The positive nihilism of Sunny War

Peruse the list of artists on Harry Smith’s influential Anthology of American Folk Music and you’ll find dozens of blues and folk musicians who recorded only a handful of songs, sometimes as little as one or two, to commercial acclaim in the 1920s before returning to their previous, and little-documented, lives and labour. Many of these records, thanks to archivists like Smith, are now lionised additions to the canon of recorded music, but more often than not this recognition began long after the artists themselves had died or disappeared from public view.

In Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, an invaluable book on the American blues tradition, its author explains that “the suddenness of the Depression proved a dramatic ending for the era of the classic blues singers.” Audiences for blues music, Baraka says, “could not spend money on phonograph records; most were barely able to get enough to eat.” The majority of artists on Smith’s anthology therefore enjoyed only fleeting, ephemeral professional careers in music.

A YouTube video with over 9 million views, titled “Amazing Venice Beach Homeless Girl on Guitar”, might at first seem to parallel these old blues records; another musical fulguration, another moment of musical happenstance never to be replicated. Not only do we see a young woman playing fingerstyle guitar with a preternatural urgency that wouldn’t be out of place on Smith’s anthology, but the guitarist is not given a full name in the video and, like the blues players of the 1920s, it’s easy to wonder whether this too is a lifetime’s worth of hard work being captured in only a few minutes – an isolated glimpse of a career otherwise undocumented.

“I wonder where you are today,” asks one user in the video’s comment section. “I hope she hasn’t lost what makes her so special,” adds another. Unlike the transient blues people of the 1920s, the nameless woman playing guitar in this video is still playing. Her name is Sunny War. The video, striking as it is, is equally reductive; it captures a moment, rather than the career. It is the career that is most worthy of attention.

Sunny, born Sydney Ward, was destined to be a bluesperson. “My grandma took me to see B.B. King and I saw Bo Diddley when I was a kid. My whole family is really into blues. Blues and gospel, that’s just what I grew up listening to,” she tells me from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee on an overcast winter’s morning. But just as her career has already stretched much further than blues singers of the early twentieth century, so too has it meandered into other genres, other modes of working and writing.

“Punk rock is the other side of me. I listen to a lot of trap music. I like a lot of electronic music. Then I also really like bossa nova. I listen to a lot of country. I listen to reggae. Well, only old reggae and ska. I listen to a lot of soul music. If it’s good, I fuck with it,” she says, barely pausing to take a breath. Ward’s string of full-length albums mirror this broad tapestry of taste; while 2018’s With the Sun is sparse and to-the-heart blues songwriting in the traditional mode, 2021’s Simple Syrup adds splashes of jazz to this near-perfected template and 2023’s Anarchist Gospel salutes her Nashvillian roots with a nod and a wink to country.

In 2024, the nonagenarian elder of country music Willie Nelson covered Ward’s own “If It Wasn’t Broken” for his album Last Leaf on the Tree, the track nestled amongst his interpretations of songs by, among others, Nina Simone, Tom Waits, and Neil Young. Like the 91-year-old Nelson, whose battered, bruised, scraped, and scribbled-on nylon-string guitar has travelled the road with him for over half a century, Ward, too, has kept her instrument close at hand throughout. Her commitment to those six strings is such that, like Nelson, she recently developed nerve damage and carpal tunnel syndrome in her hand. “They gave me a steroid injection and I’m supposed to wear a brace every day. It is better than it was. It still kind of hurts sometimes, though,” she tells me. “I’ve been playing for 27 years,” she adds, laughing, by way of an explanation.

Ward’s connection to Nelson is also borne out in her collaborations with Nelson’s son Micah (Particle Kid), with whom she made the 2018 collaborative album Particle War. What is especially remarkable about Nelson’s cover of "If It Wasn’t Broken", though, is how easily it translates into his own style. When sung by Ward, the song is inimitably in her own world-weary but defiant style, but sung by Nelson it takes on a timeless and malleable quality; it becomes, in other words, a modern standard. Fittingly, then, songwriting is what Ward sees as her ultimate vocation, transcending even her role as singer and performer: “I don’t want to be a singer as much as I want to be a songwriter. I want to write for other people. If somebody was like ‘I need you to write a song for Mariah Carey,’ that would be fun.”

These songwriting aspirations speak to the inherent humility at the core of Ward’s music, her eagerness to collaborate and to willingly vacate the spotlight at particular moments. Her latest album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress, contains such an array of open-hearted and open-minded collaboration that it feels near-maximalist when compared with her bare-bones early recordings. Take "Scornful Heart" for instance – a bold and telling choice for the record’s second single that features friend and collaborator Tré Burt on lead vocals rather than Ward herself. “That song is for me and Tré’s band, which is going to be called Smooth Harrisons. That was the only song we finished and I was just like… we should put that on the album – on my album.”

