ANNA REY: CLARITY, VULNERABILITY, AND EMOTIONAL TRUTH

Anna Rey is a musician, singer, songwriter, and composer whose work is rooted in emotional honesty and creative restraint. With reflective songwriting, striking vocal clarity, and a deep commitment to her craft, Anna creates music that invites listeners to pause, feel, and connect. Performing and collaborating nationally and internationally, her work spans intimate solo performances and full-band settings, always driven by a desire to engage, inspire, and create safe spaces through sound.

Below, Anna speaks candidly about emotion as a songwriting tool, the balance between technique and feeling, the power of collaboration, and what she hopes audiences carry with them after experiencing her music.

Your music is often described as reflective and emotionally driven. Where do those emotions usually come from when you’re writing—personal experience, observation, or something more instinctive?

Many of the emotions for my songs come from both personal experience and observation. Sometimes from my own encounters with people, especially in my songs February Nights and Impatient, and others are more from watching the people around me and drawing from their emotions and stories they've told me, such as an unreleased song of mine inspired by something my brother went through that I used as a base to mix my own emotions and experiences in with the topic. I find it useful to stop and look around when I'm finding it hard to write songs, the key to unlocking the next best song is usually right in front of you.

Your vocals and compositions have a real sense of clarity and restraint. How do you balance technical precision with emotional expression when you’re creating a song?

When writing, being a self-taught guitarist, most of it comes down to experimentation to try to replicate the composition I'm hearing in my head, which mostly follows the vocal melodies and scansion. During the production process I try to be as involved as possible when deciding what else is needed/not needed in the song with my producer, Rees Broomfield, where we try to just enhance the emotions of the songs with other elements to help ensure they don't distract from it. Sometimes it's easy to get carried away with what would sound really cool in a mix vs what's actually needed to make the song effective.

You’ve collaborated with a range of artists across writing and performance. What do collaborations bring out in you that working solo doesn’t, and how do you choose who to work with?

Collaborations, I feel, spark a different sense of creativity by having someone else to bounce ideas off of, and usually lead to creating songs outside of my usual writing and genre style. When choosing who to work with, it ultimately comes down to how comfortable I feel with someone, as I find the songwriting process quite raw and vulnerable, so I want to be able to communicate openly and honestly with whoever I'm working with.

Live performance seems central to your practice. How does a song change for you once it’s taken out of the studio and performed in front of an audience?

Performing live helps to unlock new emotion and expression for me, allowing me to be more experimental in my delivery of the song that isn't reflected in the recorded versions, and feel the songs differently emotionally. Often, the songs end up with more sonic layers than the stripped back live versions, so I try to utilise the live scenarios to differentiate the songs and give people a reason to come and see them live by giving them a new experience of the songs they already know and love. Additionally, I find performing my unreleased songs live even more useful, as it allows me to explore the different directions I can take the songs in the pre-production and recording process.

As you continue performing nationally and internationally, what do you hope listeners take away from an Anna Rey show or record—emotion, connection, reflection, or something else entirely?

I want to give a voice and outlet to those that haven't yet found the words for how they're feeling, whether that's live or in the recorded song. I would like audiences/fans to feel seen, listened to, and at the very least, feel safe at my performances and enjoy the music. If anyone can connect in any way with me or my music, then I've achieved more than I could dream of.