PROFILE: SUNNY WAR Tom Murray

PROFILE: Sunny War By Tom Murray

Photo credit: Florencia P Marano

When Sunny War started learning guitar at the age of 10, it was simply a form of babysitting.

“That was when we were living in Nashville,” explains the 31-year-old singer-songwriter, who was born under the name Sydney Lyndella Ward. We’re speaking in a media tent after her afternoon performance at a music festival, the sound of gospel music drifting in from the distance. “My mom had a job at this place called the Sportsplex, and across the street was Centennial Park, where they had free children’s guitar lessons. She put me in there and the teacher happened to be a blues guitarist. So my mom was able to work while I was being taught guitar.”

War fell quickly into learning simple chords and riff s, but it was a bandmate of her stepfather that really got her imagination fi ring. He was a close family friend that War thought of as more of an uncle, and he was also profi cient on the banjo. Fascinated, War found herself imitating the fast picking banjo style on her acoustic guitar.

“Also, my real uncle was a bass player,” says War. “So the people I saw playing instruments in real life happened to be picking their instruments, and I just went with that. I just thought that sounded better.”

Thus was laid the foundation of an idiosyncratic guitar style that has raised more than a few eyebrows among devotees of the style. Raised on the blues artists like Bessie Smith of strings, piano, and percussion to the stark guitar fi gures. Mostly, however, she plays alone as she always has.

“I just can’t keep a consistent band,” she sighs. “Every drummer seems to play in 10 other groups. Also, I don’t really have the money to really secure anybody. So sometimes I might have a gig where people can all work, but other times I just can’t. Like, I can’t aff ord to fl y a whole band in to play most gigs, even folk festivals.”

It’s especially ironic that War is being interviewed at a folk festival because she readily admits that she’s personally not all that into folk music.

“I don’t really pay attention,” she sheepishly admits. “I mean, I like the stuff I hear when I’m here, but I’m not going out of my way to hear this stuff . I’m just learning about folk music at these kinds of festivals.”

So what does War listen to in her spare time? And where does she think her music will be going down the line? “Soul music,” she says with a grin. “I’ve got a couple of new songs for the next album, which will be out next February on New West Records. I’m going for that retro ‘60s kind of sound, like Motown. That would be sick. That’s the idea, anyways, I don’t know where the other demos will take me. What I really want is to make an album like Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, which to me is absolutely perfect. From start to fi nish it’s absolutely symmetrical, and that’s what I want to recreate. I feel like I’m going to be trying forever to make something like that.”

and Elizabeth Cotten, steeped in a high school diet of AC/DC, Slayer, Chet Atkins, and Bad Brains, War is a perfect child of the internet, obsessing over a wide variety of artists and not bothering to distinguish between them. In War’s mind, punk rock fi ts snugly next to Nashville hot pickin’ and Delta blues.

It all flows together nicely on War’s latest album, Simple Syrup, which also highlights her developing songwriting skills. If personal experience equates to quality material, then War already has a lifetime’s worth to work with. After continually running away from home as a young teen, she began travelling up and down the California coast before settling in with street punks in Venice Beach. Dabbling with drugs, spending time in a mental hospital, busking on the Venice Beach streets, she eventually dug herself out enough to form a punk band called the Anus Kings in 2009.

“It was a rough time,” she says softly. “All that travelling around got me in a constant state of delusion. So everything’s surreal to me. All of the things that have happened…I just don’t feel like I have any real footing. There’s no context, everything feels fake.”

War stepped out on her own in 2014 with Worthless, putting that virtuosic fingerpicking style front and centre around a batch of beautifully measured songs that traversed the personal and political. By 2018 she was attracting attention of music critics with her third release, With the Sun, adding small measures

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