"The second you walk out, it’s so crazy. Especially growing up watching the show, it feels like a fever dream."

Seventeen-year-old Anya True says she has been singing pretty much since she could speak. She picked up playing the guitar when she was five and, two years later, tackled singing and strumming simultaneously. At eight, she started performing in theater productions, and that’s when she feels she found her “true love for music.” By the time she was 12, she had left theater behind to focus on writing her own songs. At 13, she jettisoned attending high school to dive even deeper into her songwriting.

“It was something that I had to think about for a second,” True recalls. “I remember I was just going to go to a public school, and then my parents were like, ‘We found an online school that is completely autonomous.’ I have teachers that I can reach out to if I need help, but for the most part, it’s all on my own time, which is so different than what I did in middle school. This was during Covid, so a lot of people were doing online school. I was like, If I can have half of the day at least to work on my music, then why not? At the end of the day, it just felt right. This was the time to seize the moment. It was the first year that I was starting to write full songs, and I felt confident in what I was doing. It’s an easy decision once you realize how much time you can have toward doing your passion.”

It was a gamble, and it seems to have paid off. True started to hone her singer-songwriter skills by playing live gigs. Her favorite haunt became Leucadia’s Le Papagayo, where John Bennett and Rand Anderson (Sweet Juanita) quickly took her under their collective wing. “They would pull me up on stage when they were doing gigs there, and I would sing a song or two. It was so fun, and then eventually it became, ‘You can do hour sets opening for us.’” True eventually felt confident enough in her abilities to send in a video of herself performing to audition for the NBC series The Voice in 2021. They didn’t bite that first time, but she did get a callback last year requesting additional videos and an interview. “I was in Target when I got the call that I was going out to LA to be in front of the coaches, and I thought I was dreaming. This has been a dream of mine my whole life.”

She made it to the blind auditions for the show, but she still had to make a team to be part of the actual competition. She selected a song by Stephen Sanchez, “Until I Found You,” which she had previously covered on Instagram. “Before the doors opened and I walked out, I was taking deep breaths, and I was, like, ‘You’re fine. You have prepared so much for this. Just go out and do your best.’ But the second you walk out, it’s so crazy. Especially growing up watching the show, it feels like a fever dream. I definitely blacked out for most of it.”

True snapped back into reality when she heard cheering and noticed that two of the judges’ chairs had turned, signaling that she was guaranteed to make a team. In the end, she ended up on a single team with two coaches: Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney. “I’ve worked so many years to get here,” True says. “That they were cheering for me and they really wanted me…it means so much to have two people so talented and successful believing in me and wanting me so bad on their team.”

True is excited for her upcoming battles on The Voice — and beyond that, releasing more of her own music. The cover of “Until I Found You” is available on all streaming platforms, and an original single, “Hannah,” drops this month. She has ten songs “ready to record and put out,” so perhaps those will become the foundation of a format that she loves: the album. She raves about buying vinyl and even (gasp) CDs at Lou’s Records in Encinitas. And despite her youth, she does so in the most Gen X way possible: “I find one song that I like, and then I just buy the album. It’s kind of old school, but I just like listening to music like that."