Anya Movius

Anya Movius has been releasing music since 2022 which you can find on her spotify, linked above. She is currently a college student and has an EP out titled At Least For Now, among other singles. One of the songs on Movius' EP features Dar Williams, who is another singer/songwriter; the song is called Call Your Daughter Home. Anya continues to perform at her school, her website is linked above with more information. 

Interview Transcript(not directly quoted)

Q: Can you briefly introduce yourself and some of your inspirations? 

A: My name is Anya Movius. I grew up in Charlottesville, VA and I’ve been doing music my whole life. I started out in piano and switched over to guitar when I was around seven and that’s what I’ve been writing songs on since then. A lot of my inspiration has come from Taylor Swift. I just grew up with her and I think subconsciously it's definitely influenced my style or my habits or my inclinations when it comes to songwriting, but I definitely hear new music all the time that weaves its way into whatever I'm doing. Dar Williams has been a big inspiration. Brandi Carlile and recently Noah Khan have also been huge inspirations. Other more professional songwriters as opposed to singer songwriters, such as Dan Wilson, who is someone that works professionally with co-writing a lot and helping other artists with their visions and songs, which I think is really cool. Dan Wilson is another inspiration. 

Q: How long have you been writing for? Do you remember first getting into it?

A: The first song that I have a video of and the lyric sheet of was called Eric's Bad Day. I wrote it when I was four years old, on the piano. It was a pretty short song, but it was about this kid named Eric who went to college, and on his first day of college, he lost his shoes, and then on the second day of college, he caught the flu, but, his sister came along, and she sang him a song, and so he felt better. He just went through his life. He felt like driving a bus, but he got fired because he was too tired, but his sister was there. That's the first song I remember writing. I don't really remember a time when I wasn't writing in some kind of way.

Q: Do you remember your first performances/first opportunities to share your work? 

A: What comes to mind immediately is this theater, or cabaret, kind of open mic through a theater group that I was a part of when I was like five or six. I was never big into theater, that didn’t work out. I was not a good actor at all, but I remember doing this cabaret night. It was an opportunity for people to show songs or poems they wanted to put out to an audience.I remember doing a couple of my original songs then. I was around seven or eight when I did those. Those are my early memories of performing.

Q: What were your first inspirations for beginning to write? 

A: It's hard to figure out exactly where the first inspiration for it was, but I will say that growing up I had a slight speech impediment. I had a lisp, so sometimes it was really hard for people to understand me. So I think, looking back, maybe I liked performing so early on because it felt like a way to connect with people and have people listen and understand what I was saying. If I want to go back and psychoanalyze, maybe that’s where it came from. 

Q: Did you start to write because you wanted to perform or the other way around? 

A: It definitely was the writing that came first and for a long time growing up I would never say I wanted to be like a singer because it felt so weighted. There's a lot of discouragement and I just wanted to avoid that completely just by never bringing it up. As I’ve gotten older it’s been easier to say that I want to be a musician, even if I’m not making money from it. You can still be a professional. Anyway, growing up it was never really something I said I wanted to do, it was just something that I was doing and wanted to keep doing. 

Q: What is your writing process? Are there common themes you find yourself writing about? 

A: It definitely stems from just feelings in general, or stuff I'm going through. Whenever I have a very powerful emotion or something happening in my life, it usually always comes out in the songs that I write. Definitely when I was growing up, the deaths of grandparents were always processed through writing songs about them. I also wrote about friendships ending. Most of it was negative. It was like a crutch for me to go back and figure out how I was feeling as opposed to feeling great and writing a song about it. Maybe in songwriting lessons if I didn’t have anything to write about that’s when I would start brainstorming a random story. However, for me, it doesn’t feel so much like a process of creative writing. 

Q: Do you think it's harder to write happy songs? 

A: For me, yeah. But I also hope that most of my songs aren't just sad. I just think they're weighted. I have this song that I wrote when I was honestly feeling very frustrated at a friend and I was feeling like we were just getting to this point where we're spending too much time together and we were just really going at each other. The beginning of the song started out with me being angry. The first line is; ‘you're easier to love from a distance. I am fuming.’ Then the chorus turned into; ‘but there we go, making each other known, racing each other home, you know, it's hard being as close.’ And that turned into the theme of the song. The second verse was about how I'm easier to love from a distance and how people are. I guess that's one example of a song that I hope is not really a sad song, but one that definitely came from anger. In some ways it's kind of a love song too.  

Q: Have you ever dealt with writer’s block? How did you overcome it? 

A: I think writer’s block is somewhat constant. Whenever I'm not writing, you could think of that as writer's block, but it always comes and goes. When I'm around more musicians, if I'm recording, I usually am just in a phase of productivity and I'm just putting a lot out. Then there are times too when I'm not and I think for me, the key is to let that creative impulse come. Just knowing if you're not doing a lot of writing that it's going to come back and I try not to worry about it, I think that is the best thing to do sometimes because it will come back and then you can write like 10 songs in a week. Then, you might not write a song for a few months and that's okay.

