A wide spectrum of musical genres will await the crowd at Sunday’s Levitt AMP concert in Galva.

Headliner Sunny War performs music ranging from gospel to blues, from folk to rock, and avant-garde. And the opening act, Lone Pinon, is a New Mexican string band.

Sunny War features Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sunny War,

“I feel like there are two sides of me,” War said. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.”

That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out.

“Everybody is a beast just trying their hardest to be good. That’s what it is to be human. You’re not really good or bad. You’re just trying to stay in the middle of those two things all the time, and you’re probably doing a shitty job of it. That’s okay, because we’re all just monsters,” said War.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with AC/DC, and I loved dramatic ‘80s guitar bands like Motley Crüe,” War continued. “Later, I was obsessed with Bad Brains, the Minutemen, and X.”

True to the punk ethos, her first punk band, the Anus Kings, made music with whatever they had at hand, and what they had at hand were acoustic guitars.

That made them stand out among other Los Angeles groups at the time, and today Sunny is the rare roots artist who covers Ween and can drop a Crass reference into a song (as she does on “Whole”).

“I don’t really make music with a traditional roots audience in mind. I like weird music, outsider music, like Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson,” she said.

Even as she was developing a guitar style that married acoustic punk to country blues, those two sides of Sunny were already at odds. As a teenager, she began drinking heavily, which led to her dropping out of school. She played punk shows, stole and chugged bottles of vodka, and quickly became addicted to heroin and meth.

For money she busked along the boardwalks in Venice Beach, recording an album to sell out of her guitar case and letting that self-destructive side win most of the battles.

But “the body can’t handle both heroin and meth,” she said. “When you’re young, it’s hard to gauge that you’re killing yourself.”

A series of seizures landed her in a sober living facility in Compton, so emaciated that she could only wear children’s pajamas.

Music remained a lifeline, and she fell in with a crew at Hen House Studios in Venice, where over the years she made a series of albums and EPs, including 2018’s With the Sun and 2021’s Simple Syrup.

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries.

Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared–thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

Lone Pinon will take the stage at Galva’s Wiley Park at 6 p.m.

There is no charge for admission to the concert. Those attending should bring lawn chairs. Food stands will be on hand.