As far as how the recording went, I’m not good really at telling people, “this is what I want you to play.” I just know what I’m going to play. I wanted a sound that reflected what we were like as a live group on the road, and that was a hybrid of how the three of us sounded together. I wanted to play with the band that I had just started playing with and that I was hoping to go on tour with. What drove that decision, and what was different about recording this album as opposed to your previous ones? ![]() In it, you and your producer Harlan Steinberger chose to go for a minimal approach that used just the core of your live band. Your newest album, Simple Syrup, was primarily recorded before the pandemic. It was like a lot of what people like Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan would sing about. There was a lot of traveling and meeting many people like train hoppers, and their life philosophies really shaped me because it felt like they made sense. I think it’s helped it because I had a lot more time to think about things I probably wouldn’t have thought about if I lived a more normal life. How has that experience influenced your songwriting or the way you approach your music? Especially because I was making good money busking and all my friends were ‘gutter punks,’ so I was into that counterculture too. I started feeling like I would possibly get her kicked out of our living situation, so I felt like it was best for me to leave. ![]() ![]() And at the time, my mom and stepdad had divorced, and she was getting sober, and the both of us were living in a sober-living home, and that’s when I started to drink a lot. Also, a lot of the other bands out here in the punk scene on the West Coast were squatters. It was me and my one friend from high school. I had a folk-punk duo already before I started sleeping on the streets. Was it right before you began making music? Can you talk a bit about that experience? You have a very peculiar story because you spent some time living on the streets in Los Angeles. I’ve had the nickname Sunny since middle school, and my last name is Ward, so I kinda thought that “War” sounded better than Sunny Ward. What’s up with your stage name? Is there a story or a meaning behind it? That’s also around the time I learned to play “Blackbird,” and also started mimicking one of my stepdad’s friends who was a banjo player, especially the fingerpicking. At that time, I was already playing fingerstyle, and he would tell me ways to improve it and really encouraged me to keep playing and taught me other styles too. Electric blues guitarist, and he was amazing. The guitar teacher, his name was James Dixon, and he was a blues guitarist. I got a guitar when I was seven but didn’t really start learning until I was ten when I went to a kid’s lesson at a community center in Nashville. At what age did you start playing the guitar? And then, my mom would also take me to shows when I was a kid in Tennessee. So as a small child, I grew up seeing people playing and writing music together. ![]() My uncle is a classical bassist, and my stepdad was a singer for a rock band, and his friends would be around and play guitar. Do you come from a musical background? What type of music were you exposed to as a child? That’s also around the time when I started paying attention to lyrics in music as opposed to before when I mostly listened to things that were melodic. That’s when being a teenager was really overwhelming, and I had to lose myself in music to try to survive everything. I started playing when I was seven, but I wasn’t really passionate about writing songs until the ninth grade. How old were you when you first discovered your love for music? I caught up with Sunny War to discuss her musical influences, activism, love of Bob Dylan, and her views on finding success and fulfillment in today’s underground scene. A collection of snappy and breezy blues-fueled numbers, the album is a testament to Ward’s ability to combine seemingly disparate musical elements that create a unique and distinctive sound while simultaneously invoking the emotive quality found throughout the Great American Songbook. Her fourth and latest LP, Simple Syrup, was released last March under the moniker of Sunny War. Nevertheless, throughout Covid, she’s stayed busy and committed to both endeavors. Yet, she remains ambivalent about allowing her activism to seep into her music. At 30, she’s both socially conscious and politically active, as evidenced by her involvement with the Los Angeles chapter of Food Not Bombs. An optimistic and free-spirited type who’s survived periods living and busking on the streets of Berkeley, and who’s spent most of the pandemic assisting the homeless population in her newly-adopted home of Los Angeles, Ward is the epitome of Millennial contradiction.
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