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Sunny War
September 22, 2023 @ 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Sunny War is more than just an artist; she is a force of nature that is tough to pin down. What exactly is her style? Blues or punk? Yes, she may be a Robert Johnson with a shot of Bad Brains, but even this description falls short. The only way to really know Sunny is to immerse oneself in the music.
Sunny crafts a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments. She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song.
Even as she was developing a guitar style that married acoustic punk to country blues, those two sides of Sunny were already at odds. As a teenager, she began drinking heavily, which led to her dropping out of school. She played punk shows, stole and chugged bottles of vodka, and quickly became addicted to heroin and meth. For money she busked along the boardwalks in Venice Beach, recording an album to sell out of her guitar case and letting that self-destructive side win most of the battles.
A series of seizures landed her in a sober living facility in Compton. Music remained a lifeline, and she fell in with a crew at Hen House Studios in Venice where over the years she made a series of albums and EPs. Twelve years after she kicked meth and heroin, Sunny is remarkably candid about this time in her life. Building on those hard-won triumphs of previous albums, Sunny most recent album ‘Anarchist Gospel’ documents a moment when Sunny had finally gained the upper hand on her self-destructive side.
