Sarah Vardy (aka Anu Sava) is an enigmatic and ever-evolving creature.
Over the years, she has morphed from a self-proclaimed chubby kid with a penchant for the violin to frontwoman of Aussie band Girl With Cake, and then again into her solo incarnation, Anu Sava.
For her first Anu Sava album, 'Buried', the multi-instrumentalist intertwined EDM with folk music to create a sound that hints of things you know but can't quite be compared to anything else.
Continuing the evolution, Anu Sava took uniqueness to new heights with her queer/ country album, 'Lickety Split'. Now, with a new year and a new album in sight, Anu Sava has transformed once again, this time spawning a second musician in the process.
What inspired you to add a second musician to the mix?
I had been working with a lot of EDM and midi programming. I felt like it was making me over-produce songs and controlling the compositions so they felt too restrained. I wanted to add back in some edge and life to the compositions so I added a drummer to the mix... Finding other musicians to work with is kind of like dating. Once you meet them you just know there’s a deeper connection.
Where does the name Anu Sava originate from?
Anu Sava is a name that comes from history. You are a product of what has come before you. It’s personal. I wanted this project to have a sense of that. Anu is another word for grace or favour. Grace is my deceased grandmother’s name. Anita is my middle name. Anita means grace. Anu is another word that also means grace. Saint Sava is a Serbian Saint credited to be a founder of independent Serbian literature. I wanted to have a sense of history and re-birth. A strength that could help me go out on my own with this project and stand on my own two feet with confidence to be an example and embrace who I am as an artist.
From the Girl With Cake website, it looks like you guys are still making music and planning a new album. How does that work with them in Australia and you in America?
Girl With Cake have been on a little bit of a hiatus as we’ve all taken on a few different side projects. We have started putting together some tracks for a new album, mostly working off scratch tracks that we upload and share. Modern DIY recording equipment and cloud technology is amazing for this. I don’t think it would be possible otherwise. The next goal is to actually meet up face to face, maybe on a quiet island, in the mountains, an abandoned building or a nondescript toilet block, to record the project.
Missing your family, friends and home comforts is an unavoidable side-effect of moving overseas. But, since moving to the States, what are the three most unexpected things you miss from home?
1. Girl With Cake bandmates of course! I love those mofos. I can’t find anyone like them to work with. It’s that special musical chemistry. There are others - but it almost feels like you’re cheating on your lover at first. Then you just have to move on. I also miss everyone in the Brisbane music/arts scene - most of whom are really sincere and supportive. Brisbane has something special going on. There’s also a unique Brizzy flavoured rock that you just can’t get anywhere but Brisbane. That’s pretty cool!
2. The beach? What? I didn’t think I cared about the beach anymore but once you’re land locked in Middle America you think about it a lot. It’s like you’re stranded with no way out and you start hyperventilating thinking ‘oh wow what have I done, how will I ever cool down on hot days!!!’.
3. Australian euphemisms and the Australian accent. There are a lot of different accents in the US. Some barely legible. I get asked where I’m from several times a day and have to talk about Australia to strangers. It’s weird but you get used to it. You get to know how to answer certain questions so you aren’t stuck chatting for way too long. I still miss the Aussie way of talking and explaining things; it makes me feel immediately like I’m home again smiling at some weird little way of explaining something from a dude with stubbies on. I explained the euphemism ‘rare as hen’s teeth’ to someone from Chicago the other day. They still thought it was weird and I was bizarre for even conjuring up this strange little saying in conversation.
What about the three most awesome new things you've discovered since you moved to Nashville?
1. The rock scene. It’s at house parties, through grassroots organising, and at dive bars. If you think Nashville is just country music. It’s not. It takes a while to find your bearings here and some even say it’s a 5 - 7 year town. I’ve been here about 3 years now and I’m still finding out things, meeting new people and finding new dive bars/venues in the rock scene. It’s growing. Jack White has his Third Man Records store in downtown and lives in Nashville too. People are moving here from all over the place and feeding the scene so there’s lots of new venues and opportunities coming out of the woodworks. People are hungry for the scene so it’s building furiously. It seems like there’s a new venue popping up almost every other week.
2. It’s pretty easy to get to another capital city on the East Coast in just a few hours. This makes Nashville a great place to have as a touring base as it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the next capital city. You can drive or fly to another city to play a whole bunch of new venues. Also, if you really need to just get the hell outta Dodge it’s easy to make a quick exit.
3. Nashville is diverse and it’s thriving. Once you start digging around you can find people in all different places doing some amazing stuff. I recently had the honour of volunteering at the Southern Girls Rock and Roll Camp in Nashville teaching young women how to record their own music and managing one of the bands. It was an amazing experience and it’s great to see young women in a safe space encouraged to do music. It can be hard to be taken seriously as a woman, especially in the rock music scene so programs like this are amazing to support and be a part of. There’s also tonnes of local art crawls and music almost 24-7. There’s a lot more to Nashville than just downtown, country-music Broadway and the Grand Ole Opry.
Your lyrics are often inspired by social injustices. What issue are you most passionate about at the moment?
I recently joined a local grassroots movement ‘Nashville Riot Grrrls’ so I am very passionate about women’s issues and giving voice to unspoken truths or ‘herstories’. The new project imbibes this notion in many of the tracks speaking about confrontational issues such as domestic violence, gender equality and not buying into a general misogynist status quo that we are encouraged to jump on the bandwagon with. I also aim to try and give a queer voice rather than one that’s filtered by agendas like what is going to sell or appeal to a mass audience. I came to a point of asking myself ‘why should I have the privilege of making music’ and my answer was to change, inspire and improve other people’s lives. To try and do this I had to accept myself. Whether that be fat, thin, queer, woman or otherwise I yam what I yam. There are too many people in the world ready to take the wind out of your sails for being different - I want to celebrate it and empower people who don’t think they can stand up for themselves. Whatever your voice is and whoever you are it is important and it matters. Don’t ever give up on who you are.
With your album, 'Lickety Split', you bring the voice of the LGBT community into country music with honest and often humorous lyrics (“she looks at me beneath her fringe, down below I feel a minge twinge”). Have you had the opportunity to play the songs to traditional country music fans in Nashville? If so, how were they received?
Yes I have and the response has been mixed. There are very liberal people in Nashville and there are also very conservative ones. Liberal audiences think it’s a hoot and I can hardly get through some of the songs sometimes because when they start giggling it’s contagious. I’ve been yelled at by conservatives in Downtown on Broadway and ended my set early to avoid further confrontation. People come from all walks and generally the people who are offended are the crazy ones who make a point of making other people’s lives hell as a general occupation. I like to make them feel like they have ants in their pants.
You're coming home to play a show in Brisbane in September. What are you most looking forward to doing when you get here?
I am looking forward to seeing familiar, friendly faces and catching up with everything I’ve missed. I miss the Brisbane music scene immensely and of course friends and family. The more time I can spend with the people I love and miss the better. I’m really excited about playing at The Beetle Bar with a stack of old friends. It’s nice to reignite the spark. I’m excited about seeing/hearing about how much my friends and family have grown and what they’ve been getting up to. Saying cheers over a schooner of beer and talking about the mundane or incredibly radical. I’m looking forward to seeing how much little Brisbane town has changed while I’ve been gone. I really want to get to the beach too.
