Anya Van Rose

Playful and sweet grounded by dark guitar-driven grit, Anya Van Rose gives you honesty with a taste of Bubblegrunge. Her recent record Lucky Stars, is the afterglow of a starry-eyed daydream where perspective shifts from head-in-the-clouds reverie to the fiercely feminine.

“The making of this record was deeply influenced by the energy, sparkle, and grit you’d expect to see at an Anya Van Rose show. ” she explains. “I wanted to develop the production around creating an experience for the listener and also bring in elements that you wouldn’t hear live. I think I just wanted to create something that felt authentic to me first. I knew that it would translate to those who were meant to embrace it the way I did.”

Given the story arc of this record, it’s fitting that the eleven-track LP opens with an invitation to get in Anya’s car. “I felt a little cheeky opening the record with chimes of the ‘no-seatbelt warning’ field recorded from my car. I wanted the listener to be prompted to buckle up and give them the idea they were about to embark on a journey in the passenger seat as they listened to the record beginning to end.” Anya says.

The history of Anya’s band spans the MySpace era where her and classmate Austin Wolfe would upload original music to the platform and exchange feedback over dial-up internet. Austin was as cool as being an upperclassman could afford him and was writing his own songs under the influence of Connor Oberst and Bob Dylan at the time. Anya sets the scene in her new song “So Much 4 That” where she remembers one of the first times she met Austin at battle of the bands as the new kid at school. Up until that point, she had only dreamed of playing music in a band and spent summers playing guitar and learning to sing harmony around the campfire with her cousins.

She recalls the first time she publicly shared a song in the school cafeteria to an audience sipping on punch and cookies. She sang a song about a boy she met at “Choral Camp” (aka summer-camp for kids who love choir) to a room full of parents and teachers at an after school poetry event. She was feeling scholastic as they handed her an “Outstanding Participation Certificate” signed by the principal but it wasn’t exactly what she was expecting after baring her soul. It wasn’t until she found herself starry-eyed in the high school gymnasium at Battle of the Bands that she realized she would have rather been on a stage under bright lights among her peers. There were kids in high school playing loud guitars in a room where only a couple of chaperones were on guard– she dreamed of being on that stage.

In 2010, Anya began attending an informal songwriting gathering in a historic home on a brick road in Canton, OH. The ever-evolving group that became known as “Bring Your Song” captured some of Anya’s earliest recordings (if you don’t count the lost MySpace tracks) as Ron and Connie Flack would set out chairs and a microphone in their living room. Their home became a sacred space where creatives gathered and listened intently. After several years, a recording studio known today as Realgrey Records was built on the property by Flack himself and the songwriters whose songs echoed through the halls.

Inspired by the buzzing community of creatives that surrounded the studio, Anya would bring the same guitar that once buzzed beneath her fingers as she learned to play her first songs at the age of 12. She recalls the first time her dad set a guitar in her lap and taught her to play Beatles songs one chord at a time. In retrospect, Anya realizes how formative her time at “Bring Your Song” was as she wrote about loss. Her songwriting raised questions over her father’s passing and helped her contextualize his death and legacy. She wrestled with the reality that he would never hear the songs he inspired her to write. For Anya, peace was a stubborn reckoning but songwriting helped her feel the pulse of her experience verse after verse.

In 2018, Anya started her band after bass player/high school classmate Austin Wolfe and original guitarist John King unbeknownst to each other said “If you ever start another band, I want to be in it.” The three of them were songwriters that had spent the past decade taking turns playing stages and attending each other’s shows. Austin and John both had their own full length records and Anya had always dreamed of making a record of her own. Consequently, they began working together on arranging a set of Anya’s new songs.

Later that year, Anya was nominated by Realgrey Records to track a song at a full-weekend workshop with Weathervane Music spearheaded by Brian McTear. Anya and the staff at Realgrey knew McTear through the “Shaking Through” docu-series that takes you through the recording process with artists like Waxahatchee, Hop Along, Sharon Van Etten and Sufjan Stevens in his Philadelphia based recording studio. McTear, Ron Flack, and a room full of producers and engineers spent the weekend at Realgrey implementing Weathervane’s recording and mixing process featuring Anya and her band. After the two-day workshop, her song “Flies” was born and appeared as the first track on her debut EP “Golden Age.”

In the summer of 2022, Anya teamed up with Claymore Pictures and set designer Magan McLaughlin to film a music video for her single and title track Lucky Stars. Anya had her Whitney Houston moment as it becomes apparent that she is “every woman” in each scene of her parade themed music video. (Spoiler alert!) After filming that summer, the parade float she designed for the music video took to the streets in the same parade she used to march and play clarinet in her high school marching band. With 200,000 people in attendance, Anya channeled her inner-Ferris Bueller on her award winning float in the nationally televised Pro-Football Hall of Fame Parade. Her float won first place in the DIY Parade Float category and she made history as the first musical act to play on a float in the parade that first stepped-off in 1963. Massillon, OH based drummer Austin Popovich joined the band that day on Anya’s parade float and has been making history with the band ever since.

Today, Austin Wolfe and Austin Popovich have both been promoted to Anya’s Myspace top 8. They are excited to bring you Lucky Stars that they proudly recorded at Realgrey Records among the surrounding community of creatives in sunny Canton, Ohio.


Follow Anya and her band’s upcoming releases and shows on her website at www.anyavanrose.com. Stay up to date by following her Facebook and Instagram accounts @anyavanrose.