FTER arough break-up in 2021, Sydney Ward found herself alone and all but imprisoned in the Los Angeles apartment she and her partner had shared. “I had to stay behind and finish the lease,” she recalls. “I was really depressed and started drinking alot. Iwas isolated from everyone Iknew. We’d had the same group of friends and I didn’t want to talk to them or anyone else. Iwas barely eating. I left the apartment only when I really had to.
“I had no idea what Iwas going to do when the lease was up, or if I could even make it that long. Iwas contemplating suicide. I felt like Ihad no fight left in me.”
Ward –who goes by her stage name, Sunny War –can be bracingly frank when she describes this and other dark moments in her life. But she is equally forthcoming when she explains how music has let in alittle light. At that low point, she wrote asong called “I Got No Fight”, ableak blues ballad that anchors her latest album, the toughhearted Anarchist Gospel. “Will I survive the war inside my head, tossing and turning in my lonely bed?” she asks herself, her nimble guitar trailing the vocal melody. It’s adire moment, painful in its honesty, yet her spidery licks and soulful vocals betray akernel of optimism at the song’s heart.