Q&A: Anna B Savage Embraces Internal Opposition on her New Album ‘in|FLUX’
☆ BY Makena Alquist ☆
Photo courtesy of Katie Silvester
IT CAN BE EASY TO FEEL DEFINED — by how others see you. In an increasingly digital world, labels are often foisted upon us by those who may not have any idea of who we are, what we think, or how we feel. On her new album, in|FLUX, Anna B Savage refuses to be confined to the box the world wants to put her in.
Throughout in|FLUX, Savage travels so far outside the box that the box disappears entirely. This brings Savage into an uncanny space — one that is intangible — leaving her with a desire to look away from her experiences but an inability to do so. A discomfort lingers on the record, but in a way that becomes comforting as the disquieting nature returns again and again as a theme throughout the tracklist.
Savage finds playfulness in this new, indefinite space. She brings instruments from her past and present together to create a new sound to match this new environment. The album feels limitless, as if nothing was off the table, but also completely calculated in its overall cohesiveness.
The album never overwhelms the listener. The repetition and constant recurrent themes hook listeners in; they will be content in the same comfortable discomfort as Savage herself.
The singer-songwriter embraces this and all other dichotomies on the album, an intentional choice by Savage to further refuse definition. This is visualized perfectly in her video for the titular track, which features Savage surrounded by different versions of herself as they sing back and forth to each other in mirrors.
With the album out and an upcoming tour, the discomfort has shifted to excitement for Savage. Luna got the chance to sit down with her to talk about the upcoming album release. Read the interview down below.
LUNA: First off, congratulations on the album! How are you feeling in the lead up to the release?
SAVAGE: I'm just excited for it to happen! Only a week and a day to go, so I feel like I'm getting to the impatient part now.
LUNA: Yeah, right around the corner! So, diving right in, I wanted to ask about the instrumentation on the tracks. You can hear everything on these songs — bells, saxophone, clarinet. What was your process for putting that together?
SAVAGE: Mike, my producer, and I met up before we'd started and had a quite broad chat about what sounds we'd like the record to have, really. There were no hard-and-fast things going on then but I mentioned that I would quite like saxophone and clarinet on it; I also mentioned that I used to play the saxophone and the clarinet. So he was like, “Okay, cool, you should bring those.” I also brought a kalimba pedal that my friend made specifically for me. Those were three things that I felt I really wanted to put on the album, specifically the clarinet and the kalimba. The other thing was [that] I'd written everything on acoustic guitar — not electric guitar, like [on] my first album. Then he also had a real piano and analog sound machines. So we played with what we could play with, starting out with clarinet, saxophone, and piano. Then we honed in on two or three of his analog machines so that we could kind of use those across the whole album so that it felt like it was in the same audio space.
LUNA: That totally comes across on the record. It sounds cohesive but there’s definitely a really playful quality. Speaking of the music on the album, David Byrne recently recommended your single “The Ghost” on his radio station. There’s definitely a similar experimental sound on the record — was there any specific inspiration there?
SAVAGE: Unfortunately, no. Basically I'm like — I literally say it in a song so it kind of feels a bit trite to say it now in interviews — but I am a bit of a magpie and I really do like certain things from very random places. I think it’s really nice to have audio references, but it's kind of harder to pinpoint them if they're broader. I'd say probably the record that we listened to if we were both stuck was Beverly Glenn-Copeland, because he's obviously the best in the entire world. But yeah, there was no other person that we really were like, “It has to be like this.”
LUNA: Yeah, I totally get it. Okay, shifting to talk a little bit about the lyrics, there's a repetition theme happening throughout the album. Was that something you intended going in or something you found as you worked on it?
SAVAGE: It definitely wasn’t something I intended — it's literally only something that's coming to my brain now that you're mentioning it. I think there are certain things that I have in my back pocket as a songwriter that I tend to lean on and that's one of them. So maybe I subconsciously leaned into that little bit.
LUNA: I think the repetition really works for the themes you deal with on the record. The toxic relationship idea, and the circular nature of it, constantly feels like we’re coming back to this main theme.
SAVAGE: That's really interesting. For me, I feel like there is definitely the idea of circling back. In the flux of the album, it's constantly coming back and forward and back and forward. But a lot of it is also to do with being able to hold two seemingly diametrically opposing ideas at the same time, through the same person. So that idea of wanting to be physically close to someone and feeling desire but also knowing that you don't want to be in a relationship with them, even though you really fancy them and you want to be with them in that moment. It’s having those two seemingly opposing feelings at the same time — feeling empowered and completely self-loathing, or content and completely dissolved. I just feel really strongly that there's so much pressure to have one singular narrative or one singular focus, or one opinion, or one type of music that you make, or one thing you do, and in the current social media world that we're in you just have to keep reinforcing that thing because that's what's going to keep the content good. And we're not that — we're humans.
LUNA: Speaking of two ideas in the same space, the music video for “in|FLUX” is such a cool visualization of that! And you directed the video for “The Ghost,” so what was your process for finding these visualizations for the album?
SAVAGE: Well, “in|FLUX” was definitely the most enjoyable because we got this pitch from Rosie Barrett, the director, which was incredible. It just perfectly encapsulated the song, so that was the dreamiest one. Then “The Ghost” was a little bit [trickier]. We'd spent a really long time thinking about the visuals for the album and we spent a long time shooting them, and while we were shooting the visuals for the album we also shot quite a lot of video. I really wanted “The Ghost” to kind of introduce you to the world but also feel quite uncanny and quite unsettling. And so much of the stuff that we filmed was exactly that. So yeah, it kind of felt like the perfect way of getting that uncanniness across.
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