Anna B Savage is no longer conflicted about being conflicted

It’s a bracingly cold mid-December morning, and there’s not enough coffee in the world to fix my thumping head. An interview the morning after the first Christmas party of the season? It’s giving rookie error, but Savage is very gracious about it.

She’s gracious about a lot of things, in truth. More than once she springs from her side of the sofa to hold open the door for people coming in for their breakfast: a man in a wheelchair with a bandaged eye, a woman struggling with her kids. “My sister has two children and it breaks my heart when no one stops to help her,” Savage says, sitting back down. Panicking as the volume starts to rise in the room, I push the dictaphone closer towards her. “Now you can hear my chewing better,” she says, tearing off a chunk of buttery croissant.

Savage has only been officially living back in London for a week after spending most of the pandemic in Ireland, and so far she is loving it. Since her debut album was released in January 2021, she’s completed an MA in Popular Music at Dublin's BIMM Institute, moved to the Atlantic coast to learn how to surf, and later lived in Belfast, where she’ll perform for the first time next month. For now though, Peckham is home. And she already has a visitor in A Common Turn producer William Doyle, who’s staying for some days.

“I would have happily worked with Will forever,” says Savage, recalling the relief of getting into the studio with him to make A Common Turn after a prolonged and agonising period of self-loathing and stagnation. But at the suggestion of her label, she “took a punt” on Mike Lindsay of Tunng and LUMP as producer instead. A couple of test days in a studio later, she was convinced. So convinced that she booked a few more weeks of his time there and then. The catch? “Well, I hadn’t really got any songs at the time!”

“I know myself,” she says with a lopsided grin. “I only work well when I have an external deadline. I just cannot self-motivate. It doesn’t matter if it’s a studio session or a yoga class, I need to have paid for something so I can guilt myself into going through with it. Even if it’s something I really enjoy.”

As it turned out, she did have some songs, or at least the beginnings of them. During the first lockdown, she and a friend had challenged each other to write a song daily for two weeks, but, self-critical as ever, she’d filed them away as too-casual cast-offs. When they talked about her looming studio time – “I was a bit like, ‘What the hell have I done!?’” – the friend proposed she bring them out of storage. “He thought there was a lot of good stuff in there,” she says, pulling a face. “At first I was a bit dismissive, like, ‘You can’t use writing exercises as a song!’, which in hindsight is hilarious.”

One thing that changed her mind was listening to the Adrienne Lenker album, Songs. “The whole premise of it was that she would just turn up, write a song, and record it in a day. I was like, ‘Okay, so you’re allowed to do whatever you want, and it can turn out like that!’”

In the end, about half of the songs on her new album in|FLUX came from those song-a-day drafts. The other half are songs she wrote along the way, either incidentally or by filling in any gaps she saw in the themes of the record. Savage doesn’t beat us over the head with it, but in|FLUX does have a concept. It’s an album largely about holding space for duality, for not needing to be one thing or the other, but a third, more pliable thing. Less dogmatic, more forgiving.

“I wanted to try and express that idea, both musically and lyrically,” she explains. “That realisation that you’re allowed to have opinions that oppose each other, and you’re allowed to feel them at the same time. You’re allowed to want to be single but also want to be close to someone. It can all be very confusing, but you are allowed.”

Having put herself through the wringer with A Common Turn, right up to the point of getting into the studio with Doyle, her goal for album two was simply to have an easier time. “I wanted to have more of the fun aspect and less of the putting myself in a dark hole for years aspect,” she says dryly, pointing out how, in that respect, the songwriting exercise was a perfect fit. “I definitely wasn’t thinking those songs would go anywhere or be used for anything. I was just so free when I wrote them.”

By the time the studio booking rolled around, Savage had enough tracks for an album, most in “baby song form,” some barely even conceived. Over three week-long recording sessions, each with a gap of a few weeks in between, she and Lindsay took what she calls a “very improv, ‘Yes, and?’ approach” to developing the songs. “Mike is such a warm, open-armed, empathetic, gorgeous human,” she gushes, praising his positivity and willingness to entertain her every idea no matter how “completely fucking stupid” it was. "It was very wonderful to go from not knowing him at all to making this album together, through this very intimate creative process."

Besides regularly meeting with her therapist, one trick that helped Savage to focus in the studio was to write out three ‘morning pages’ before leaving the house. For those who don’t know, the morning pages are a stream-of-consciousness exercise from creativity bible The Artist’s Way, and part of what author Julia Cameron describes as “the bedrock tool of a creative recovery.” It’s something that comes up a lot in interviews, and the story is always the same: consistency is key, but it works.

The same holds true for Savage, too. “Because I’m quite self-flagellating and neurotic, I found it really useful to be able just to splurge out words in the morning before going to see Mike,” she says. “I was able to look at those words and be like, ‘Okay, you’re here. You’ve been listened to. I understand. Now stay in the book, I’ve got to go and do some work.”

It’s a far cry from the years spent writing for A Common Turn, when Savage would go to places she could be alone, close all the curtains, switch off her phone and laptop, pick up her guitar and try to force out songs. It was, in a nutshell, somewhat sub-ideal. “It turns out I don’t have to do the tortured artist thing!” she says, feigning shock. “I can just, like, have a nice time and that’s gonna make it much more sustainable and fun.”

She shrugs and laughs. “Well, it’s not like I make any money from it, so where’s the joy? I want to be doing something because it’s joyful, not because I feel some weird, slightly moralistic urge to put myself through difficulty or perform an exorcism to make some good art. It’s funny, because I didn’t subscribe to that narrative either when I was writing A Common Turn. It’s only looking back that I was like, ‘Okay, so you definitely weren’t making it fun.’”

She gets serious again. “I felt a huge sense of accomplishment when the first album was done, but I still didn’t feel like I liked myself at the end,” she says, cupping her tea with both hands. “Dealing with stuff is fine, but I feel like it’s way more important to actually find a way of liking and trusting yourself.”

Savage would be the last to claim she’s already at the end of that path (“I feel like that’s my life’s goal, basically”) but at least she’s on it now, and with some idea already of the route. Since recording for in|FLUX wrapped up in March 2022, she's written half of album number three. “I kind of knew what the next album was going to be, conceptually, before I even started in|FLUX,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “For the first time in my life, I’ve actually prepared in advance.”

Clearly, she's doing better than I am. In my woeful condition, I've somehow managed to leave my notes for the interview at home and confess to having to wing it. I'm mortified, of course, but she's happy to speak off the cuff and we take each song from in|FLUX in turn.