She Shoots, She Scores
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Fermin’s parents moved to Wisconsin when she was just a year old. Her father had been an accountant and her mother a teacher in Manila, but in the U.S. their poor English forced them into factory jobs. Her father, who played rudimentary piano and violin, got Anna started in piano lessons when she was just four; she continued studying for the next 14 years and picked up the violin as well. In junior high she sang light classical and Broadway fare in choir, but when it came time to attend college she decided to study visual art, not music. She heard the Earle tune just after graduating from the School of the Art Institute, and it stuck in her head during the next several months, which she spent in the Philippines and Japan.
When she returned, she borrowed an old classical guitar from an aunt. “I asked her to teach me a couple chords,” she says. “The first song I ever wrote was a country song, just because I only knew three chords and it sounded like a country ballad. It just seemed natural to me.” Writing and performing songs became her primary focus, and over the next few years she spun through a revolving door of day jobs, working as a coat-check girl at the Park West, a waitress at Wishbone (where she was befriended and encouraged by Freakwater’s Janet Bean), and a production assistant at a TV-commercial production company. Playing at open mikes at the Abbey Pub, she met other musicians, and by late 1994, when she formed the band Anaboy, she’d written more than 20 songs. But over the next year, she says, she began to realize that her rock-oriented friends couldn’t re-create the sounds she heard in her head, and by the end of 1995 only drummer Paul Bivans remained with her.
Fermin celebrates the release of Things to Come on Thursday, June 10, at FitzGerald’s; Lloyd Maines, Janet Bean, and Robbie Fulks will sit in with Trigger Gospel. The music starts at 7:30 with a set by Maines and Austin singer-songwriter Terri Hendrix, but the party begins at 6, when early birds can join in a free celebratory feast–including a couple of Filipino specialties cooked by Fermin’s mom and cousins.
