Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Anna May releases singles like bullets
Albums are an art form, but you need to build your base
Alt-folk singer-songwriter Anna May moved to San Diego at the tail end of 2024. Her roots are in the northeast, but she has also called Durango, the Bay area, and Nashville her home. Small surprise, then, that the shifting scenery seems to be a catalyst for her songwriting. “A lot of my travel is associated with horrible breakups, so I think it's like, I'm lucky,” she explains. “My music has come from that. Just the ability to write in different regions, at different times of the year. It feels schizophrenic, traveling from one place to another. You’re dumped into the winter one day, and then sunny the next day, stuff like that. I think that’s what really speaks to me about being a touring artist, too, is that stuff really inspires you, the change in perspective. You’re not in a real structured rhythm, and I think that helps writing a lot.”
May has been a featured guest on NPR’s Great American Folk Show, on WKU PBS' Lost River Sessions, and she was nominated for Best Americana Act at the New England Music Awards in 2024. She was also nominated for best Indie song of 2023 by Indie Boulevard Magazine, and her song
"The Show" was KUTX’s song of the day in August 2024. She recently released her third single of 2025. In the wake of March’s “Elegy,” and July’s “The Cliff,” comes “Fireflies and Buffalo,” a breakup track originally based on a poem she had written.
The full-length single for “Fireflies and Buffalo” feels like a novella-length song due to the dense lyrics. The radio edit is eight minutes long, while the extended version clocks in at over 11. So, one might expect that playing a song like this live could be a Herculean task in the memory department. “I have a series of songs that I, by some miracle, have memorized over a lot of years,” she says. “That’s my usual set that people know from me. A lot of the newer songs are a mouthful. I do have them memorized, but I don't totally trust myself. So, I'm kind of in that process now of fully memorizing the last four singles. It's been hard. I never have made a lyric mistake, but I did on ‘Fireflies of Buffalo.’ I played it last weekend, and I screwed it up. If I know I'm going to play these songs, I have to make sure that I have those down. It’s kind of a task.”
Video:
Anna May: "Fireflies and Buffalo"
If you dig into May’s Bandcamp, you will find output that dates back to 2015. Besides singles, there are some early EP to mini-album-length releases, with 2022’s detach being the only full-length album in her catalog. Like many current artists, she is now focusing on singles. “I think right now the attention span for albums is not great,” she says, “and I think until you're a super established artist, not everyone is going to really tune into the album. I think all these songs are really good, like stand-alone singles. That’s why I'm kind of releasing them like bullets, and hoping to kind of get some traction with those. I think it becomes more about hooking people's attention. I'm still kind of growing my fan base. People listen from a lot of different pockets. But albums are really cool, because it really is a piece of art in a way that singles aren't. But it’s so much about the marketing and keeping people’s attention and social media. So, in a way, that stuff kind of goes over better.”
May prides herself on being very accessible to her fans, and even mentions how, as a songwriter, she has been enlightened the most by random people outside of the music industry. For example: a Russian Uber driver in Albuquerque. After she mentioned having numerous traumatic, near-death experiences in her life, he gave her a free evaluation (though not a free ride). “He said that the reason that's happening to me, or that these experiences find me, is because I’m powerful, and I have the power to endure that. I should perceive it as a gift that bad things might happen to me, ‘Because whatever this force is knows that you can handle it, and that you're going to turn it into something artistic.’ I thought that was really profound, and honestly, I never thought about that.”
