoral ornaments built from strings, horns and plucked instruments.

Anna B Savage's folk album thus opens with "Talk To Me": flute notes, the sound of a stream, and lyrics addressed to the sea and the wind, delivered in a register that follows in the footsteps of Sandy Denny. Savage hasn't merely adapted her technically trained, intense and versatile voice to these classic folk settings: starting with "Lighthouse", we see her tackle, with real conviction, an intriguing narrative-driven song as well. Imagining herself as the youngest daughter in a dynasty of lighthouse keepers, while the piano dances on the water and the strings' high notes cry out like seagulls. The Irish sea, with its cold, briny breeze, also washes over "Donegal", a dramatic, theatrical episode built on taut guitars and an overwhelming chorus.

If toxic, overbearing relationships were at the center of Anna B Savage's first album and still cast a few shadows over the second, You And I Are Earth marks a rebirth on the romantic front too. A new love, refreshing and luminous, the union sealed by the shared embrace of mother earth evoked in the title, pervades numerous lyrics, but above all the lush "Mo Cheol Thú". It's an intimate love ballad built on a limping guitar line, which opens and brightens progressively until a finale where horns and strings swirl through the air around her siren-like voice. The idyll with the mysterious Irishman continues on the delicate "I Reach For You In My Sleep", another outing that starts on tiptoe before the chorus wraps everything in its glow.

An esoteric feast of crackling basslines and shifting folk figures, "Agnes" is further proof of an inventiveness and taste that tickles the imagination like the butterflies and spirits of the darkest, most intriguing Irish folklore.

The phrase "mature album" gets used a lot. It's tempting to use it here too, and rightly so, for this third work by the London songwriter. Here Anna not only grapples with the classic forms of folk and wins that challenge thanks to her immense talent and trust in an entirely new team, but she also takes the risk of removing herself (at least for long stretches) from the center of her lyrics, disguising herself as an ancient, shamanic storyteller. There's no doubt about it: this third venture finds her victorious as well.

Contributions by Stefano Santoni ("A Common Turn")

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