Anna B Savage - Rebirth of a singer-songwriter

With just three albums under her belt, the young London singer-songwriter has established herself as one of the most significant artists of recent years. Her path is steeped in both electronica and folk, inseparable from a turbulent romantic history that fuels a passionate poetics capable of shaking listeners to their core

by Michele Corrado

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 prominent 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 the 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 in electronica. Crucial to this is her choice to change producer with every release. Anna's shifting moods are always matched by a new guise for her songs, just as her look and the way she looks at us from her album covers also change. First a creature of darkness draped in sombre colours and gothic feathers, then a fresh-faced girl, finally free and a little 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. The 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 in 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, produced by DM Stith and accompanied by scant, sparse press notes, yet still striking for its deep timbre and personal lyrics expressing insecurities, questions and often unresolved doubts. Four songs that intrigued two artists as different as Father John Misty and Jenny Hval, who were quick to catch her live at a London music institution like Cafe Oto before taking her under their wing and bringing her along to open the European dates of their tours.

This sudden and somewhat unexpected success failed to dispel Savage's insecurities - if anything, it probably ended up adding new ones, which, combined with a romantic relationship that had turned toxic, quickly undermined her ability to write 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 to do, but it wasn't easy for her to recognise just how damaging a relationship she had entered into - not only with her partner, but above all with herself. The unravelling of this toxic bond was the first building block of a journey of rebuilding and rebirth that led the English artist to find herself again, take back control of her life and, at last, rediscover the strength to express her vocal and compositional talent.

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

The next step came through contact and subsequent collaboration with William Doyle (FKA East India Youth), whose ambitious yet elegant production helped give the songs their finished shape. Together, the two created A Common Turn (2021), a debut album made up of ten decidedly unconventional tracks, full of sudden and happy flashes of intuition, where Savage's vocal range and timbre weave through strikingly original harmonies.

After the brief incipit of "A Steady Warmth", built from dark, skewed echoes, the English artist begins voicing her doubts and insecurities with disarming sincerity and candour, as in "Corncrakes", where, following a light-footed opening of guitar and voice, a stop & go dynamic builds into an anxious acceleration that culminates in a final 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" - that knocks the air right out of you.

Yet Savage can be docile and wild at the same time, as in the vocal shifts of “Dead Pursuit”, which underline 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”), always revealing a vocal and compositional maturity that's remarkable for a debut.

The sudden changes of pace that mark most of the tracks are never out of place, as in the layers of sound that ripple across the calm sea of guitar and voice in 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 melancholy (“Baby Grand”), there's a more or less decisive change of course that catches you off guard, always with absolute emotional intensity.

And while the near-title track “A Common Tern” is breathtaking, evoking the ghosts of Jeff Buckley, “Chelsea Hotel #3”, behind an apparent calm, lays bare her fragilities and her relationship with sexuality, underscored by a voice that is authentic, vulnerable, capable of growing strong and hypnotic in the song's climax, when she comes to realize the simple fact that, beyond all doubts, the essential 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 almost always begin in a seemingly conventional way, with just voice and guitar, as in the splendid “Hotel”, where Savage puts on headphones to listen in the dark to “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake, hoping to fall asleep as quickly as possible. Nothing is as it seems. Chiaroscuro, as often happens in life, is also a fundamental part of this work, where calm and desire go hand in hand with weaknesses and doubts. Vulnerability and insecurity are spelled out plainly in the closing “One”, which is moving in the open sincerity with which Savage describes her fraught relationship with her own body and the resulting complicated approach to sex, before underlining, with hard-strummed guitar, a resolve not yet achieved: “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”.

Her expectations were probably undone only by the labyrinths of the mind, capable of blurring the thin line between awareness and fantasy, but who knows whether, after this record and with the acceptance of her immense talent, Savage will manage to convince herself that she has become stronger. On one hand we hope so, but on the other, perhaps it's precisely this questioning, this discovering of small everyday wonders, this letting herself be caught up in doubt, that makes her feel more real and, empathetically, even closer to us, since by now she has made us complicit in her fragility. It's the vulnerabilities we all carry, 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 captivating debut.

