Anna Troy’s sound is difficult to pigeonhole. Her music can take excursions into rock, pop and soul with blues and R&B as a foundation. “I don’t limit myself to one genre,” she said. “I just play whatever style of music seems to be working for me and inspiring me at the moment. I want my music to be soulful, with songs that people will remember because of a catchy phrase and melody or intriguing lyrical content.”
Since the release of her debut solo album, “Ain’t No Man” (2006) she has kept increasingly busy. Having assembled a crack backing band, her live schedule has seen her perform at major venues including The House of Blues, The Starlight Bowl, The Belly Up Tavern, The California Center for the Performing Arts and The Casbah. Meanwhile the album itself was nominated for “Best Blues Album” in the 2007 San Diego Music Awards. Add in over a dozen press appearances and double that in TV & Radio appearances to her credit and it’s clear that Troy has made an impression. There aren’t many artists whose stylistic range can have them perform on both country radio station KSON as well as indie rock station FM94.9.
Still in her early twenties, Troy has spent a lifetime immersed in music. It’s evident in her confidence and her brash, playful stage presence. A native San Diegan, she’s become known for her stand-out guitar work but actually started out as a pianist. “I do remember being four and sitting at our 100 year old upright grand piano that we had and tinkling away at the keys. And that is when my mom thought ‘We need to give her piano lessons.” Troy played for eight years, and has rarely touched a keyboard since, although she did take away one valuable lesson from the experience. “We had recitals a few times a year, so I got used to being on stage at a very early age,” she mused.
At the age of twelve, she switched to guitar. “I never really had a passion for the piano. It wasn’t until I picked up a guitar around the age of twelve that everything instantly started to click,” said Troy. She soon began to perform alongside her sister, Lindsey, occasionally joining Joy Eden Harrison or Lisa Sanders for a song at their shows. The pair became perennials at open-mic nights at Mikey’s Coffeehouse in Poway and Java Joe’s Ocean Beach location.
Interestingly, like most budding performers, their sets at the time consisted largely of covers. Perhaps uniquely however, the trio performed songs by other local acts such as Sanders, Jewel and Gregory Page. “I always leaned toward local music,” Troy explained. “I wanted something I could relate to. I wanted to listen to artists that I could actually go see play at a coffee house and then talk to them afterwards. I wanted to be like them.” She proceeds to name a who’s who of the local club scene, including the much missed Bug Guts, Candye Kane and others. “(It was) their albums I would sleep with next to my pillow, and listen to every night before I went to bed.” These days, Troy cites such disparate names as Chuck Berry, The Allman Brothers and Ani DiFranco as early influences, but she still spends any time, not on stage herself, checking out other local gigs.
Troy next worked with Cindy Lee Berryhill, who secured the two sisters’ a demo deal with Warner Brothers. While they recorded three tracks, nothing came of the sessions. But the pair (only 13 and 15 respectively) soon attracted producers Harlan Lansky and Craig Bartok, of the production company was called Matrix Music Works. The Matrix soon secured them a deal with Elektra. In 2002 The Troy’s scored a minor hit with their song “What Do You Do?,” and shooting a big budget video in Los Angeles (with Fleetwood Mac working next door) which was aired on MTV's TRL. Notably the song was included in cult kids film “The Powerpuff Girls.” The siblings even started turning up in the pages of magazines like Teen Vogue.
“It was very surreal,” she recalled. “Honestly, I was really scared of losing my identity and individuality. I think that was my biggest fear was to be influenced into becoming something that I didn’t want to be. All glitz and glam that we experienced during that time was meaningless to me.“ She describes a time spent riding around in limos and wardrobe budgets, walking down the red carpet at industry parties and appearing in all the teen mags. The recording even garnered their producers a Grammy nomination. Luckily her cynical nature, when it comes to the music business, kept her from losing perspective. “The whole ass-kissing thing was so prevalent in this business, it seemed to be everyone’s favorite way of getting things done,” she laughed. “It was so amusing to my sister and me, that we titled our album, Massaging Your Ego. Unfortunately label politics led to the album being dropped from the labels roster just prior to general release. The union with Elektra Records was short lived, but Troy went solo and kept at her craft.
