By John Powell – GlobalTV.com

Although you can’t stop rock ‘n roll, you certainly can stop a tribe on Survivor from winning. The ill-fated Kele Tribe has lost every single challenge thus far. The latest casualty is rocker ‘Trashy’ Annie Davis who couldn’t break on through to the other side of the Kele and its tight core alliance.

John Powell: Hey, Annie, it’s great to be talking to you today! How are you?

Annie Davis: I am doing great! How are you?

John Powell: Fine! Thank you! Now this is a real special interview for me, because finally, after all these years, I get to talk to another trumpet player. I’m going to date myself here but I had trumpet in band class in high school. We had a cool music teacher. He taught us things like Another One Bites the Dust, Chariots of Fire, like stuff like that. Isn’t it true? Don’t the trumpet players get all the best parts?

Annie Davis: (laughs) Oh, all the best parts! I think it’s the best instrument! I’m a little bit biased but I started out trying to play the trombone but I have really abnormally short little T-Rex arms. So I was like, this is never gonna work but also way less cool than the trumpet. So, yeah, it’s an amazing instrument!

John Powell: I found your story very interesting. So, before we get into the Survivor stuff, you grew up as I did. I grew up with a single mom so there was a lot to overcome. In that sense, you made a success of yourself, own your own business and you decided to pivot and jump into music. Tell us why, how that all happened, because that’s a very interesting story.

Annie Davis: Thanks for asking that, actually…I grew up single parent household, food stamps, welfare, very poor and so I knew there was going to be no money for college. So in my little fifth grade brain, I was like: ‘I know! I’ll be a musician! I’ll teach myself to play because then I’ll always be able to make money! (laughs) That was a flawed approach but whatever. (laughs)

I taught myself trumpet. I put myself through college on trumpet scholarship and then ended up sort of making this pivot because I realized: Oh crap, how am I going to make money as a musician?

Ended up back to school, getting my doctorate, starting a company called Run Lab. We do running bio-mechanics analysis and all that. Fast forward and COVID hits and I had to do this horrible, horrible thing. I had to lay off 28 of my 30 employees because nobody cares about their running bio-mechanics when they think they might die from this unknown virus, right?

So, I was dealing with a lot of head garbage when I had to do that. These are my friends. These are people that I loved dearly. So, I bought a guitar and I never sung in front of anybody before and I said I’m going write one song and go sing it at an open mic or whatever and conquer this fear and get some of this stuff out of my head. I went did it and I just fell in love with it. So, I ended up here, four or five years later and I have this touring rock band called Trashy Annie. We did 21 States last year and two countries, and we’re touring all over the place.

John Powell: You released an album as well?

Annie Davis: Yes, I have an album out that came out in 2023 called Sticks and Stones. And then I’ve got a brand new one coming out on Halloween called Let It Kill You because I found this really cool quote, and it says: “Find the thing you love and let it kill you.” I was like, that, you need to live life.

John Powell: Getting back to Survivor and last night’s vote. Did you have any idea that was going to be you heading into tribal council?

Annie Davis: No, not at all. I think you always have to have your Spidey Sense up. You always have to be concerned. You never can get comfortable. That is true of every time you go to Tribal Council, no matter how comfortable you feel. It was definitely a blindside. I thought that Alex and I were super good. I thought Alex was going to be able to convince Jake to actually vote for Sophie. I kind of thought he might not but I thought the rest of us sort of saw the physical performance with with Sophie and that challenge and realized that it was it we needed to cut that weaker physical side out. Her on the puzzle was a big old fail, as you saw.

I thought it was very obvious that we needed to probably offload her so that we could try to make the tribe a little bit stronger but she’s a great social player and she has a lot of connections to all these people. I missed how close she and Jeremiah are, how close she and Jake also are.

It was the right move, frankly, for Alex to vote me out because if had he sided with me it would have been those three with the two of us. I think he knew how close those relationships were and I don’t fault him because I know he had to do it. He had to do it for his own game and it was the right move.

John Powell: Did the vote pivot on him?

Annie Davis: I kind of don’t think it pivoted on him because even if he would have sided with me on Sophie then you got the other three of them still voting. I think I was destined to go home that night regardless of what Alex did. If he had he played the idol for me then we could have sent Sophie home but then it would have created a rift between Alex and Jake and so then he would have lost Jake’s trust. We’re back to square one again without being able to control anything from within because Jake is so strong physically.

If we were to get to say the merge together Jake’s going to beat us all. So, it was tricky. I don’t think he was really a swing vote. I don’t think there was a swing vote. I was pretty much destined to go. I didn’t know the extent of the relationships around me.

John Powell: Did you have any idea that they were searching for that idol so diligently?

Annie Davis: No, because we had kind of had this conversation and they didn’t talk about it but the way they edited me they sort of showed me all the time by myself and they focused so much on like…and she’s off by herself again!

There were a couple of things that weren’t shown and that was that one when I was off by myself I wasn’t idol hunting at all because I knew very quickly I was never going to find an idol. Everything is broken, everything looks like a leaf or a piece of paper. I was like: I’m out for searching for idols. I can’t find it if I happen to bond one great but that was not the goal. I was out looking for stuff to build a shelter with.

