Sunny War has a unique and beguiling personality. Recently introducing her song “Big Baby” at DC’s Songbyrd Music House, she explained that the title of the song refers to the name she has for her guitar. She went on to say she got Big Baby “from a creepy guy on Craiglist” (as though one meets any other type of guy on that site!). She described the situation as “either I get a guitar or I go missing.”

Needless to say, Sunny got the guitar and didn’t go missing, a fact for which everyone in the crowd at Songbyrd was surely grateful. For 75 minutes, she held the crowd in rapt attention, playing solo with just her acoustic guitar. It takes a special kind of artist to command that level of attention in that format, and Sunny is definitely a special artist. She is a fine guitar player, using a fingerpicking style that hearkens back to the great country blues guitarists.

Sunny told the audience that, before moving to Nashville a few years ago, “I thought I was playing country because no one else on Venice Beach was fingerpicking.” She introduced “New Day” as “the first country song I wrote when I was 16.”