As I pull up to Sunny War’s small, red and black Craftsman bungalow, the last remnants of the 4 inches of snow that fell earlier in the week are melting under the blue, cloudless sky over her historic Glenwood neighborhood in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
She invites me in to sit at her small dining room table. A record player sits on her filled, two-tiered vinyl cabinet. A spool of Christmas lights are on the desk behind where she sits. An eclectic collection of art and posters hang on what seems like every square inch of wall in the house, along with a banjo.
Sunny — born Sydney Lyndella Ward — is shy, soft-spoken, and doesn’t make a lot of eye contact. Which is not what I expected from someone who writes lyrics like:
All the words I take with a grain of salt / Cos I know you’re fake, but it’s not your fault / Sucking dick for a dollar’s not the only way to hoe
She is wearing black leggings and a black hoodie, sleeves pulled up to reveal several arm tattoos, and a silver chain around her neck. She was born in Nashville, she tells me, but moved to Los Angeles when she was 12 with her mom and stepfather. She moved to Chattanooga almost three Christmases ago. This house belonged to her grandmother, then her father before he passed away.
“He was a hoarder, so we had to clean really intensely,” she tells me, almost mumbling. “And then there was a lot of water damage, and then I had to replace the roof and I had to start getting the foundation raised.”
She wrote three of the songs on her new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress, in this house — “Walking Contradiction,” “No One Calls Me Baby,” and “Ghosts.”
The record, which follows her breakout Anarchist Gospel, was released on February 21 and features Valerie June, John Doe of X, Crass’ Steve Ignorant, Tre Burt, and Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs. Her music, as she describes it, is a blend of folk, alternative, and blues.
“Ghosts” has a particularly interesting story behind it. Sunny had been living in her father’s house — which had no power — for about a year and was broke. She was basically squatting, she says. “It was winter time. I didn’t have gigs until spring.”
She started hearing voices and was convinced she was being haunted by her father. So she wrote a song about it.
When she finally got the house inspected, she was told it had a gas leak. “I was being gas-poisoned the whole time I was living here,” she says.
“So, the house wasn’t really haunted?” I say.
“No, there was just a gas leak and I was going insane. I was chain smoking in here too. So a lot of the songs that I wrote here, I was just in a weird state of mind.”
After hearing about her time in Los Angeles, though, this story was somehow not that surprising.
As a kid, Sunny loved Mötley Crüe but quickly became obsessed with Bad Brains, Crass, X, and other punk bands. She started running away from home at 14, hanging out with “gutter punks,” as she describes them, on Venice Beach, busking along the boardwalk. Then she discovered alcohol.
“I would be missing for three days and then my mom would call the cops and say I was a missing child. And then I would end up back home,” she says. “That was the first time I tried crystal meth with some older people in a hotel room and then later, I started doing heroin.”
By the time she moved to San Francisco at 16, she was completely strung out and stayed that way for three years. When she was 19, she was arrested and stayed in jail for a year. “I think that pretty much saved me somehow,” she says.
After she got clean, she recorded her first album, Worthless, in 2014.
Over the next few years, her following grew as she played shows and released five more independent albums before signing with New West Records and releasing Anarchist Gospel in 2023. Since then, she’s toured with Mitski, Iron & Wine, John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, and — through a special request by Bonnie Raitt — appeared on Austin City Limits.
Since she’s been in Chattanooga, she’s played around town, testing out the local music scene, playing bluegrass and punk at some open-mic nights at Cherry Street Tavern.
As I leave, I think about her song, “I Got No Fight” off Anarchist Gospel:
Will I survive the war inside my head? / Tossing and turning in my lonely bed
Been up all night waiting for day to come / I want it over long before it’s done
I got no fight, I got no fight, I got none
I got no fight, no fight, I got no fight, I got none
I see the opposite: Sunny War is a fighter, and I have a feeling she’ll survive whatever comes her way.
