Anna B Savage on “in|FLUX”
In the Gray Matter
Apr 10, 2023
Photography by Katie Silvester
Web Exclusive
Anna B Savage is letting her guard down. After the release of her debut EP in 2015, Savage spent a meticulous six years worrying she’d never finish her debut album, only to receive critical acclaim for 2021’s A Common Turn. Deeply personal and often devastating, A Common Turn possessed a haunting interiority that invited listeners to lean closer.
Her new record, in|FLUX, is just as intimately devastating as her debut LP—but with a new focus on liminality and the contradictory nature of being human. The title itself sounds transitional and in-between. Savage has entered a new sonic landscape that plays with those ideas as well, combining haunting acoustic fingerpicking with playful electronic sounds and airy woodwinds.
“It feels really important to me, especially now, in the world of social media that we live in, to not be like, ‘This is correct, this is wrong,’” Savage says of the record’s thematic undercurrent. “Ultimately, we’re all humans. We’re fallible, we are inconsistent, we’re hypocritical; we’re like all of the gray matter [in our brains]. We can hold two completely opposing things in our heads at the same time and think that they’re both true.”
“The name for the record was there before a lot of the songs were finished,” Savage admits, “which was quite useful because it meant I could really lean into that gray matter…. One of the things that I have learned doing therapy is that the gray matter is where most things exist. And that is not a bad thing. It’s been a process of constantly reaffirming to myself that I’m allowed to be in that gray space. I’m allowed to think about things that are from disparate areas that aren’t simple and perfectly formed next to each other.”
The song “Pavlov’s Dog” exists in the gray space she speaks of, detailing an enigmatic romantic relationship that feels difficult to parse upon first listen. “That song is at once active and passive,” Savage says. “It’s confident and also kind of quiet; it’s kind of sexy and a bit bittersweet at the same time.” Throughout the song, Savage takes on the voice of the dog, and the chorus depicts the iconic image: “I’m here/I’m waiting/I’m salivating.”
“[The dog] has been trained, and it feels quite clinical, quite Machiavelian. But the dog’s getting treats, man. That’s some good stuff,” she laughs. “In the experiment, there is a man and a dog. There’s obviously a balance of power there. But in the song, the equivalent man doesn’t have a voice. I’m the voice.”
As long as she’s been releasing music, Savage has been exploring female sexuality and passivity. “Pavlov’s Dog” and many other songs on in|FLUX feel like the natural progression of this exploration from her past records: from shyness and insecurity on the melancholic “One” from EP, to the declaration of self-determination that is “Chelsea Hotel #3” from A Common Turn, to a sublimation of many kinds of sexual experiences and their individual value on in|FLUX. The idea of passivity is turned on its head as Savage takes control of her own experiences.
In that vein, what truly defines Savage’s shift in approach this time around is her willingness to open up. For the first time, she co-wrote songs with someone. “Almost my entire MO for this album was to make the process easier and more fun,” she says. “Because before, with A Common Turn, I wrote it all on my own, and it was only when I got into the studio to record it that I was like, ‘Fuck, this is so nice. There’s someone else here that I can talk to and have a laugh with during lunch.’ I regularly described [the songwriting process] as pulling teeth because I felt like it was that difficult. I thought, ‘Well, if I want to make this my career, and I found that a bit like pulling teeth, and I find performing absolutely terrifying, and I really hate social media, then what the fuck am I doing? If I don’t enjoy any of the aspects of it, what’s the point?’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I need to try and enjoy the making.…’ And I really fucking did, I nailed it. I scared the shit out of myself, because I booked in-studio time before I was ready.”
That leap of faith paid off—Savage and musician/producer Mike Lindsay (of the bands Tunng and LUMP) built most of the album’s songs together in the studio. “It was a case of trusting myself, which felt like a very powerful thing to do. And I only realized that retrospectively.”
There’s a moment on the record’s title track that feels like a precise distillation of the recording process: about three quarters of the way through, a synth breakdown comes in along with Savage’s backing vocals. She ad-libs over the top, at one point letting out a series of primal, glam rock screams. It sounds improvised, spontaneous, almost as if done for a laugh to be removed later. “That’s exactly what happened,” Savage laughs. “We were doing a take and I did those only because I’d fucked up something in the take and was kind of embarrassed. But I was like, ‘I’ll keep going.’ The next time [Mike] played the song for me, they were still in there.”
In|FLUX feels like a release because it is. Though the insularity of A Common Turn is still frequently present, Savage’s musical environment is bigger and bolder. “I just wanted to try something new. I’m not interested in regurgitating the same thing over and over,” Savage says. “Some people, after they’d listened loads to A Common Turn, would speak to me and be like, ‘Oh, you’re kind of goofy and a bit silly and…kind of fun.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, and I like dancing!’” she laughs. “I didn’t feel like I’d managed to express that on the first album. I wanted to be able to express more of the broad spectrum of who I am and what I’m interested in [on in|FLUX].”
In focusing on the “gray matter,” Savage has opened her own world and allowed for all the peculiarities and contradictions of being human to seep in.
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