Videos

ANNA B SAVAGE shares new single

• 2nd Dec 2020

With her debut album ‘A Common Turn‘ set for release on Jan 29th via City Slang, London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage is sharing her new single & video “Corncrakes“.

Written after reading ‘The Outrun’ by Amy Liptrot and ‘The Summer Book’ by Tove Jansson, Savage speaks about the inspiration behind writing the song saying “At this moment in my life, I was entering a seismic shift. I felt like I was getting clues from the universe, and all I needed to do to ‘work it all out’ was piece them together. These clues came in the form of birds – in this instance a corncrake. I now see the corncrake as a layout for a theme: something tangible, but imperceptible, evident but not necessarily visible.”

The video, created by nature producer Chris Howard (Planet Earth Live, Springwatch, Autumnwatch) is for Savage “the perfect representation of happiness, confusion, longing, desire, sadness, and also a stoicism that has run through me, all at the same time, for the last few years. The breadth of some of the shots make my heart ache, with both joy and a real sadness that I won’t get to experience them myself for the foreseeable.”

“I was absolutely chuffed when Chris Howard agreed to do this music video for me. Chris is a nature producer extraordinaire and old friend. In fact, my sister’s ex boyfriend. While we haven’t seen each other in many years, we’ve kept in small amounts of contact and during lockdown especially he’s been encouraging me so kindly and generously in my musical and twitching tendencies. It was such a joy to be able to communicate with him regularly, share in my vision and see how my work inspired his, resulting in this gorgeous video which I will probably watch all the time but with the sound off.”

Making art is a bold thing, a statement. Usually a full stop, sometimes an exclamation point. But it’s bolder still when it’s a question mark. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage makes question-mark-music, captivating and powerful, navigating various recurring themes including female sexuality, self-doubt … and birds.  

Often questioning the validity of her own thoughts and feelings, her songs are heavy with unanswered queries. Is this even real? Do we have what I think we have? How did I get to this point? Is anyone listening? Or the record’s opening and most potent question: “Do I understand this?”. 

Yet these questions are buoyed by her ability to conjure melodies and lyrics so devastatingly candid, vulnerable and honest, that somehow still manage to be bewitchingly charming, utterly modern and often funny.

This is seen over and over again on her debut full-length record, ‘A Common Turn.’ “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 what you’re treating yourself” Savage explains.

From a young age, Savage has also always been surrounded by music. The daughter of two classical singers, Savage spent her childhood birthdays in the green room at the Royal Albert Hall, as her birthday falls on the day Bach died and her parents were booked to play the Bach Proms each year. Her 2015 EP was deeply intriguing as a project, it contained four songs, all of which paired Savage’s deep, rich voice with lyrics rife with insecurity and unfinished business and was released with very little accompanying information about the artist. 

The success of the EP caught Savage off guard, triggering a form of imposter syndrome, stifling her writing and ultimately affecting her mental health.  At her lowest point Savage wasn’t sure if she could continue making music. At one stage her well-meaning parents started to cut out arts administration jobs for her and put them on the bed for when she arrived home.  

In the five years between her first release and this forthcoming one, Savage ended the bad relationship mentioned previously (“I was so small by the end of it”), took up odd jobs, moved across the world twice, got herself a lot of therapy and eventually built herself from the ground up again. “I sat in the sun and read, and I ran my book club, and I went swimming in the Ladies Pond, and I went on trips, and I got drunk, started smoking again and going to parties, and I started dancing again and seeing my friends and, most miraculous of all, I started to like myself.”

For the last three years, focused and reenergised, Savage wrote music for her debut album, stitching together influences and references “One month I printed out all the lyrics, blu-tacked them to my wall, and drew lines between each corresponding idea. Making sure I’d lyrically covered all the themes I wanted to, linking ideas, deleting repeats, and making me look like a literary serial killer”. The album is littered with personal and cultural references (Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Spice Girls, female pleasure, mental health, and a ceramic owl mug by Scottish alt-rock legend Edwyn Collins, among others), all of which are now sewn into her music like talismans. 

Savage got in touch with William Doyle, (FKA East India Youth – 2014 Mercury Prize nominee)’ having seen his social media post asking artists to contact him if they wanted to experiment together. From their first meeting, William provided ambitious yet elegant production to the demos Anna brought him, and ultimately gave a definitive shape to the record she had at one point deemed officially impossible to finish. Theirs is a blending of earth and industry, of human feeling and mechanized deconstruction of expectations and barriers. As a pair, they were able to make a record that is, in Savage’s words, “about learning, adapting, growing, being earnest and trying really f***ing hard.”

Savage’s music is deeply vulnerable, without being submissive. The subject matter could weigh these songs down, but instead they soar as she lays claim to her own fragility. There’s an intoxicating catharsis woven through the album and the stories she tells are of taking up space, finding connections, and owning the power in not knowing all the answers. Hers are songs for anyone who thinks hard, feels deeply, and asks big questions.

During the years since the release of her debut EP, Savage has also been making a film with two collaborators. The film can be read as in conversation with this album. More details of that will be released at a later date.

‘A Common Turn’ track list:
1. A Steady Warmth 
2. Corncrakes
3. Dead Pursuits (Youtube)
4. BedStuy
5. Baby Grand
6. Two
7. A Common Tern (Youtube)
8. Chelsea Hotel #3 (Youtube)
9. Hotel
10. One