Like mountains born of the violence of plate tectonics, it’s difficult to believe something so beautiful could come of something so dreadful. Nashville born Sunny War’s music was born of her journey through homelessness, addiction and pain, infusing it with wisdom worldly but never weary. Growing up with her single mom between Nashville and Rochester, New York, War picked up an uncle’s guitar and was soon creating songs. While she loved AC/DC and Mötley Crüe as a kid, she discovered X, Minutemen and Bad Brains, swirling the glaring urgency of metal with the unflinching x-ray lens of punk.

She took off at 13, jumping trains and eventually busking on Venice Beach, where a documentary maker captured a teenage War creating guitar sounds so exquisitely pure it was like the sky emptied into her fingers. She says guitar can be a new thing forever if you let yourself be experimental, and lives that in her music, from her early acoustic punk band Anus Kings to her recent album Anarchist Gospel, where Gillian Welch guitarist Dave Rawlings and Birds of Chicago’s Allison Russell complement War’s folk homage to pain and hope.

War said recently a lot of her songs are just tantrums, then she feels better after writing them. Well, that explains how the plate-tectonic upheaval of her heart leads to humbling winsomeness.

— Mary-Lynn Wardle