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Photo by Talia Hodge
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Photo by Talia Hodge
Clad in a frilly pink dress and a blue cowgirl hat, singer-songwriter Anya Van Rose performed atop a white hand-painted carousel horse with a silver streamer mane — and made history in front of about 200,000 people. The distinctive bubblegrunge artist and her bandmates spent two hours playing four songs on loop as part of the 2022 Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement parade. They became the first musical act to play on a float in the event’s 60-plus-year history.
“We were all in awe,” says the 34-year-old Canton resident, whose offstage name is Anya Antonavich, “like, Are we really real-life Ferris Buellers? It was so fun!”
Antonavich has always had stars in her eyes. At 12, she started playing guitar with her dad, learning Beatles songs like “Across the Universe.”
“I felt a lot of childlike wonder — what the possibilities were,” recalls Antonavich, who is now the studio manager at Realgrey Records.
For years, she quietly released songs on MySpace. At 16, her world imploded when her father died. By 18, she was fervently penning songs about loss. In 2010, Antonavich started workshopping songs about her dad at informal Bring Your Song meetups, which were held in a Canton home on the property where Realgrey Records would later open. After completing a Shaking Through workshop in 2019, she recorded the contemplative “Flies” with acclaimed producer and Sufjan Stevens collaborator Brian McTear.
Photo by Talia Hodge
“I had written about flies on the windowsill,” recalls Antonavich, who put the moody track on her 2020 debut EP, “Golden Age.” “It represented time passing. … How long do I have to wait for what I want?”
For her latest album, 2023’s “Lucky Stars,” she flipped the script toward dynamic, guitar-driven bubblegum rock.
“I thought, Why don’t I 180 this and write something happy?” says Antonavich, whose band now includes Austin Wolfe, Austin Popovich and Devin Johnson. “I wanted to explore the grittier sounds, the happier grooves, things that I could move around to onstage. … I was giving myself permission to do something fun.”
The album’s sparkly, sun-drenched title track came with a sticky-sweet music video that now has over 3,400 views. There were about 50 people on the Claymore Pictures-directed set, including three body doubles. The visionary stars in seven parade-themed scenes and can be seen baton twirling in a hand-dyed pink majorette costume, leaning on a disco ball in a poufy pink pageant dress while riding in a red convertible and blowing a kiss from a 1963 Mayberry cop car driven by a Barney Fife impersonator. I thank my lucky stars for you. After all that I’ve been through. Now you might make my dreams come true, she sings.
Antonavich experimented with unconventional sounds, using a pepper shaker during an emotive guitar solo on “Apology” and a car ignition on “Pretty Please.” Heavier songs, like “In Your Mind,” were influenced by gritty ‘90s guitars. Ruminating on the loss of a relationship, she sings, I’m holding dandelions in the dark. To you, they’re just weeds that I collected from the lawn.
“A lot of what I’ve written about, especially in that song, is letting go,” she says.
It’s the driving force behind her current work: She’s recording songs about her dad, adding orchestral elements to honor the person who ignited her passion for music.
“To not have boundaries and to be open-minded about what could be,” she says, “is so exciting.”
See Her: Westside Bowl with the Vindys, Youngstown, Nov. 16, anyavanrose.com
Photo by Talia Hodge
