The Tennessee musician ran away to hop trains and drop acid, then went viral after being filmed busking. Her sterling new album features her hero Steve Ignorant – and resists the rise of the right
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.’”
