Music
After a lifetime of searching, Anna B Savage has finally realised that it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. An artist who constantly sought answers, she’s come to believe that the process matters much more, and that complexities should be embraced.
New album ‘inFLUX’ is part of this realisation. It’s the sound of someone revelling in the act of creation, in all its messiness and contradictions. Out now, ‘inFLUX’ was constructed alongside Mike Lindsay, and it’s both her most open, and most personal document to date.
In this essay, Anna B Savage muses on creativity, and looks at the journey she has undertaken over the past few years.
On ‘should’, making and creativity in all forms.
It’s taken me almost two decades to feel like I’m allowed to make stuff for the joy of it. I’ve always loved making things, something instilled in me by my immensely creative mum, who can make basically anything. But I think I’ve always felt like this should be done only as an addition to everything you’re meant to do, loving it whilst also secretly thinking it’s frivolous and not a good use of time. My mum used to make play dough for me (very salty), help me make my own clothes (very, very cool) and make my lunches in to ‘animal lunches’: cutting my sandwiches in to the shape of a rhino, with lettuce trees, a tomato sun with carrot rays beaming down, and a little pile of raisin poos in the corner. But of course, she didn’t get paid to do these things, she did them because they’re fun and enjoyable, and also useful.
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When I was younger, I used to feel like even making music wasn’t work. I would never be able to find the time to write songs, because everything else was more important. With two parents who are both classical singers, I knew that the practicing of your instrument was work – but writing? I didn’t know what that was, or how to do it in a day. I was genuinely stunned when one day a friend said “I’m going to do some work” and went to his room and… played his guitar? A secret door had unlocked, and the magical boundary of “doing some work” was allowed to exist around me playing my guitar and singing.
For a while after I’d started doing music professionally, I felt like any other creative output was a waste: I shouldn’t be learning to use photoshop, I should be learning Ableton. I shouldn’t do leatherwork, I should be practicing my guitar. I shouldn’t be going out to a pottery course, it’s too expensive and I should’ve bought a new hard case with that money. But, the longer I’ve carried on in to my career, and the more I’ve learnt about myself and my relationship to creativity (and, if I may be so bold, humans and our relationship to creativity) the more I’ve realised that making is one of the purest joys there is, whether there is an obvious ‘benefit’ to it or not.
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Making my most recent album, ‘inFLUX’ I had two MO’s: collaborate, and – importantly – have a nice time. Working with Mike Lindsay made both of these easy. I would wake up, eat my overnight oats, do my Morning Pages (to get my creativity demons out) and then walk to his studio, where we’d spend all day volleying ideas back and forth, leaping around on instruments, working with an accidental “yes, and” principal. When I came home exhausted, I would put on The Office and knit. I’d come to knitting a few months earlier as I wanted to be able to make something whilst on tour, and knitting seemed about the only thing I could make whilst sitting upright in a moving car. A few years ago I might have felt guilty for this frivolity. So many musician talk about writing stuff while ‘on the road’. Well, that is definitely not me – the last thing I want to do is pick up my instrument out of hours… on tour in October, I went from perilously knitting a huge scarf, to learning to knit on circular needles. By the end of the year, I had knitted myself a balaclava. Whilst I got a lot of joy from music, there wasn’t much that made me feel as proud as wearing that balaclava, knowing that I MADE it.
I think perhaps the reasons I struggled to think of creativity as valid and worth anything are those well worn, deeply embedded beliefs from (say it with me…) misogyny! These things which I so love: knitting, pottery, drawing and painting, making mobiles or embroidery, have historically been deemed women’s work and therefore dismissed or diminished, whilst also often going unpaid. And as we know, things are only worth something when they’re worth $$$omething. Even the words hold weight: ‘craft’ and ‘hobbies’ and loaded terms, laden with frivolity. Move from ‘pottery’ to ‘ceramics’ and suddenly the practice is imbued with importance. There are many people who have written on this phenomena more eruditely and with more nuance (I implore you to seek them out). But in our post industrial era, in our capitalist utopia (ahem) anything that doesn’t bring in money isn’t worth doing.
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Letting go of shoulds and guilt and whatever other bullshit I’ve ingested from society means I (mostly) don’t feel guilty for my ‘hobbies’ now. I’m fact, I fucking love them. There is a quietly revolutionary feeling, I think, in making just to make. In learning just to learn.* These things also feel like the perfect addition to a career in music. When I knit alongside making an album, I can go home with a balaclava. When I make do a ceramics course whilst making an album, I can be eating my overnight oats from that bowl every morning before I go in the studio. Music is, of course, not tangible. But something that that I’ve made that I can share, stroke, smell, taste… and never have to monetise. That’s some gold right there.
*Of course – this is coming from a place of immense privilege: I am lucky enough to do music full time which does afford me ‘leisure’ time if I so choose. And evidently, I do choose. I also have a giant safety net in that I come from a middle class family, with parents who have a house that I can move in to if everything with music/my career goes tits up. I feel like this is a luxury – the luxury of space and time – which should be afforded to everyone but, especially in the U.K., is not.
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Here’s a smol reading/ingesting list:
– How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
– Grace Rother’s substack
– https://www.tiktok.com/@verdeflowerco/video/7188470465071942917
– Would love more readings/accounts that aren’t cis white women as am aware
This swings heavily that way so please do send across if you have some!
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Photography: Katie Silvester
