London-based songwriter Anna B Savage is releasing her debut album A Common Turn next Friday, January 29, and following a series of excellent singles, we’re pretty excited. She’s giving us one final teaser in the form of “Baby Grand” along with a video, co-created with her ex-boyfriend Jem Talbot – the very person the song is about. Explaining their past and future a little more, Savage reveals:
“Jem was my first love. For three years we’ve been working on a film together about our past relationship. This song is written about a night Jem and I had, just after we’d started work on the film. This night was – like much of the filmmaking process – very confusing. Taut with unexpressed emotions, vulnerability, and miscommunication.
“‘Baby Grand’ (the film) and ‘A Common Turn’ (album) are companion pieces: woven together in subject, inspiration and time. Jem was, for want of a better word, a muse for ‘A Common Turn’. Expressing ourselves through our different mediums (mine: music, his: film) became a way for our disciplines to talk, perhaps in place of us.”
Even before the visual accompaniment, “Baby Grand” is a typically image-laden track from Savage, whose voice and use of atmosphere brings heft to her painterly images. Here she recalls a confusing night between the former lovers, listening to records, chatting all night long, feeling each other out, carefully navigating an emotional minefield. While there’s plenty of unspoken feelings between them, Savage lets them all bubble over in her voice and guitar playing, where her inner monologue comes swirling up in a storm of conflicted feelings – new and old – and she lets them speak and sing without trying to analyse them too deeply – “I think it’s platonic affection,” she ultimately decides, as “Baby Grand” reaches its hyper-charged finale.
Then add the video to “Baby Grand” and we have something truly special. Watch it below.
Anna B Savage’s debut album A Common Turn is coming out on January 29 2021 through City Slang. Follow Anna B Savage on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
