London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage has announced her debut album ‘A Common Turn’, which is set for release Jan 29th via City Slang. Playing on the album title, she shares single & video “A Common Tern“. “A Common Tern“ is a song about Savage’s escape from a toxic relationship. The moment Savage decided she needed to change coincided with the sighting of the titular common tern while on a fishing trip with her ex.
Expanding on this further she said “When I saw the terns, I was pretty amazed: they really did seem like they were just suspended, dangling on the bottom of a thread. Something about that seeming captivity, being on the end of an invisible line, then breaking free. They were at once familiar and yet so strange and weird. I don’t think I entirely grasped the relevance while I was writing it but now it seems very, very frickin obvious. I spent a year and a half after the tern incident trying to extricate myself from the relationship, bit by bit, section by section. It was fuckin hard work, and I did do a lot of apologising. For me, a common turn means the common moment where you decide you just don’t/ can’t love someone any more, and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.” She adds: “For me, ‘a common turn’ is those moments of decision where you think ‘I’m not taking this anymore, whether it’s the way someone else is treating you or the what you’re treating yourself.”
For the last three years, Savage wrote music for her debut album, stitching together influences and references, both personal and cultural. She got in touch with William Doyle, (FKA East India Youth – 2014 Mercury Prize nominee) who provided ambitious yet elegant production to the demos Anna brought him, and ultimately gave a definitive shape to the record. As a pair, they were able to make a record that is, in Savage’s words, “about learning, adapting, growing, being earnest and trying really f***ing hard.”
Pre-order ‘A Common Turn‘ here.
Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz
