Sunny War

When Sunny War (a.k.a. Sydney Ward) moved into her late father’s house in Chattanooga, she thought the place was haunted. “I spent the winter seeing things and hearing things,” she says. “The house is 100 years old, and I was in there by myself. I could hear people walking around and talking, but when I jumped out of bed with my machete, there was nobody there. I assumed it was my dad, and I started writing about the ghosts that I was living with.” One of those songs, simply titled “Ghosts,” anchors her latest album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. A kind of slithering blues, driven by her spidery guitarwork and haunted by disembodied voices dopplering in and out as the song fades, it’s a wise-yet-confused meditation on what it means to live with your
memories of the dead and the lost.

Sunny’s house wasn’t haunted, at least not the way she initially suspected. “Something broke and I had to fix it, so I called the gas company even though I didn’t have the money. The guy discovered major gas leaks all over the house. I thought I was losing my mind, but I was just hallucinating from the gas. After I got that fixed, I never saw or heard another ghost.” That’s not to say they weren’t there, just that she could no longer detect them and no longer had to sleep with a giant knife next to her bed. But Armageddon is rooted in the disorientation of those hallucinations. In songs that are deeply incisive and keenly imaginative, Sunny ponders the act of crossing boundaries—between worlds, between musical genres, summoning the ghosts of the people she lost, the people she once was, and the people she was not allowed to be. “Just how to hang on to the ones we let go,” she sings on “Ghosts.” “They’ll be down in the ground when you need them most and now somehow you believe in ghosts.” Following the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Anarchist Gospel, Sunny spent less and less time at her not-haunted house and more and more time on the road, opening for Bonnie Raitt, Mitski, Iron & Wine, and Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, among others. When she was back in Chattanooga, she did her best to stay busy, lest she lapse back into the drinking that almost killed her. “If I’m home and not touring, either I’m going to play music all day or I’m going to get drunk. It’s really one or the other. I’m just obsessively trying to work on something so that I’m making healthier decisions that day.”

Sunny spent long days recording elaborate demos, chasing ideas and assembling whole songs from the ground up. Some were odd experiments, a few turned into a long series of old-time guitar/banjo duets, and others became the songs on Armageddon in a Summer Dress. She wrote primarily instrumental tracks and played everything herself—guitar of course, but also bass, drum loops, keyboard, and anything else she thought the track needed—all with the notion that she’d add lyrics later. “I want to be a producer, so I try to make my own recordings as complete as possible, trying to get to the point where I feel confident enough to start recording other people. So I get obsessed with my demos. They have to be done just right so I can move on to something
new.”

The intense demo process allowed her to tinker with new textures, and she found herself gravitating away from her trusty acoustic guitar for an electric. “Touring behind Anarchist Gospel made me want to make a bigger-sounding record and have a whole band rather than just playing solo acoustic or with a three piece. I wanted to try stuff out of my comfort zone and try to have more fun playing. I definitely wanted to make this album for a badass five-piece band.”
 
Songs like the runaway “One Way Train” and the lowdown “No One Calls Me Baby” reveal an artist further refining Sunny’s vibrant mix of punk and roots. “To me it’s the same kind of music. If you’re into punk for the lyrics and the message, there’s definitely a lot of old-time music that has that spirit. Folk used to be very anti-establishment. Pete Seeger, union songs, Woody Guthrie—that’s punk rock shit. It’s all about being an outsider.” In fact, she may be the only artist who could host punk stalwarts John Doe from X and Steve Ignorant from Crass to sing alongside Valerie June and Tré Burt, but to her credit, Sunny disregards any genre boundaries that might separate them. “They’re all just beatniks. That’s what I’m calling people now. They’re all different, but they’re just artists, poets. They all have that aesthetic, in their own way.”

Recruiting Steve to sing on the anarcho-punk anthem “Walking Contradiction” was a full-circle moment for Sunny, who counts Crass among her all-time favorite bands. She wrote the song especially for him: with its snaking blues melody, ominous organ chords, and Sunny’s guitar tagging the walls of city hall, the song is a smart, scowling depiction of late-capitalist America, where even the best of us are compromised by a
fundamentally evil system. Their voices suggest a wild chemistry between them, possibly because Sunny’s been singing along with Steve for decades. “He’s my hero for life. When I started listening to Crass, it changed everything about how I thought about everything. I dropped out of school because of them, because I realized I needed to be playing gigs and writing songs.”

What kind of person would Sunny be had she had never heard Crass? Or Robert Johnson? Or any of her heroes? Those mirror-universe Sunnys are just some of the ghosts that haunts Armageddon in a Summer Dress: all of those different selves who would have led different lives. Would she have turned out like the woman in “Lay Your Body Down,” who misspends her life following rules and projecting her frustrations onto everyone around her? These songs tally up everything that’s lost as you grow up and grow old, all of those small occurrences that turn out to be pivotal, and then Sunny flips you the bird on closer “Debbie Downer” for thinking she’s being too dour—“a Negative Nancy, an infinite frowner.” As dire as these songs may be, they’re also righteous and therefore joyous in their exhortations to live on your own terms, to fight injustice wherever you see it, and to always reach for new ways to express yourself. “I’m still learning a lot about everything,” Sunny confesses. “I’m trying to learn how to be comfortable playing shows, and there’s still a lot I’m learning about guitar in general. I think I’ll be learning forever. Music is infinite. You can never stop having different combinations. You could never play everything that could be played on guitar, and you can never say everything you need to say, so you can just go on forever learning new things.”