In four short years, Anna B Savage has established herself as a striking voice frankly chronicling what it is to be a young woman filled with curiosity and grabbing life’s experiences with both hands. Her third album, and first to be inspired by her experiences living amongst the wild Donegal landscape in Ireland, is a celebration of finding home both in a place and person. A far more intricate and intimate offering from Savage, You And i are Earth exudes a tremendous warmth as her distinct cadence wraps around deft acoustic guitar-led melodies. Carefully decorated with the tranquil wash of sea coming to shore, and light touches of bright piano and rich double bass motifs, Savage has created a beautifully organic and timeless body of work.

Ahead of You And i are Earth’s release this Friday, via City Slang, Anna B Savage spoke to Northern Transmissions about the ways the Irish landscape has seeped into her songwriting, how she approaches new material and working with producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, Caroline).

NT: How are you feeling about You and i are Earth coming out in a few days? Do you find this part of the album release cycle, while it must be very exciting, to be a bit nerve-wracking because you’re sharing a new chapter and its defining experiences with audiences?

Anna B Savage: Yeah, I think I’m OK with it! It’s funny, now that it’s album three, I feel at least like I know how I feel about certain bits when they’re coming. I can anticipate when I’m going to feel not so great and when I’m going to feel good. That’s actually quite nice because the first time around, it was a total shock. And I was like, ‘Why do I feel like this?’ Whereas now, I can expect it a little bit.

But also, it’s nice to be putting new things out, especially things that are nice. The world’s so fucking terrifying and horrible right now. Although, you know, even in making something and exploring something nice, I feel a bit like, ‘Oh, how trite’ to put out something like this in these times.

NT: Of course, but I also think that with the world being so scary and hard, that’s when we need music even more to turn to for 40 minutes of escape from reality.

Anna B Savage: True. I mean, also, I didn’t write it with anyone else in mind. I just wanted to write what I wanted to write. If it does become something that people can have a little escape to, then that’s really nice.

NT: You worked with the brilliant John ‘Spud’ Murphy when you were recording your new album. How did that collaboration come about? Had you been a fan of his work beforehand?

Anna B Savage: Yeah, ah, I love Spud! He’s such a lovely, gentle man. I knew that I wanted the album to be recorded in Ireland and that I would love for it to be an Irish producer that I worked with given that, for me, [You and i are Earth] is so much about my experiences in Ireland and about being there and fostering relationships. I had actually worked with Spud on something before and we just got on so well. Even after two days with him, I felt that he’s just such a safe pair of hands for this very delicate, gentle thing that I’m trying to create. I knew that he would be perfect.

I also love the breadth of the music he does and the breadth of the sounds that he manages to capture and actually contain within a record. That was something that I wanted as well. It was just dreamy.

NT: Absolutely, because something I really enjoyed listening to your new album was how vividly it captured the Donegal landscape in your lyrics, and that world building is something that Spud does so well sonically. In that way, your lyrical and musical sensibility combined with his production style, showed how well the two of you worked so well together. What did you most enjoy from your experience working with him?

Anna B Savage: I feel like I’ve really been so lucky with all three of the people that I’ve made records with [William Doyle on A Common Turn and Mike Lindsay for in|FLUX]. They’re all very different and yet there’s a real throughline of very intense conscientiousness and delicateness and gentleness around the way that I want to make stuff sound as well as bringing in their own quite specific sounds. It’s not like working with another artist in that they’re not going to be like, ‘It has to sound like a record of mine’, but, of course, there’s a sensibility there.

With Spud, he’s so diligent and respectful. He’s also so light of touch, everything he does feels so thought out and yet it also really allows whoever it is he’s recording or in the studio with to do all the things they want. Even watching him with the musicians who came in to play on tracks, you see how everyone is given free reign but somehow you’re also shepherded into this really beautiful, perfect space for the record. I really loved that. That’s a real skill to do with so many different people coming together with different personalities and managing to get such great performances out of them. He does that whilst also making people feel listened to and heard. That was just one aspect of how he is in the studio that really stood out to me. I just thought it was amazing to see and that I’d like to keep in mind at all future times.

