A Dirty Dozen with ANNIE DAVIS from TRASHY ANNIE – June 2025

According to a recent press release: “Teaming up for the first time with rock legend Thommy Price, best known for his work with Joan Jett and Billy Idol, Trashy Annie delivers a track that grabs you by the collar and drags you into the kind of night your mama warned you about. Inspired by dirty biker bars, seedy motels, casual hookups, and the brutal honesty of life on the road, “Some Strange” is a whiskey-soaked, guitar-driven anthem that harkens back to the era when rock and roll was unfiltered and a little dangerous. Trashy Annie is an Austin-based rock band fronted by award-winning songwriter Annie Davis, known for blending outlaw-country with hard rock energy. Formed during the pandemic, the band quickly gained attention for their raw, genre-defying sound and high-energy performances. Davis, who taught herself guitar in her mid-40s, leads the group with a rebellious spirit and unapologetic authenticity. Their debut album, Sticks & Stones, showcases Annie’s unique style and storytelling prowess. With a growing fanbase and a reputation for electrifying live shows, Trashy Annie continues to blow the roof off bars across the US with their fresh, story-driven approach to rock and roll.” We get Annie herself to discuss new music, influences, and more…

1. Tell us a little about your latest release.  What might a fan or listener not grab the first or second time they listen through?  Are there any hidden nuggets you put in the material or that only diehard fans might find?

“Some Strange” ain’t your mama’s love song. This song was co-written with the legendary Thommy Price, the same badass behind the drums for Joan Jett and Billy Idol. Some Strange is a dirty, diesel-soaked postcard from life on the road. This track doesn’t sugarcoat a thing. It’s not love, it’s pure lust born in the chaos of a biker bar – sweaty, reckless, sealed in a $40 motel room with a flickering vacancy sign and dirty sheets. This song is full of easter eggs that only bikers will understand, like references to the Buffalo Chip Saloon and Gremlin Bells. If you know, you know.

2. What got you into music, and can you tell us about the moment you realized you wanted to be a musician?

I was 11 when I borrowed a beat-up school trumpet, all dented to hell and smelling like spit valves and dust, and taught myself to play. I grew up in a very poor family. Food stamps, welfare, the whole deal. Music wasn’t a dreamy escape; it was survival. It got me into college. Then I shelved it in my twenties, got a doctorate, built a business… did the whole “real life” thing. But that fire never died. It came roaring back the day I picked up a cheap guitar decades later and started bleeding songs onto the strings. At 44, I threw together my first rock band, hit the road, and never looked back. Playing music was never a fantasy for me, it was a necessity. It still is. I don’t want to do this… I have to. Before I’ve even poured my coffee, lyrics are chewing holes in my brain and melodies are punching their way out. Like Duke Ellington said, “Music isn’t a job—it’s a damn compulsion.”

3. Building on that, is there a specific song, album, performer, or live show that guided your musical taste?

When I was a teenager, I would get hired every year as a stagehand to run spotlight for the big Clark County Fair shows in the summers.  Sometimes, we’d get to see up and coming acts like LeAnn Rimes when she was only 13 and belting out “Blue.”  But mostly we got acts that were washed up, and playing at the fair was their last, dying gasp.  Their exhaustion was so obvious. I knew I’d never want to be on stage unless it was high energy and engaging. Those acts weren’t connecting with their audiences and that’s the entire point of performing live. If you don’t care about connecting with your fans in a raw and vulnerable way, then go be a YouTuber or a studio musician and stay off the stage.

4. If you could call in any one collaborator to do a song with, who would it be, and why?

Oh, Kid Rock for sure! Devil Without a Cause dropped right when I was figuring out who the hell I was, and by the time Cocky rolled around, I was all in. He doesn’t color inside the lines—he blows the lines up. One minute it’s rap, next it’s southern rock, then he’s got you crying into your whiskey with some outlaw country ballad. Pushing the RANDOM button on Spotify for Kid Rock is like putting in a badass mix tape from a friend who just gets you; a little Southern Rock, Rap, Hard Rock and Country all in one place. His tracks “What I Learned Out on the Road” and “Cowboy” inspired my latest single “Some Strange.” They’re cut from the same dusty cloth—full of grit, lust, and truth only the road can teach you.

5. What is your favorite activity when out of the studio and/or not on tour?  What do you like to do to unwind?

It might be a surprise to people but I’m not just a full time musician, I am also still a CEO. I run my company, a biomechanical analysis company called RunLab®, from the road. I started the company in 2013 and even though it might sound a little weird, I unwind by spending time reading about hip retroversion and tibial torsion. It uses an entirely different part of my brain than music. I’m also a little bit of a thrill seeker and have done Ironman triathlons, adventure races, and I’m a big mountain biker, so I spend a lot of time outdoors both on and off the road. I actually ran every single day in 2024! I tend to have a hard time shutting my brain off at night and to REALLY unwind I prefer cheap champagne, pad thai, and finding every random documentary about sister wives that I can dig up.

6. How would you describe your music to someone who’d never listened to you before? What is the one comparison a reviewer or fan has made that made you cringe or you disagreed with?

We are bit genre-fluid, but I would describe us as unapologetic rock and roll. At this stage in the game, most of the people who come to our shows are often discovering us for the first time, so many people want to give me their opinions on what we sound like.  Joan Jett is a common one and I also like when fans bring up powerhouses like Janis Joplin or Courtney Love.  What I disagree with is typically only being compared to other female artists. I am not a badass female rocker. I am a badass rocker. Dolly Parton isn’t amazing because she has boobs, she is just AMAZING.

7. When your band is hanging out together, who cooks, who gets the drinks in, and who is first to crack out the acoustic guitars for a singalong?

We travel around in a 15 passenger van nicknamed Trashy Vannie.  The more important question for us is who does the driving!  I tend to drive the gear out to our first tour stop and then the boys take it from there and get us from city to city. I drive the gear home at the end of the tour, and while it’s a lot of time on the road by myself I enjoy it. It’s a good chunk of time for solving problems and writing music. Miles (Bass) and Amir (Guitar) make sure we are always stocked up on beer (crappy champagne for me), and weed gummies, which I learned a long time ago are the key to a good night sleep on the road. Touring schedules are unpredictable. We sometimes go to bed at 9 p.m., sometimes 4am, and sometimes not at all because we are driving through the night to make our next city in time for sound check. Finding a way to quickly shut down the brain and come down from a high energy show is important to being able to sleep so that, in the words of my friend Roger Clyne of the Refreshments… we can get back up and we can do it all over again. Blake (Lead Guitar) likes to cook for us and turns on the stove whenever we end up in one place for more than a day or two, but we’re usually so tired after shows that cooking is just too much to comprehend. We will sometimes talk about making a big 5 star dinner after the show and then end up eating at a gas station. Which is… as it turns out … where I also happen to buy all my best hats. Ryan (Drums) helps me manage the tour logistics and we lovingly joke that he is 27 going on 67 and is simultaneously the youngest and oldest one in the band.

8. When was the last time you were starstruck and who was it?

I don’t really get starstruck because famous people are still just people, they shit just like everybody else. However… I taught myself to play the drums and was playing somewhat regularly with some cool cats in Austin. One night after a show, my friend Danny B Harvey asked if I had some sticks in my van for his friend from out of town. And into this seedy little dive bar on a Wednesday night in east Austin walks Clem Burke of Blondie. He ended up playing my drum kit and it was one of the cooler experiences I’ve ever had in music.

9. What is the best part of being a musician? If you could no longer be a musician for whatever reason, what would be your dream job?

I don’t think I actually have a “dream job.” To me, a job is something you do to make money so you can enjoy the rest of your life. It sounds super cliche, but the old adage “do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” has always resonated with me. That being said, I also don’t need much. The gypsy lifestyle fits me well: living on the road, never staying anywhere very long, cheap hotels, taking showers in the sink of Walmart bathrooms. When people ask me what kind of animal I would be if I could be anything, I always say a cockroach. I can live through ANYTHING. As long as I have my guitar, my songwriting notebook, and my mountain bike, I’m good.

10. What is one question you have always wanted an interviewer to ask – and what is the answer? Conversely, what question are you tired of answering?

I can wrap both of these questions up in one answer. I wish someone would ask me about influences outside of music. Asking “who are your musical influences” is an antiquated question in the era of genre-fluid mashups, streaming playlists that jump artist to artist, and electronic music that has been built by 13 year olds from their bedrooms. I just read the book GEEK LOVE where a young couple realize that no one is interested in coming to their circus any more because everyone has seen a fire eater or elephants. They realize that they need to create a performance that is freakier and crazier than anything else out there.  It reminded me that to get people to our live shows, they need to leave feeling more alive because they saw something they’ve never seen before. I live in Austin, TX and every corner has someone playing a guitar with incredible skill; but being on a stage and performing takes so much more than just strumming a guitar while wearing flip flops and cargo shorts and belting out Neil Diamond covers on 6th Street.

11. Looking back over your career, is there a single moment or situation you feel was a misstep or you would like to have a “do over,” even if it didn’t change your current situation?

I would have shown up for my Washington State trumpet audition during my senior year of high school. I was too scared I would fail, and instead of taking the risk I ran away from it and LITERALLY hid in a bathroom.

12. If you could magically go back in time and be a part of the recording sessions for any one record in history, which would you choose – and what does that record mean to you?

How could I NOT choose the Beatles? I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the recording of Sgt Pepper. Aside from being a drug-fueled masterpiece, they reportedly tracked 700 hours for that album. The idea of seeing the way things were done on tape in the analog days, and before auto-tune, Pro Tools, backing tracks, and digital effects became commonplace would have been an incredible experience. We take so many things for granted these days and it’s hard to imagine doing an album before the internet, or even cell phones, were invented.

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Category: Interviews