Crooning the 30 or so songs she’s written so far, Anna Lynn Fermin can sound like Rosanne Cash or Suzanne Vega or Patsy Cline. Or “Jane Siberry and Victoria Williams,” she readily admits. Fermin is still forging a musical persona–one that’ll embrace “straight-ahead country and western as well as eclectic folk influenced by bluegrass and by the beat of flamenco music.” Right now what she has in her favor is a pure, agile, vibrant voice, the kind that helps pave the way to pop divadom. What she fears most is to be labeled as “America’s only Filipina country singer.”
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Fermin’s family immigrated to this country in 1972, when she was almost one. “In Manila there were two classes–the rich and the poor. My folks weren’t rich so they thought my sister and I could get a much better education and life in the States,” she says. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, where her parents found jobs as factory workers, the family eased into comfortable, churchgoing, middle-class routines. Fermin’s upbringing was typical of many first-generation Asian-American kids: strict, relatively insular, and filled with violin and piano lessons. “My dad is a big opera fan,” she says, “so of course we listened to a lot of classical stuff at home. He and a voice coach, in fact, nudged me into singing in public.”
“I pull influences from the air, from tunes I hear on radio,” says Fermin, whose approach is largely intuitive and unencumbered by such technicalities as notation. “Words then come to me. The first of my lyrics owe an obvious debt to country. Later on, some words took more than months to find. More often than not I write on impulse.” When she quit her full-time job, Fermin came up with “Heaven in My New Shoes”–a song on her self-produced CD–as a bittersweet ballad to starting over. A broken affair prompted the melancholic “August Moon.” A description by her mother of her hometown in the Philippines resulted in the Spanish-twanged “San Carlos,” whose sun-drenched nostalgia is rare in her output. “I’ve discovered that most of the songs are self-accusatory while dealing with the rut I’m in. They’re not terribly hopeful–through them I seem to say that adversity is my best friend.”
