A sense of rootedness is at the heart of Anna B Savage’s third record You and i are Earth, a record that is as much about healing as it is an unbowed sense of curiosity, and, more simply, “a love letter to a man and to Ireland.”
Following on from her critically acclaimed records A Common Turn and in|FLUX, You and I are Earth manages to convey a sense of intimacy, while also being open-ended. Sounds of the sea and bright-eyed strings coax us on opening song Talk to Me, a study in tenderness, which brings us to a place of the elemental. It is a charged signifier that sets the tone, “I don’t think I feel nervous because of the intimacy of it,” says Savage, “the thing I feel nervous about is that it is so delicate and subtle, and the attention economy has made us desire big shiny things that will whisk us away.”
Yet You and i are Earth transports differently, swept along by an abiding sense of calm, a major progression from Savage’s earlier work, “when I was writing the first record, it felt difficult. I wanted to make sense of something I didn’t really understand. Then with the second record I had done some therapy, and was getting to grips with myself, but my old self was still pulling me back a bit, but with this one it was quite different”.
Gentleness is as radiant a touchstone on the record as earthiness, something that Savage attributes to the place she finds herself at present, both geographically and emotionally. And quite literally the record bears witness to a particular piece of earth - Ireland, and Savage’s relationship to it as her new home.
Savage’s connection to Ireland goes back over a decade to when she studied a poetry Masters in Manchester, where both her teachers were Irish, “and I totally fell in love with Seamus Heaney” she recalls. “Then in 2020 I did a Masters in Music (in Dublin) and was reading essays about sean-nós singing, watching Cartoon Saloon stuff, reading about Irish mythology - I wanted to educate myself”. Since then Anna has spent much of her time on the west coast of Ireland, dipping back to her home in County Donegal between bouts of touring (this year supporting The Staves and St Vincent - having previously toured with Father John Misty and Son Lux amongst others) and trips to London for work (this year alone she has soundtracked a new Alex Lawther-directed short film “Rhoda” which premieres at London Film Festival - and was part of Mike Lindsay’s “Supershapes” - a collaborative album and super-group led by the Tunng & LUMP producer and multi-instrumentalist).
This delicate, yet blossoming, relationship with her new home is all laid bare in her pact with the sea on Donegal, where amid skittering percussion, she asks it to “please look after me”, and then Mo Cheol Thú which morphs into an almost-lullaby for a person, a place, and perhaps, a hope. “One of the things that I was reading while I was making this record was Manchán Magan’s book 32 words for Field, and the idea that language can have an explicit connection to the land. When I am in Ireland, that sense of grounding is vast but also intimate, and sometimes it’s a bit magical and sometimes a bit scary.”