During her time here, May has found that San Diego often reminds her of another city that she once called home, a city with beaches that are all lakefront. “I love jazz music, and I did live in New Orleans for a little while and kind of grew up on jazz. I think there’s really a lot of that in San Diego, which kind of speaks to me. It reminds me sometimes of New Orleans, like there's a lot of moments where I do feel like, 'Oh, this could be New Orleans right now.' It’s neat. It’s kind of nostalgic.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Anna May releases singles like bullets
Albums are an art form, but you need to build your base
Anna May releases singles like bullets
Albums are an art form, but you need to build your base
Alt-folk singer-songwriter Anna May moved to San Diego at the tail end of 2024. Her roots are in the northeast, but she has also called Durango, the Bay area, and Nashville her home. Small surprise, then, that the shifting scenery seems to be a catalyst for her songwriting. “A lot of my travel is associated with horrible breakups, so I think it's like, I'm lucky,” she explains. “My music has come from that. Just the ability to write in different regions, at different times of the year. It feels schizophrenic, traveling from one place to another. You’re dumped into the winter one day, and then sunny the next day, stuff like that. I think that’s what really speaks to me about being a touring artist, too, is that stuff really inspires you, the change in perspective. You’re not in a real structured rhythm, and I think that helps writing a lot.”
May has been a featured guest on NPR’s Great American Folk Show, on WKU PBS' Lost River Sessions, and she was nominated for Best Americana Act at the New England Music Awards in 2024. She was also nominated for best Indie song of 2023 by Indie Boulevard Magazine, and her song
"The Show" was KUTX’s song of the day in August 2024. She recently released her third single of 2025. In the wake of March’s “Elegy,” and July’s “The Cliff,” comes “Fireflies and Buffalo,” a breakup track originally based on a poem she had written.
The full-length single for “Fireflies and Buffalo” feels like a novella-length song due to the dense lyrics. The radio edit is eight minutes long, while the extended version clocks in at over 11. So, one might expect that playing a song like this live could be a Herculean task in the memory department. “I have a series of songs that I, by some miracle, have memorized over a lot of years,” she says. “That’s my usual set that people know from me. A lot of the newer songs are a mouthful. I do have them memorized, but I don't totally trust myself. So, I'm kind of in that process now of fully memorizing the last four singles. It's been hard. I never have made a lyric mistake, but I did on ‘Fireflies of Buffalo.’ I played it last weekend, and I screwed it up. If I know I'm going to play these songs, I have to make sure that I have those down. It’s kind of a task.”
Video:
Anna May: "Fireflies and Buffalo"
If you dig into May’s Bandcamp, you will find output that dates back to 2015. Besides singles, there are some early EP to mini-album-length releases, with 2022’s detach being the only full-length album in her catalog. Like many current artists, she is now focusing on singles. “I think right now the attention span for albums is not great,” she says, “and I think until you're a super established artist, not everyone is going to really tune into the album. I think all these songs are really good, like stand-alone singles. That’s why I'm kind of releasing them like bullets, and hoping to kind of get some traction with those. I think it becomes more about hooking people's attention. I'm still kind of growing my fan base. People listen from a lot of different pockets. But albums are really cool, because it really is a piece of art in a way that singles aren't. But it’s so much about the marketing and keeping people’s attention and social media. So, in a way, that stuff kind of goes over better.”
May prides herself on being very accessible to her fans, and even mentions how, as a songwriter, she has been enlightened the most by random people outside of the music industry. For example: a Russian Uber driver in Albuquerque. After she mentioned having numerous traumatic, near-death experiences in her life, he gave her a free evaluation (though not a free ride). “He said that the reason that's happening to me, or that these experiences find me, is because I’m powerful, and I have the power to endure that. I should perceive it as a gift that bad things might happen to me, ‘Because whatever this force is knows that you can handle it, and that you're going to turn it into something artistic.’ I thought that was really profound, and honestly, I never thought about that.”
During her time here, May has found that San Diego often reminds her of another city that she once called home, a city with beaches that are all lakefront. “I love jazz music, and I did live in New Orleans for a little while and kind of grew up on jazz. I think there’s really a lot of that in San Diego, which kind of speaks to me. It reminds me sometimes of New Orleans, like there's a lot of moments where I do feel like, 'Oh, this could be New Orleans right now.' It’s neat. It’s kind of nostalgic.”
Comments