NT: I’ve really enjoyed following your career and listening to your albums as they come out because there’s always something so different with each one. I’m interested to hear about your process of approaching a blank canvas. Do you return to your previous albums when you’re thinking about what the sonic world of your next album will be to see what has worked in the past that you’d like to expand upon and what things you want to avoid? How much of what’s come before informs the next thing?

Anna B Savage: It’s really funny. I feel like so far I’ve just been intuitioning the shit it out of it! With the first record, I’d written all of the songs and they were just guitar and vocals, butI always knew the kind of broad aural space that I wanted the songs to inhabit. Especially on the first record, I had no idea how to translate that or how to ask for that or how to find that. Then William [Doyle] posted on Instagram basically saying that he was looking to do some production stuff. And I was like, ‘Fuck, you’re exactly the missing segment of the songs and can turn the songs that I have into the world that I want them to be.

Then with my second and my third records, it’s weird, I feel maybe I now trust myself enough to believe my intuition. For the second record, there was also an element when I was working on the second one that I actually already knew what You and i are Earth was going to be. That was really helpful because it just meant everything, all of the creative ideas that I was having, I was funneling them into one of two spots. So it was like either it’s going into in|FLUX or it’s going into this record. A Common Turn was very electronica based and it was vast and also really small at the same time, and for in|FLUX, I really wanted it to have a bit more analog synth, you know, I still wanted it to be quite synthy and a bit more poppy. I knew that I wanted it to be a bit more like hands twiddling knobs rather than fingers pushing mouse pads!

And then for this record, I knew that I wanted it to be broadly based in acoustic instrumentation and I didn’t really want to use any synths or technology, as it were at all. I think that was made quite easy because in in|FLUX, it was so much about going all in on that stuff, whereas for this one, it was like, ‘OK, we’re doing none of that at all’. It was all about instruments and creating sounds physically rather than digitally with synths.

NT: As an Irish person, I was very excited that this album is a celebration of Ireland and Donegal. Listening to the songs, it feels like the album captures a very formative period for you. Can you tell me about why you moved to Donegal?

Anna B Savage: Yeah, so in the pandemic, I studied at BIMM in Dublin and I was living there from around September 2020. I was living there when the lockdowns were really intense, but everything in England had just opened up again. It was a really strange split screen because all of my mates in England were hanging out but in Ireland,I felt like I hadn’t even really met anyone. I was going to BIMM, but I only had two days of classes that were in person and then everything else was online. That was quite hardcore and I was just like, ‘Huh, okay, how am I going to make the friends that I’ve been planning to make? How am I going to make the life that I’d been planning to make?’ It was also just very expensive to be in Dublin and everything was shut. But you know, of the city, I knew Phoenix Park and that was it because it was the only place that I could go while the restrictions were in place. I was walking around Phoenix Park enough that it became my whole existence. Then, my housemate, at the time, had talked about how she wanted to learn how to surf and we started looking for places to live in any of the surfing towns and we managed to find one in Donegal!

NT: You mentioned how while you were making album two that you already had the blueprint for You and i are Earth in mind, but did you find that being in Ireland and being in a different environment influenced how you considered arrangement and lyricism?

Anna B Savage: God, yeah. There’s an atmosphere that I still, I don’t know, part of me feels a little bit uncomfortable even trying to voice it because, you know, I am still very much a new English person who moved to Ireland like three years ago.

I guess the mixture of the very dramatic landscape has definitely inspired my lyrics. From my house, I can literally see the sea and see the sun sets every night and from the other side there are mountains. There’s something about being able to see horizons, which just don’t exist in London, you know. You can only ever see other houses, so to be able to see so much nature, that feels so much more grounding and grounded and human and healthy. I think that was the first thing that really struck me because I grew-up in London and I’ve always lived in cities.

