It wasn’t until Poway native Anna Vaus left California to pursue music in Nashville that she realized just how much of an impact her roots had on her.
Vaus found her voice in childhood, performing private concerts for her pets and creating boredom-induced music videos with her brother. Around age 6, she began writing songs. “I felt like it was just a creative outlet,” Vaus says. “I love writing as a way to capture what I am feeling and take it outside my body, experience it, and be able to vent.”
Nevertheless, she didn’t seriously consider pursuing music until her time at Poway High School, when she began taking the stage at open mics, including at the now-shuttered Café Lily. “I would drag my friends out and have them be emotional and moral support while I played these songs about boys I had crushes on,” Vaus recalls.
Vaus left San Diego at 17 to pursue a degree in songwriting at Belmont University in Nashville. By her junior year, Vaus had scored a publishing deal, which led to gigs at iconic Nashville venues like the Grand Ole Opry and The Bluebird Cafe.
Yet, there was a dark side to her success—pressure from others in the industry, who inundated her with critiques about everything from the color of her hair to what lyrics she needed to sing to sound like a “real” country artist.
“I spent a few years with those people around me and felt like I was kind of just trying to be someone that they wanted me to be,” she says. “When I started to really look at the songs I was writing and [the way I was] presenting myself, I was like, ‘Man, this isn’t totally who I am.’”
So, she pivoted, focusing on crafting music that was an authentic mosaic of all of her inspirations and experiences for her debut record. The resulting album, Downhill From Here, is a love letter to herself and everything she appreciates about the California coast—the sun on her skin, the beaches in Del Mar, the wind of Laurel Canyon in her hair. The record dropped in March.
“I felt so much more myself and where I am supposed to be [with] an album that is my story and is 100 percent me,” Vaus says. “I call it Laurel Canyon country—to me, it is folk meets pop meets the natural influences of the canyons and the sky. It feels very breezy.”
Vaus returns to San Diego at The Casbah on April 1.
