Growing up in a family with a lot of children there is never a dull moment. The second youngest of five children born to Daniel and Wendy Marren in suburban Phoenix (also known as Scottsdale) Arizona, Anna learned from a young age that it was necessary to excel in order to stand out in a crowd. The daughter of a high school music teacher (Wendy) and an anesthesiologist (Daniel), achieving greatness in the Arizona education system was necessity in the Marren household.

Anna, who was desperate to be noticed amongst her siblings, became very driven as a child as a result of this influence. She was determined to show that she too could get the highest marks and be a star of her extracurricular activities like her siblings. Her first goal wasn’t too much of a challenge; thanks to genetics and nurturing she had a decent knack for academics and was able to come out at the top of her class with minimal effort applied. However, when it came to sports, Anna found herself too uncoordinated to follow in the footsteps of her older sisters on the softball and track teams, and too shy to shine in the lights of the drama department like her older brother. After trying her hand at seemingly every activity available up through junior high school without much success, Anna was becoming frustrated with her inferiority. Mrs. Marren always kept her children surrounded by music, but, she was a strict mother with whom it was difficult to get close and thus, none of her kids ever took up the hobby, almost as an act of rebellion against her. While Anna was distant with her mother like the rest of her siblings, she found herself becoming more and more curious about music as she got older. It wasn’t until the summer between 7th and 8th grade, when after years of sitting on the steps after bedtime listening to her mother play the piano, Anna finally mustered up the courage for lessons. Wendy was initially reluctant but ultimately agreed and spent the next several years teaching her daughter how to make the ivories do what she wanted them to do.

Thrilled that she finally found her niche, Anna took music and ran with it. She played every night for hours on piano, eventually joining the jazz band when she got to high school where she met her best friend and first love, Jonathon Greene. Jon played the guitar, an instrument that Anna still finds attractive to this day, and was big into grunge music and D & D. They spent the first two years of high school holed up in his attic bedroom while he introduced her to all the great classic guitarists as well as the best modern bands. It wasn’t long before Anna was able to talk him into giving her guitar lessons and by the time their relationship ended during her junior year, she’d managed to become at least proficient on the instrument. Now that she had two separate means of making music, Anna set her sights on writing songs. She’d always kept a journal of the daily happenings in her life and all the emotions that came with them since she’d never been one to talk about her feelings, but she struggled for a long time with turning these feelings into songs. During her senior year of high school in 1997 Anna met fellow musician and a prominent fixture in the Phoenix indie scene, Joe Rickson, after one of his shows at a café in Glendale. Impressed by her maturity and musical prowess, Joe invited Anna out for a date and the rest as they say was history. Within a matter of weeks he was teaching her about song structure and translating thoughts to melodies. Once she picked up a style Anna was on a roll and she hasn’t stopped since.

After high school, Anna’s parents assumed their daughter would follow the usual route of a Marren child, college at Arizona State University for a BA before moving back to the suburbs to get married and pop out a couple of kids, however, Joe had bigger ideas for he and Anna and she was so enamored that she was happy to go along for the ride. Just a year after her graduation, she and Joe were living together in a shabby apartment in the inner city. Dissatisfied with their hum-drum life in Phoenix where they had achieved maximum local exposure, it was only a matter of time before Joe began to get restless. In the fall of 1998 he was able to convince Anna that Los Angeles was where they needed to be for the sake of their music. It made sense and she didn’t give it much thought before agreeing, the two of them picking up and moving to West Hollywood at the turn of the new year.

Anna always had a good head on her shoulders and a ninja-like focus when it came to reaching her goals, while LA provided a whole slew of distractions by way of drugs and partying that Phoenix did not, she had little to no trouble avoiding the lifestyle. The same, however, could not be said for Joe. While Anna was having little difficulty booking shows at café’s and bars, her boyfriend was struggling. Not content being in the background of Anna’s success, he took to drugs and alcohol to help fill the void. Not even a year later Joe developed a pretty nasty cocaine habit, spending literally every dime he made to feed his addiction. Anna politely ignored it for a while, then tried intervention, and ultimately gave up on the relationship just a month into the new millennium.

Newly single and feeling pretty alone in the big city, Anna concentrated all her efforts on her music. She went from playing to four people on Wednesday nights at a near by bar to being picked up by an indie label by the end of 2000. For the first time she felt independent, success, and happy. At the beginning of 2001 she started work on her first studio album, Cosmos, which was released in April of that year. She was playing shows every night and living in a nice loft apartment, totally content living as a low grade musician and hanging out with friends every night in what she considered one of the coolest cities in the world. While hanging out at a show one fateful night Anna ran into another young musician named James Milton. He was new in town and shared a similar disposition of being serious, intelligent and above all things responsible (a trait Anna valued after her previous relationship). She and James hit it off almost immediately, chatting about music and sharing a couple drinks over the course of the night. They made plans to meet up several days later for Anna to give him her famous self-guided tour of LA and didn’t stop going on dates until 2 years later when Anna broke it off with him to move to New York after being offered a major label deal with Columbia Records.

Anna has since released two albums on Columbia Starting Over 2004, and The Hiding Place 2007 to mass critical acclaim. While she’s yet to reach the status of household name, she is a prominent fixture in the indie pop scene and was one of the headliner’s at the Coachella Music Festival in 2008. She recently moved back to LA from New York in early 2008 and is in the midst of planning for a fall tour before she takes a break to record her next studio album, due out in 2009.