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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.”
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