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, but had major gas leaks that were causing her to hallucinate. 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.

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.”

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.

“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.”