Suddenly, not living in a city was a very different experience. I think also, being on the coast, the weather is absolutely wild! It’s terrifying. It’s at once terrifying and it’s humbling and it’s hilarious and it’s stupid! It’s all these different things and I feel like the vastness and the smallness of it, like you’re getting absolutely battered by rain and then you’re just sitting in your kitchen. Then you see people who are out surfing or still going on their daily walks and, I still don’t really know how to formulate any of this, but there’s so much wildness mixed with the mundanity, magicalness mixed with the normalcy, the big and the small. I feel like everything is right there and in front of you. That felt so new for me. It feels so exciting and so human and so natural. Out of everything, I feel like that’s what has inspired me the most because it feels like I’m very connected to the world around me.

Whereas in London, I feel like I’m very cerebral. Everything is kind of, ‘Maybe I’ll go to the gallery or a theater’. It’s very cultural, but it’s very cerebral. Whereas, whenever I’m in Donegal, I feel much more bodily and much more like an animal.

NT: There’s very much an apparent appreciation for Ireland, its culture and people and landscape, throughout the album. It’s also extremely warm and welcoming in how it sounds and also in the sense of community that came together in the studio. You have contributions from several incredible Irish artists such as Anna-Mieke, Caimin Gilmore and Cormac MacDiarmada of Lankum, Kate Ellis, and John ‘Spud’ Murphy, too. as well. Maybe it’s because I know how warm the various music communities in Ireland are, it comes through very strongly across the album.

Anna B Savage: That makes me very happy. The music scene in Ireland is so warm. I think it comes across a lot on this record, but one of my preoccupations was just finding somewhere that I feel like I belong. You know, not that I’m saying that I belong in Ireland, but there is a warmth and there is a generosity within the Irish music scene and within the groups of people I’ve been hanging around with that does feel like, you know, this has got a lot of potential, or that potentially this is it. I feel very lucky.

NT: Finally, is there a song or a particular lyric from the album that encapsulates the overall feeling you wanted to create?

Anna B Savage: It’s a tricky one. I’m quite proud of myself because I think a lot of the album feels like it’s all part of the same thing and everything f builds on what’s come before and creates the picture as a whole. In terms of a favorite lyric, that changes day by day. Yesterday, I was thinking about one of the lyrics in “Mo Cheol Thú”: “I know you do everything with such care, soI feel safe knowing you’re getting so close / Stay close to me.” That was one that yesterday I really liked and it’s a sort of succinct way of saying that.

Today, though, I was thinking about one of the lyrics from the very last song, “The Rest of Our Lives”: “You say it’s ‘elemental’ / I say it’s ‘alchemy’ / Honestly it all looks green and gold to me”. And then, you know, I feel like some of the lyrics on You and i are Earth are like ‘We’re roots combined in dirt’. I think that’s really nice. I’m sure some people will be like, ‘That’s disgusting!’, but I feel like there’s something about that kind of rootedness, that underground comfort, which feels like a big part of the album for me.

Anna B Savage 2025 Tour Dates

2/12/2025 – Bristol, UK @ Lantern
2/13/2025 – Manchester, UK @ Night & Day
2/14/2025 – Glasgow, UK @ Stereo
2/15/2025 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
2/17/2025 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare & Hounds
2/18/2025 – Brighton, UK @ Patterns
2/19/2025 – Margate, UK @ Where Else
2/20/2025 – London, UK @ Union Chapel
3/20/2025 – Cork, IE @ Coughlan’s
3/21/2025 – Galway, IE @Roisin Dubh
3/22/2025 – Dublin, IE @ Unitarian Church
4/12/2025 – Brussels, BE @ Botanique Rotonde
4/13/2025 – Paris, FR @ Petit Bain
4/15/2025 – Cologne, DE @ Bumann & Sohn
4/16/2025 – Berlin, DE @ Franzz Club
4/17/2025 – Utrecht, NL @ EKKO
4/22/2025 – Madrid, ES @ Moby Dick
4/23/2025 – Lisbon PR @ ZDB
4/24/2025 – Barcelona, ES @ Club Sauvage
4/28/2025 – Milan, IT @ Belleza

Pre-order You & I Are Earth HERE