Anna B Savage: Brudenell Social Club Leeds gig beckons for Donegal artist celebrating release of album You and i are Earth

Anna B Savage’s third album, You and i are Earth, is said to be “a love letter to a man, to Ireland, and to my current life” a description that might surprise anyone who’s been following the career of the London-born, Donegal-based musician.

Her two previous albums, A Common Turn (2021) and in|FLUX (2023), are unflinching explorations of self that combine jarring electronica with analogue instrumentation.

For her new album, however, her sense of contentment is reflected in a pastoral quality that’s at times reminiscent of Nick Drake. She drew on some of her adopted home country’s contemporary folk talent to make the record, using the contacts of producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy to bring on board Cormac MacDiarmada (Lankum) and Anna Mieke, among others.

These helped to broaden her sound after she realised, “it would be really lovely to have a fiddle player on (the record) and a double bass instead of an electric.”

In addition to collaborating with local musicians on the record, living in rural Ireland impacted her lyrics.

She wanted to capture the slower pace of life she now enjoys with, “vignettes of little moments of picking up shells and wandering around on the beach”.

These reflect an existence in which “nature, being with people I love, and just doing small things together,” brings her joy.

The country’s rich literary tradition, which she learned to love during a poetry Masters, also found its way onto the release. The short instrumental ‘Incertus’ takes its name from poet Seamus Heaney’s pseudonym.

‘Mo cheol Thú’, the album’s emotional centrepiece, means both ‘you are my music’ and ‘you are my darling’ in the south-west of Ireland.

“It’s the most beautiful sentiment ever,” she enthuses.

The only thing that rivals the phrase for romance, in her view, is the 1661 ‘u and I are earth’ plate that lent the album its title. Found in a London sewer it was inscribed with that phrase.

Anna says: “No one knows who made it. No one knows who it was for. Everything is open to your imagination. I looked at it and it made me think of my partner and the love I have for him.”

She was drawn to the lineage in which “the plate exists and then in 2025 my album exists”.

How would she like the lineage to continue? “I think anything that begets anything else is a gorgeous thing,” she mulls, before settling on moss that’s been saved from a dead planet.

“The experience of being near moss, or putting your face in moss which no one has had for 400 years, is going to be so special.”

If you can’t wait four centuries, you can see her at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds on Saturday.

Tickets: www.seetickets.com/tour/anna-b-savage