AFTER a rough 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 a lot. I was isolated from everyone I knew. We’d had the same group of friends and I didn’t want to talk to them or anyone else. I was barely eating. I left the apartment only when I really had to.
“I had no idea what I was going to do when the lease was up, or if I could even make it that long. I was contemplating suicide. I felt like I had 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 a little light. At that low point, she wrote a song called “I Got No Fight”, a bleak blues ballad that anchors her latest album, the tough-hearted 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 a dire moment, painful in its honesty, yet her spidery licks and soulful vocals betray a kernel of optimism at the song’s heart.
“I felt better after writing it,” she says, noodling on her beloved guitar, which she has nicknamed Big