Stop haunting me, please

Just leave me be

Ever since the release of A Common Turn, it was immediately clear that the artist presenting herself, unafraid to lay bare her traumas and fragility, was one of the most interesting singer-songwriters of her generation. Several peers — and we're talking about names of the caliber of Father John Misty and Jenny Hval — have brought her along on their tours. We've also been able to enjoy her intense, deep voice on two rich features, in the work of young singer-songwriter Hamish Hawk and in that of techno pioneers Orbital, further proof of a majestic vocal and interpretive versatility.

A Common Turn was a record full of ghosts, specters attacking the subconscious of a young artist intent on licking her wounds after a toxic relationship, after one of those loves that devours you and gives nothing back. And the sophomore record in|FLUX opens with a ghost too, aptly titled “The Ghost”. But Anna is assertive when she tells it “Stop haunting me, please/ Just leave me be”; she's even mocking, almost wanting to make the ghost believe it still holds some power, when in fact she's already freed herself from it. Look how serene she is as she watches it, the same way she looks at us with her clear, icy eyes on the cover of in|FLUX, whereas on its predecessor's cover she kept them covered, as if hiding.

The young London singer-songwriter's newfound awareness has translated into a second record that adds many new elements to her repertoire. The electronics are perhaps less conspicuous than those supplied by William Doyle's production, but are actually more pervasive, injecting their beats amid textures 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, but already experienced working with a singer-songwriter like Laura Marling in their shared project Lump), brought in to work on the demos Savage had pre-recorded on her own, and complete them together. Lindsay's unmistakable folktronica touch is evident when electronic beats interweave 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 record's dark heart is its most tormented moment and, as such, the one closest to A Common Turn: “Say My Name”, which takes its folk chord skeleton and spins it into a vortex where piano chords, free-jazz saxophone sighs and anguished invocations come crashing down. Just as devoted to art-pop — though decidedly more steeped in electronics — is the title track, in which, as the beats shift, Anna B Savage unleashes as many tones and shadings as only a great vocalist can possess.

The record fades out amid relaxed beats, soothing whistles, gentle horn flourishes, and Anna whispering, self-assured, “I Think I Am Gonna Be Fine”: it's a “The Orange” that carries a message entirely different from the ones Savage has accustomed us to.

Beyond the new elements, in|FLUX finds the English singer-songwriter working with a more rounded song form than in the past. This, it must be said, strips away some of the chill, some of the unpredictability found in the songs of her debut, but it doesn't dim a talent that will carry 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 that infested 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 a batch of songs that were more serene and self-assured. For her third effort, 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 provide a fitting and primary reading of 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's full embrace of folk, which has always been the fundamental backbone of her compositions, though usually surrounded by other influences. The synthetic jolts provided first by William Doyle (East India Youth) and then by Mike Lindsay (Tunng) on the songs of her earlier records thus give way to another kind of vibration: Celtic and pastoral ornaments built from strings, winds and plucked chords.

Anna B Savage's folk record 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 boldly take on an intriguing concept narrative too, imagining herself as the youngest child of a dynasty of lighthouse keepers, while the piano dances on the water and the high notes of the strings 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 a sweeping chorus.

If toxic, overbearing relationships were at the centre of Anna B Savage's first record, and continued to cast a shadow over the second too, You And I Are Earth marks a rebirth on the emotional front as well. A new love, refreshing and luminous, the bond sealed by the shared embrace of mother earth evoked in the title, pervades numerous lyrics, but above all the lush "Mo Cheol Thú". An intimate love ballad built on a limping guitar line, which opens up and gradually brightens until a finale where winds and strings swirl through the air around her siren-like voice. The idyll with the mysterious Irishman continues too on the delicate "I Reach For You In My Sleep", another foray that starts out tiptoeing before the chorus wraps everything in warmth.

An esoteric gathering of croaking basslines and shifting folk figures, "Agnes" is another display of inventiveness and taste that tickles the imagination like the butterflies and spirits of the darkest, most intriguing Irish folklore.

The phrase "maturity record" gets used a lot. It's tempting, and rightly so, to use it for this third work by the London singer-songwriter too. Here Anna not only takes on the classic forms of folk and wins the challenge thanks to her immense talent and her trust in an entirely new team, but also takes the risk of removing herself (at least for long stretches) from the centre of her lyrics, disguising herself as an ancient, shamanic storyteller. No need to doubt it: this third undertaking finds her victorious once again.

Contributions by Stefano Santoni ("A Common Turn")