Q: How did you start recording your songs professionally? What was the first step you took?

A: The first more professional recording that I did was over COVID. It was summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school. I decided at that point that I really would love to record an album and put it out. I got hooked up with my songwriting teacher's husband, who's a producer. For a couple months I would record songs at home myself and comp the vocals and guitar parts at home. Because of COVID we had to do it virtually. I'd send the files to him and then he would add some stuff, get parts from other people, and mix it all really well. I actually ended up not releasing those songs and I think I'm going to release them in about a month, even though they're like four years old at this point. I think it's stupid that I didn't release something that I was proud of. At the time I was still a little bit too scared and it still felt too vulnerable. I was worried that I'd look back and think that I sounded bad and think ‘why did I do that?’ That was the first experience. Then I had a couple songs that I recorded with one other organization before finding Matt Wyatt, who I recorded my first EP that I actually released with. 

Q: Do you think it’s important to know at least something about producing? 

A: It depends on what you want out of it. I think it's okay if you don't know a lot about the production process, you'll learn. I think the important thing is the relationship and making sure that you can still communicate what you want if you don’t know the technical part. If you don't know the technical parts you could just say, “I just want it to sound more airy in this part.” I also think it's important to walk the line when working with a producer of not trying to reinvent the wheel, but not lose your voice as an artist because at the end of the day it is your music and it should sound how you want it to sound. I would say knowledge about the recording process and knowledge about how to work with producers and how to be in a studio is the most important skill set. 

Q: What is something that you’ve done that you are most proud of? 

A: Honestly, I have to say performing at Harvard's first year talent show. It was a really amazing experience and I didn't expect it at all. I didn't know it was a thing, but when I arrived to campus this past fall, I saw that they had auditions for this talent show and I decided to go in and do it. The next day I ended up performing at Sanders Theater in front of like a thousand people, which was absolutely insane. Before that I'd only ever performed in front of  maybe a hundred people, so I was really proud of myself for just doing that in week one when I didn't know anyone. I tried not thinking too much about it, and that was definitely one of the highlights of my music life in general.

Q: Can you tell the story of your song ‘Call Your Daughter Home’? 

A: I started writing that song freshman year of high school. That was a song that I wrote the majority of in one sitting. Then I went back a year later and wrote the bridge and finished it up with the ending. I remember procrastinating for a Latin test that I had. And I was staring at my bookshelf, and ‘Call Your Daughter Home’ was actually the name of a book that I saw on the bookshelf. I also saw another book that said something like, ‘Redhead on the Road’. And the first line just came about; ‘call your daughter home, pick up the redhead from the side of the road again.’ At that time I was definitely having feelings about parents and relationships. I think that was definitely a story that I wrote, but it 100 percent was inspired by my own feelings of frustration or feeling both very dependent on home and needing home, but also feeling like I really desperately wanted to get out of it in a way. That's where it came from. That ending was really special to me; having that parent perspective. That ending piece, which came around a year later, was probably like my favorite part of that process. 

Q: Do you do any collaboration? How does your writing process change when you are working with someone else?

A: I don’t do a lot of collaboration with songwriting. However, I have worked with songwriting teachers in the past. Usually what that looks like is going in for a lesson and, I had this great teacher Devin Sproul, who would be like, “what do you want to, what do you want to write a song about today?” And then I would start talking and she would be typing up what I was saying and then help organize it a little bit. That was one form of collaboration that I did. Collaboration is something that I want to do more of. I think because it feels like such a personal and intimate process, it might be hard for me to be that vulnerable around someone random. But I do think it's like a really important skill set to have so I hope to do more of it in the future. 

Q: What is your weekly life like in terms of music? 

A: First semester of college I pretty much took a break from music after the talent show. I did a couple other performances, and I wrote some songs, but in terms of routine, I was focusing on classes and meeting people and getting adjusted to a new place. Over break I redesigned what I hoped my life would be like here. I have a voice lesson right after this so I'm going back to voice lessons. I just made a website which will be up shortly and I have a manager now too. I'm really excited about that. Hopefully all those things will make music more part of my everyday life. I'm learning more and then also sharing more. Those are my goals for the immediate future. 

Q: When you have a goal, what is the first step you take to achieve it? 

A: I think it starts with the little things. Sometimes when you want to do something, you’re back at spot zero again. You're constantly coming back to that zero spot. You just have to do the little things consistently and try to do a little bit every day. With collaboration, just invite a person to play with you. So I would say, start small, do the things that you can do now, and it will build. Once the ball gets rolling, that’s the hardest part, but it will build. If you put work out there, work's gonna come back.