Sunny War is calling via video from her home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The house belonged to her grandma, then her father; he died during the making of her last album. After War and her brother moved in, she became convinced the house was haunted. She would see people and hear noises at night. “It sounded like someone was walking around, to the point that I would jump out with a machete in my hand, thinking someone had broke into the house,” she says. “It was happening all the time. I thought I was going insane in here.” It was confusing, “because I have been crazy before. And I was also drinking a lot and sometimes that makes me hallucinate.”
But the apparitions weren’t ghosts, or the result of a mental health crisis, or indeed a drinking binge: “I didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t get the house inspected or anything,” says War, 35. “I was kind of squatting for a while. So I didn’t find out until after a year that there were really bad gas leaks in the heating system – that’s what was causing it. The people who inspected it were like: ‘How long have you been here? This is really dangerous.’”
The gas leaks are fixed, the hallucinations have stopped and War got a song out of it: Ghosts, an exploration of her father’s death and its aftermath, appears on her new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. It is a fantastic record, more evidence of a songwriting talent who has attracted the attention of Willie Nelson (who covered her song If It Wasn’t Broken on his last album) and Mitski, who invited War to support her most recent New York shows. It deals in Americana deeply rooted in blues – War is a devotee of Elizabeth Cotten, whose song Freight Train became a skiffle-era standard, and plays guitar with a distinctive “crab claw” finger-picking style more commonly used on a banjo – but also displays her longstanding love for anarcho-punk.
Puffing on a cigarette as she speaks, she is a disarmingly frank and apparently filterless interviewee. “Everybody I love is punk,” she shrugs. “As a kid, those are the only people that would be friends with me, because maybe I was a little bit smelly and I had a drinking problem.”
Once a member of a punk duo with the spectacular name the Anus Kings, War has old Discharge and Multi-Death Corporations posters on the wall of her home; she is frequently seen sporting Rudimentary Peni and Conflict T-shirts. The lyrics on Armageddon in a Summer Dress cover everything from romance to the urge to switch off from the incessant news cycle. There are definitely moments when they sound remarkably like the barked contents of a 7in punk single: “Sucking dick for a dollar’s not the only way to ho / We sell labour, we sell hours, sell our power, sell our souls.” Even her stage name makes her sound like a member of a punk band – her real name is Sydney Ward – while Armageddon is perhaps the first album in history featuring a guest appearance by Steve Ignorant, the former lead singer of Crass, that you could imagine getting played on BBC Radio 2 or earning its author a slot on Later… With Jools Holland.
Ignorant’s guest spot, she says, was a dream come true: she heard Crass when she was “probably 13” and they changed her life. “I was raised Baptist Christian – my grandma brainwashed me to be afraid of hell – and Crass made me realise: I’ve been abused. It was abusive to make a child so afraid of something without a choice. I was having a really hard time in school, I wasn’t good at learning the way they were trying to teach us, I was failing everything. Crass showed me: I don’t have to do this; everything I’m doing is against my will. I just started thinking differently.” She skipped school to hang out with gutter punks “who would drink on the beach all day and eat trash – slices of pizza people had thrown away. Crass was like the doorway for me to figure out what I wanted to do.”
She ran away from home to Venice Beach, California, hopping trains, “sleeping in the woods”, busking to make money. “It was the best time of my life,” she says. “I just had a backpack, a sleeping bag and my guitar. I would sleep in Golden Gate Park [in San Francisco], go to Oregon. I went to [the counterculture festival] Rainbow Gathering with these Grateful Dead weirdos I met, I ate acid for, like, two months straight and I had the time of my life. It was awesome.” Far from being an unsafe environment for a teenage girl, she says: “People would look out for me, make sure I didn’t get arrested, tell me who not to hang out with, who was a predator.” It was great, until it wasn’t. “I got into different drugs and got really strung out.”
War started attracting attention for her music when a community college professor making a documentary about homeless communities filmed her playing “some Nashville blues that I wrote” and posted it to YouTube with the headline Amazing Venice Beach Homeless Girl on Guitar. It got millions of views, but War had developed a problem with heroin and crystal meth. She began experiencing seizures and spent time in jail and psychiatric hospitals. She recorded her first EP while resident in a sober-living facility, pressing CDs to sell on the street. She once estimated that “almost 40 people I knew as a street kid” were now dead, either from liver failure or overdoses. “But I have some friends that still hop trains and sleep outside. They’re straight-edge and really healthy,” she shrugs. “They’re like vegans and shit.”
After getting clean, she started self-releasing albums, signed to a local label and then to the longstanding Americana institution New West – home to Steve Earle, Drive-By Truckers and Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett’s the Coward Brothers. Her breakthrough came with 2023’s Anarchist Gospel, which featured contributions from alt-country royalty David Rawlings. The years of busking prepared her for touring life. “I don’t have a lot of fear that some other performers have, because all the craziest shit that could happen while you’re playing has already happened to me,” she says. “I’ve had gangs of teenagers heckle me. I’ve had a crackhead steal all of my tips out of my guitar case and run away. And I pay a lot of attention to how people react to songs, because as a busker you’re always trying to figure it out: oh, people tip really good if you play this.”
She says she still identifies as an anarchist, although she admits to feeling a little “defeated” and “exhausted” today. “The activist work I’ve been part of, the police have opposed things that were obviously positive.” She cites South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles that operated for about two decades, but was dismantled in the mid-00s after the land was sold. “There was a big urban farm in this food desert in South Central, just a beautiful thing. People were growing food because there were no grocery stores in the area to buy produce and nobody could eat anything but fast food. Everything was developed, people were actually getting food from it. And they just destroyed it for no reason.” She lets out a sigh. “You just feel like there are people against everything that could be good.”
It’s a feeling compounded by recent events in American politics. War describes herself as “not Obama Black; Black as in, Nigerians ask me what tribe I’m from Black”. In Chattanooga, she recently saw a flyer for the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan: “LEAVE NOW,” it read; “SELF-DEPORT”. She posted it on Instagram with the suggestion that the only rational response was to dig out her old steel-toed boots. “That’s real,” she nods. “Where I live, the KKK never went away. But they got their guy in office now. The only way to deal with it, to me, is accept that these people, they’re in charge of their own life. I can’t put all my energy into being angry at how somebody chooses to think. If you’re an adult and identify as a Klansman, what am I supposed to do? It’s not my responsibility to change the way somebody in their 40s is thinking. It’s just a bunch of fucking Nazis. I was born here; all I can do is defend myself. You have a right to be whatever you are, I guess. And I have a right to fight you if something happens.”
At least, on a personal level, things are going well. Armageddon has attracted critical acclaim and War plans to move into production and to tour the UK, although finances preclude her idea of performing with her desired “five guitarists”. Moreover, she has carved out a unique space for herself: there really aren’t that many Black anarcho-punk-inspired Americana artists, although she says she isn’t sure why. “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.”
• Armageddon in a Summer Dress is out now on New West
