Features, Music January 15, 2010 By Annie Rudd

So are you still DJing much these days? I loved the DJ-Kicks that you did a few years ago.

Yeah! I’m actually DJing quite a lot. I did a DJ tour in the US. I was there, playing a couple of gigs in New York, LA, San Francisco, Miami, and that was really fun. So I’m gonna keep on doing that I think. It’s really great, but in March and April I’m going to do some live gigs as well.

Your albums present a more complicated picture of female attitudes toward love and sexuality than a lot of female musicians, especially pop musicians, tend to offer. There are songs that talk about love in an earnest, innocent way, like in “Heartbeat” and in “Bad Times”, and then others that are more jaded and even dismissive of men, like “Chewing Gum” and “Take You Home” — so your albums present a wide range of emotions and experiences from a woman’s point of view. Can you talk a bit about that?

Definitely. I mean, I’ve been having some relationships off and on, and stuff’s been weird and definitely it inspires the way I’m writing as well. I don’t know, I’ve always been that kind of girl that’s been hanging out with a lot of guys, so I’ve never really been very much aware that I’m a woman, in a way. I always thought as a child that I was more like a boy — I was dressing like a boy, I almost thought that I was a boy. Everybody else thought I was a boy [Laughs] ’cause I looked like a boy! Later, I thought that, “Yeah, I guess I’m not a boy.” I don’t know, it’s definitely very important for me, but I don’t know this is what I’m thinking about until I sit down and write. It’s not something I go around thinking about every day. There’s a big difference between being a female artist and a man, though, and I became more aware of this when I started DJing, because there were not that many female DJs around. I remember [one night] there were these guys coming over, all surprised, going, “Whoa! We’ve been dancing all night, we just noticed that there was a woman [DJ]!” So that was weird, because I’m never really thinking that way myself. You understand it more and more, the more you get into the business, because it is a lot of men. So I guess I’m aware of it, but again, it’s not the sort of thing I think about every day.

You’re a pretty seasoned musician at this point. You’ve been making music for well over a decade. Was this something you always knew you wanted to do?

I always wanted to become two things: an archeologist and a musician. [Laughs] From a very early age, I started writing poems, and then I started in a band called Suitcase. I think I was even more ambitious back then. And then when I released my first song under the name Annie, “The Greatest Hit”, I was more releasing it for fun and seeing how it went. But I always wanted to do music, definitely. It was a dream of mine for a long time. I feel very, very lucky.

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