She’s the finger-picking blueswoman whose life was changed by the punk band Crass – and went viral for busking while homeless. She talks about ghosts, her ‘smelly’ childhood and fighting the far right
By Alexis Petridis
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.