Her work with Andrija Tokic, who produced both Anarchist Gospel and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, has also broadened her sound. “I like Andrija because he’s down to record, like, hitting a can with something and then putting a bunch of effects on it. He's down to do stuff just to see. He’s more experimental. Like, let’s just try this. There’s one song [on the album], ‘No One Calls Me Baby’, where we’re using an autoharp. Just doing fun stuff, fun studio stuff.” This collectivist approach is something Ward says she wants to replicate live, too: “My first two shows of the year are going to be with a five-piece band and I’m hoping that we tour as a band. I’ve never done that before. You can’t even jam when you’re by yourself, and I actually do take solos and shit if I’m playing with other people. It gives you room to just do more fun stuff musically.”

The album also contains collaborations with punk bastions John Doe of LA band X – another artist who, like Ward, has deftly woven a thread binding together punk, folk, and country – and Steve Ignorant of British anarcho-punk group Crass. “X is really special to me, just because that was the first time I really thought about lyrics, when I was getting into X. Before that I only cared about guitar. I never really cared what people were saying, ever,” she says. Crass were equally formative: “[They] just kind of politicised me, I guess. Listening to Crass is very important for a child.”

Dust the surfaces of Armageddon in a Summer Dress and you can find the lyrical fingerprints of both these influences from top to bottom. If this is an album whose musical thesis is collaboration, then its lyrical thesis might be to chronicle a collective contemporary experience, warts and all. “Bad Times” takes aim at prohibitive healthcare costs – “Back pain and rotting teeth / gets written off as working-class grief” – while the album’s first single, “Walking Contradiction”, considers whether anyone can live morally within an amoral political order: “You’ll never truly break away or ever leave their side / Your humanity does not outweigh your will to survive.”

These songs, Ward says, are “just a reaction to what we’re all going through right now, I think universally. Everybody my age that I know works their fucking ass off and can’t afford to live anywhere. Even right now, I have holes in my teeth and I can’t eat on one side of my mouth and I’m going to have to pay a lot of money to get my teeth fixed, just so I can eat. And right now I’m gonna just ignore it until I can’t. This is probably specifically just a US problem but I don’t know. I feel like everybody I know, we’re all just giving up. We just don’t give a fuck anymore.”

Beneath the disillusionment the lyrics on Armageddon in a Summer Dress so unflinchingly express, though, it’s impossible to miss the moments of light that break through the clouds. It is not quite sanguinity, nor is it out-and-out dejection. On “One Way Train”, the “violence and the doom” collapses to reveal an imagined utopia where “You’ll be fed, you’ll be loved” and “You’ll have all you need.” In the chorus of “Bad Times”, the mantra-like shout of “bad times stay away” shows a steely audacity in the face of rapidly extinguishing hope. They might be running dangerously low but there are, just about, still some fucks to give.

If there is an optimism tucked away within the corners and the folds of Armageddon in a Summer Dress, does that come from thinking things can change or is it a case of knowing they can’t and just getting on with it? “My optimism is about: people have survived worse in history,” Ward explains. “I find a lot of optimism by thinking that because I’ve been smoking cigarettes since I was, like, 12, I probably only have 20 more years left to live. That’s where my optimism is. I don’t have to worry about retirement because I’m gonna die.”

She pauses for a moment, then laughs. “But I also think we should try to have fun. [It’s] more about laughing at the whole situation instead of getting frustrated. I guess [it’s about] realising you’re powerless in some things, like some stuff is just not your fault, don’t take everything on. You can’t control if a bunch of fucking billionaires decide that you can’t see a dentist. Don’t take the blame for that. My optimism is more about, I don’t know… I wouldn’t get spiritual but some people are fucking evil.” So her philosophy is a kind of positive nihilism? “Yeah. Like, not everything is on you.”

If Ward’s new album is a soundtrack to Armageddon, to the battle between good and evil as the end times approach, then she makes it quite clear that she wants plenty of people fighting in her corner; her unrelenting instinct for collaboration makes that quite clear. But what is equally apparent is that to fight back can itself be a cathartic experience. So, too, can laughing away the pain. Although Armageddon in a Summer Dress comes out in the dreary, dim light of winter – in Tennessee, she tells me, it’s “raining all the time and it gets dark really early” – she asks us to imagine, just for a moment, a world that is a little bit warmer, a little bit brighter, a little bit sunnier.