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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 and 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.’
It’s fitting then, that You & i are Earth folds in some of Ireland’s brightest contemporary musicians, with Kate Ellis and Caimin Gilmore from Crash Ensemble, Cormac Dermody from Lankum and Anna Mieke contributing vocals, strings, harmonium, bouzouki, taishogoto and clarinets to the album, all tied together by producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, Black Midi).
A sense of reckoning underpins a compassionate piece of work, with a conflation of many strands; histories and people, and nature and human nature, with the title song You and i are Earth taking inspiration from a 17th century plate that was found in a London sewer that has inscribed that unifying sentiment. And yet the song, while epic, is also pared back and graceful, warming to something that sounds like a swirling storm of strings. The record is not trying to hide anything, but instead unfurls a vulnerability that binds, such as on the delicate I Reach for You in My Sleep with its dreamy marriage of guitar and choral flecks, and the sweetly aching The Rest of Our Lives, which really serve Savage’s magnetic, elegant voice.
That process is brilliantly rendered on Agnes, a complicated piece of work featuring Anna Mieke that turns on tropes of duality and transformation. It mirrors an unsettling experience that Savage had through meditation, which ultimately ended in an immersive, beautiful feeling, ‘I felt like I was part of the earth, completely connected to the mycelium network, I felt like I was where I was meant to be.’
In many ways, that experience framed the album’s artwork, a photograph taken in some woodlands in Co. Sligo, with Savage looking up at the trees, their fractals reflected in her eyes, mirroring something she had felt in her meditation, bringing us back full circle, and to that sense that we are essentially in unison, or at least striving to be, that ‘you and I are earth’.
Price: £15 adv
Info/tickets: https://www.heymanchester.com/anna-b-savage-3
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Night & Day Cafe, 26 Oldham Street,Manchester, United Kingdom
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