To call You & i are Earth Anna B Savage’s Irish album would be reductive, but also accurate. The London-born artist has lived in Ireland on-and-off since 2020, completing a Masters degree at BIMM Dublin (famously where Fontaines D.C. met). She’s released two albums since then—her 2021 debut A Common Turn and 2023’s inFLUX—both of which occasionally flirted with dancefloor-worthy synth music and the raucous throes of rock n’ roll. However, at heart, Savage is a folk musician, and on You & i are Earth she taps into her adopted home’s rich history with the genre and the pool of talented artists living in Ireland.
This is an overwhelmingly joyous album as well, with Savage enthralled by both the man she’s in love with and the land she lives on. It’s heartening to see her so content after the emotional turmoil of A Common Turn and inFLUX. The former sees her questioning a platonic friendship that could be more (“Baby Grand”), plagued by self-doubt (“Two”) and grappling with the perceived futility of making art (“Dead Pursuits”). On her sophomore album, she’s haunted by past relationships (“The Ghost”) and feels like she’s disappearing (“Say My Name”). Savage’s life isn’t portrayed as perfect on You & i are Earth, but there is an inner peace here that’s palpable in every note, even during the more sonically tempestuous tracks. The songs are lush in their evocative, layered instrumentation—thanks in part to legendary producer John “Spud” Murphy (Lankum, caroline, black midi)—and also in the way Savage’s deep, throaty voice wraps around us as she sets the scene. Yellow cottages, striped shirts, carpets of moss, cupped hands full of seashells—all of these are the trappings of a gorgeous (though at times overly sentimental) record that reminds us love is real, and often found in the very ground beneath our feet.
From the outset, Savage is keenly aware of her home country’s harsh colonial history with Ireland and seeks to reckon with it. Obviously one person coming to live in a place does not a colonist make—not when so many English people have come to live in Ireland over the years—but the past traumas of colonial rule still shape the country, a fact that plenty outside of the island remain ignorant of. Savage is not one of them, thankfully; she sings on “Mo Cheol Thú” about her significant other “learning Irish / they didn’t teach you in the north.” The Irish language is a required school subject in the Republic, while in Northern Ireland—still a part of the UK—it is not. Being divorced from one’s native tongue fragments the self, exposing yet another way that colonial rule’s shadow continues to loom long over the land.
That line is followed up with “While I’m learning about you, and being English, and… remorse.” Feeling regret about a history you had no part in, but that ultimately benefited you, is a difficult circle to square, but Savage has never shied away from the complex. She carries that same cognizance in “Donegal,” a mischievous, dramatic number named for the most northwestern Irish county. “Today I join the well trodden queue / of British people desperately in love with you… Aware of history, and our vast lack of knowledge,” she shares in her velvety voice. Perhaps, most importantly, she wonders on the song if she can stay: “Is there a home out here, for me, forever? Have I found home out here, for me, forever?” It’s a question that may never fully be answered, but her having asked it is a step in the right direction. (Also, all of this comes with the massive grain of salt that I, too, am someone who moved to Ireland from a country with a horrific, genocidal past—the United States.)
Aside from these ruminations, though, are tracks brimming with love for her partner and Ireland, both of which are deeply tied to her appreciation for the natural world, too. She invokes the organic on nearly every track, whether sonically—the soft sound of lapping waves is the very first thing we hear on the album—or, more often, lyrically. Birds in particular have always been a motif of Savage’s work: The title-ish track of her debut album is a play on words (“The Common Tern” as opposed to A Common Turn), and that record also features the devastating song “Corncrakes.” On “I Can Hear the Birds Now,” from her sophomore LP inFLUX, we get a sense of just how much these winged creatures are important to Savage, in terms of making her feel grounded in her surroundings and sense of self: “But some things are clearer / I can hear the birds now.” When it comes to You & i are Earth, birds are a reassuring presence, whether Savage is singing about “starlings on the train line” as she fell in love (“Mo Cheol Thú”) or the curlew that “calls all day” (“I Reach for You in my Sleep”); they’re never the center of attention, but a consistent reminder of beauty that’s waiting to be appreciated.
Of course, all of this loveliness can tip over into saccharine monotony. Savage’s impassioned repetition of “You are my music / and oh it’s so true” on “Mo Cheol Thú” is rapturously sincere, but also so treacly that we could use some of the saltiness she mentions on the first track. Her acoustic guitar’s warmth wears on you by the album’s end; the most compelling parts of You & i are Earth, coincidentally, are the ones that lean into the expansive, sweeping side of folk music or intricately layered sounds, transcending the gentle dullness of the singer-songwriter genre.
These issues aside, You & i are Earth succeeds because of the intensity of Savage’s feelings and her songwriting. “I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to,” Savage worried on her debut album, but it’s clear on this LP that she’s become deeply attuned to her own emotions and the world around her. As the title implies, the line between the two—self and earth—is more blurred and malleable than often thought.