I spent my whole first day building a shelter for everybody because I just wanted to contribute in that way because I thought there’s a lot of areas I’m small, I’m older than them. There’s a lot of areas where they’re not going to view me as an important part of the tribe but if I can physically go out and work really hard that’s a really good contribution or at least it was in kind of old school Survivor days.

Then, the other thing that was happening was when we put the vote on Nicole for the first tribal council the five of us decided let’s make Nicole feel comfy. I said: Make me the decoy. I said: Just he say you’re putting the vote on me. Let me go wander around by myself a little bit and sort of be on my own so it looks like I’m not part of this group and that way she won’t sniff it out and play her Shot in the Dark.

The whole thing worked like a charm. It worked great but it did in the context of what the fans are seeing make me look like I’m an idiot and just wandering around by myself because everybody knows you don’t do that and I know you don’t do that too. It was all part of a master plan that ultimately just did not work out in my favor.

John Powell: What surprised you the most of what’s going on at camp that you didn’t get to see?

Annie Davis: I will preface this by saying I came into this game knowing that my the social piece was going to be hard for me. It was part of the reason I want to be on it because everything I’ve done in life is solo, lone wolf effort. Even the physical stuff I do, Iron Mans and like 72-hour adventure races in the woods by yourself with a map and compass, like that is all solo endeavors, starting a company and CEO and all that.

I can be bossy but it’s not from a bad place. It’s from a place of love and wanting to help and help kind of make sure everybody’s working together and steering the same direction. What I saw in the episode was especially Jeremiah and Sophie just talking mad crap about me and so many eye rolls, and so many like: Oh, she’s a ‘Karen’. I have never been called a ‘Karen’ before. (laughs)

That’s a misread but we’re all good now. It’s just the game. Even though it’s hard to watch it and it’s hard to see people saying things about you that you didn’t realize they said, because then you go back into the real world and you’re like: Oh my god! Is this what everybody actually thinks about me in life? You have to step back from it and recognize that this is a game and people will do anything they can to get to tomorrow and they should do all of that. I wasn’t that hurt by the things that were said because I’ve processed it all and I really recognize it’s just a game and we’re not talking about real world relationships. We’re totally good in the real world.

John Powell: Could it have been a generational thing? As we’ve seen in other editions of Survivor when you have the older folks, like Gen X or older Millennial and they’re trying to give advice there’s that resistance that happens sometimes. Do you feel there were some of that?

Annie Davis: I think you can’t avoid that. From what I remember of Survivor other than the Gen X versus Millennial season, they don’t usually put more than just one token old person on a track. They just don’t and it’s a little hard because you’ve had all these 20 to 30-year-olds that have each other to kind of connect with and they speak this and all that.

The next closest person to me was 11 years younger than me and then after that it’s more like 20 years younger than me. I don’t think you can avoid having some kind of generational disparity when you don’t put people of the same generation together. Maybe had Matt and Nate and me all been on the same tribe maybe there’s a connection that can be built there that just can’t come with a 50-year-old and a 25-year-old because we have experienced life so differently. It’s hard to say. I mean, I always say I’m 49 going on nine, so whether I’m the youngest in the tribe, either way, I wasn’t fitting in some way.

John Powell: Well, at least we’re all getting to learn what ‘cinema’ and ‘fire’ means so…We only get to see a portion of your journey. Are there any parts of your game that you wish fans would have seen?

Annie Davis: I think what I mentioned a little earlier about the edits about why I was kind of by myself. I do wish that that had been part of the storyline because people are just probably screaming at their TVs like: Annie, what are you doing? You cannot wander out by yourself!

I was a little bit bummed that they didn’t show me spending endless hours building this shelter…It genuinely was a labor of love for me because I was trying to do something cool for our camp. Everybody’s tired, it’s hot, I’m just going to keep working at this thing until we get it. Not going to be the greatest shelter in the world because we don’t have a machete or anything else, but I’m going to do it.

I just kind of wish that some of that would have been portrayed more because I do feel like, in some ways, I got a little bit of the “old lady edit”. Oh, there she is dropping the piece of bamboo! There she is wandering around and laying in the shelter! She is drinking all of the coconut water! That was not an accurate portrayal of what was going on at camp.

That kind of bummed me but…I wish they would have shown we had some really fun times in camp together. You know, there’s a great story that I told at one point about my first time trying to “aqua dump” because I was the first one of our track who tried to poop in the ocean and I pooped in our fishing area and then my poop is breaking up against me because the waves are coming in! I’m like: My tribemates are going to come find my poop floating around! I’ve got to scoop it over the wall! (laughs)

Jeremiah and I shared some stories like that. Jeremiah had me on his shoulders at one point trying to grab a fruit. We found this really scary spider and just went tearing out of the woods like little girls. There are some fun things that happened and I wish fans could see that it’s not all backstabbing. I will say I had a really great experience top to bottom being on this show.

Trashy Annie: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1NE5iw2eDd0kgUlO23m1GV

Trashy Annie YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TrashyAnnie

Trashy Annie Official Site: https://www.trashyannie.com/