Over the next few years, she once again became a fixture at San Diego coffeehouses building up a repertoire of folk-pop tunes. She released three E.P.’s of solo tracks (some produced by Page). For her debut album she pieced together a collection of tracks that showcased both her song writing and guitar playing, both electric and acoustic picking styles. It was a chance meeting with guitarist Robin Henkel at an open mic that led her to record a blues disc. “He became my mentor,” she said. “He gave me the foundation, of understanding the fundamentals of what blues is all about. I just took those ideas, and ran with them.” A mix of originals and vintage covers, Troy was backed by notable musical friends including Henkel (guitar,bass), Brian “Nucci” Cantrell (drums), Billy Watson and Martin Greaves (keyboards). It was co-produced by Nathan James.
For Troy, “Ain’t No Man” was a labor of love. “I pretty much spent almost two years preparing the album, from the time I started writing the songs for it,” she remarked. ”I wrote the songs for the album with a very specific purpose in mind. I wanted those songs to be powerful enough -and fun enough - to drive an audience crazy with excitement!”
The next step for Troy was assembling her own band. She struck early gold with drummer Megan Carchman, though the remaining spots have remained more fluid until just recently. A half dozen musicians, including keyboardists Mike Reed, Daniel Hartzheim, and Ed Kornhauser as well as fill-ins Bart Mendoza (guitar) and Danny Cress (drums), have shared the stage with Troy as a band member, before she found the perfect combination for her live performances: Carchman, Joe Pomo (bass) and Ian Owen (lead guitar).
2006 - 2007 saw Troy become a respected guitar and ukulele teacher, but the bulk of her time was spent road testing material up and down the coast of Southern California. It’s a never ending tour that has had her playing three gigs in a single day on more than one occasion. 2007 was the year she shot her first big budget solo video, in 3-D no less, but perhaps the most significant event of the year was meeting guitarist Greg Douglass. A former guitarist for The Steve Miller Band and The Greg Kihn Band, Douglass has penned tunes for Eddie Money and Miller, notably “Jungle Love.” Following introductions at a San Diego guitar shop in 2007, she began a weekly song writing session with Douglass. It quickly yielded a continuing bumper crop of material, which set the stage for her forthcoming album, “Wait Another Day.”
Preceded by an E.P. of outtakes (with a bonus live set) the album is set for release during the last quarter of 2008. Containing a concise ten songs, “Wait Another Day,” was in germination for over a year, though the nitty gritty of recording was only a few months in early 2008, off and on. A major departure in every way from her previous effort, fans of Troy’s blues work will find much to like on the new album, but they won’t find much blues. Likewise her detour into indie rock sounds has been tempered. Instead, what we have is something that incorporates all of the above and more, resulting in something closer to classic rock, in the sense that it’s rock with an enormous sense of melody. Of course, there are a few ballads as well.
Five of “Wait Another Day’s” tracks are co-writes between Troy and Douglass. A co-write with Reed rounds out the collaborations. The rest of the compositions are by Troy alone. The CD was co-produced by Troy, Bart Mendoza and Mike Kamoo. Guitarist Owen, joined post recording, but musicians included Carchman and Pomo with guests including Henkel, Watson, Mendoza, Reed and significantly, guitarist Greg Douglass.
As solid as Troy’s work has been in the past, going back to her Elektra days, 2008 looks set to raise the bar ever higher for her, with 2009 penciled in for more extensive touring and more recording. For those who have been waiting for Anna Troy to reach the promise she has shown since she first began hitting San Diego’s stages as a teenager or for those who thought her previous efforts would be hard to top: “Wait Another Day” not only delivers, it confirms Troy is a major talent to watch.
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