My Music with Graham Coath — Anna May (not Anime!)

This week Graham sits down with Anna May — Connecticut-born, sometimes-San Diego-based singer–songwriter — for a wide-ranging conversation about voice, vulnerability and finding your lane when you don’t fit neatly into one genre. Anna grew up on a diet of female storytellers (Natalie Merchant, Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette), 90s alt, dad’s country (The Mavericks, Dwight Yoakam) and a childhood of jazz rooms—and it all threads through her work.

She talks candidly about writing lyrics first (often as poems), letting the voice improvise live so no song lands the same way twice, and recording one-take magic with engineer Steve Rizzo in Rhode Island. We touch on k.d. lang (“Constant Craving”, “The Air That I Breathe”), unexpected covers (yes, Ozzy Osbourne), social media’s darker edges, boundaries, and how a bruising breakup became a healing body of songs. There’s even a New England vs California detour, a Billy Bragg nod, and a Groove Armada truth bomb: “If everybody looked the same, we’d get tired of looking at each other.”