INTERVIEW: The Accidentals
The Accidentals
The Photo Ladies Interview - by Emily May
Sometimes bands can start out in the most unexpected ways, which was the case for Michigan band The Accidentals. Formed by Savannah Buist (violin) and Katie Larson (cello) while in high school, the self-described musical soulmates live and breathe music. Writing deep and catchy songs from the very beginning, it didn't take long for them to gain a loyal and devoted fanbase, referring to their core supporters as "The FAMgrove". Releasing their first album Bittersweet in 2013, funded by a successful crowdfunding campaign, Buist and Larson met drummer/percussionist Michael Dause in 2014 and recruited him into the band, cementing their lineup. Upon finishing high school, the band toured extensively, playing 200+ shows a year that included various festivals, and shared the stage with artists such as Brandi Carlile, Andrew Bird, and The Decemberists. On the heels of their 2016 release, Parking Lot EP, the band signed a deal in 2017 with Sony Masterworks label and released Odyssey, an album they have described as a culmination of 6 years of being a band and that signaled a new chapter for the band. In 2018, they began work on their 4th full-length album Vessel. When the pandemic hit, and the music industry came to a halt, the band paused work on Vessel in lieu of their pandemic EP Time Out, which was written during quarantine over zoom with legendary writers like Tom Paxton, Kim Richey, Dar Williams, Maia Sharp, Mary Gauthier, and Jaimee Harris. With the music industry opening back up, The Accidentals will be completing Vessel, slated to be released in the fall of this year. The Accidentals also host workshops around the country in an effort to inspire other young musicians, and in 2020 they formed a non-profit called Play It Forward Again and Again, providing instruments, lessons, and mentors to aspiring musicians. With plans to release Vessel, tour the album and write new music, they have plenty of exciting things in store for their fans! You can connect with The Accidentals via the following links:
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify | SoundCloud | iTunes/Apple Music | YouTube | Deezer | Vevo | Bandcamp | TikTok
Savannah and Katie- You both met and started playing music together in high school and have talked about the tremendous support you received from your local music community. What can you tell me about the local musicians who took you under their wings when you first started out and gave you pieces of knowledge and genre that inspired you to keep exploring? What did you learn in those early days that you have carried with you over the years?
Sav: We were really lucky to grow up in such a music-and-arts-loving community. I got my start in a family band with my parents (both are professional musicians who met in Nashville, where I was born), who taught me to improvise. There’s a huge festival scene in Michigan, and at most of those festivals, you’d find me under the workshop tents, learning traditional fiddle tunes from other violinists. There was also a weekly jazz jam that I took my electric violin to jam at, and the cats there were incredibly welcoming and accepting of a young kid who wanted to learn more about the genre. There was also a strong orchestral presence at our public high school, where I met Katie in the after-school “alternative styles club” (where we would cover Led Zeppelin, Coldplay, and more on our orchestral instruments).
After we were thrown together to represent the alternative styles club for an upcoming concert, we quickly became friends and from there a duo. Katie and I swapped skill sets - she’d written original music and played multiple instruments, but hadn’t performed live or improvised as much; meanwhile, I’d grown up in a live improv scene but didn’t write original music or play multiple instruments. We inspired each other and helped each other grow.
Once we had established ourselves as The Accidentals, we played all over the place - coffee shops, breweries, wineries, bookstores, anywhere that would take us. As a result, we met a lot of local musicians in the community, who took us under their wing. They’d have us open their concerts, or connect us to local studios and engineers. Whenever we needed help, we didn’t hesitate to ask someone in the community to teach us a bass riff or lend us an instrument. We still do that to this day. It’s actually our motto - “Ask for what you need.” No one ever does anything alone. To collaborate is always more fun than to compete.
Katie- You have said that it still blows your mind how many things you and Savannah did before graduating from high school and that you both basically spent a lot of time saying "yes" to things. Was that a conscious decision on both of your parts starting out, to say "yes" to every opportunity to see where it led you? Are any of the opportunities especially memorable?
At the time we met, neither Sav nor I envisioned a career in the music industry. We were introverted overachievers with a lot of random interests. Sav was writing novels, playing travel soccer, and studying biology in her downtime. I was obsessed with documentary filmmaking, graphic design, and movie soundtracks. When we started playing music together I saw an entire new world open up. Music had the ability to introduce us to people, places, and experiences we would have never found ourselves in contact with otherwise. We ended up playing on a ferry in the middle of Lake Michigan, playing in a swimming pool, at weddings, electronic music festivals, punk clubs, onstage with the Traverse Symphony Orchestra, teaching ukulele workshops to kids, jamming on live radio with a bagpipe player, etc. We performed before a movie at the Traverse City Film Festival and the directors from an indie documentary called One Simple Question asked if we’d be interested in scoring music for the soundtrack. It’s like Tina Fey’s quote: “say yes and you’ll figure it out afterward”. One of our first gigs was at Horizon Books in Traverse City. They cautioned us they didn’t have the license for cover songs, so we’d have to fill an hour and a half with original songs. We said yes and wrote 13 songs by the end of the week, which became the material for our first album. At times it was overwhelming, but we learned something valuable every time.
What can you tell me about bringing Michael into the band and how do you feel he has helped to mature and evolve your music, as well as your desire to "just try everything"? Michael- What can you tell me about joining the band in 2014?
Katie: We started playing with percussionists and noticed it completely changed our live show. Instead of trying to cover all the rhythmic parts, we had space for the arrangements to open up and the energy to jump off the stage. At the time we were writing original songs and mashing up gypsy jazz covers with versions of Muse and The Strokes on violin and cello, so finding someone who was as weird as us and willing to come on board full time was a challenge. When we met Michael, it clicked instantly. We were able to embrace a whole new level of energy, three-part harmonies, and more dynamic arrangements.
Michael: I had met Sav and Katie at a music festival in northern Michigan during the summer of 2013. I fell in love with their newest record at the time, Bittersweet, and listened to it almost every day for a while after. We became friends over the internet while I was in my first year of college, and when the summer of 2014 came around, they said they were looking for a drummer to play with them for the month of July. They asked if I was interested, and I said yes almost immediately. I had been sitting with their music for so long, I pretty much knew the songs by heart, and after playing with them for a month, they asked if I wanted to drop out of college and come on the road with them. It was an easy yes from me.
You have long operated as an indie/DIY band, crowdfunding early tours and albums. What can you tell me about signing with Sony in 2017 and releasing your first major-label album Odyssey. You've referred to the album as a culmination of 6 years of being a band. How do you feel that the album and signing to a major label signaled a new chapter for the band?
Sav: It’s funny - it’s been a total ride. Odyssey was definitely the culmination of 6 years. It was a snapshot in time of us signing with our first major label. We were nervous, excited, and when I think about it, incredibly young. We learned so much from that time of being signed. Particularly, we learned who we were, and who we weren’t. At this point, we are back to DIY - but definitely operating at a different level than we were. We’ve been able to work with some of our favorite producers of all time (John Congleton, Tucker Martine), play insane shows, travel the country, and meet amazing people. We’ve also learned to maintain who we are as a throughline, no matter what. There are lots of hands in every musical cookie jar. It can be really difficult to know which voice to listen to as a result. The key is to know who you are first, and what your goals are - then trust your instinct.
You have talked about how the music industry can feel very intimidating, having to constantly push past your introverted tendencies. How have you learned to exist in that realm over the years while still protecting your energy and making time for yourselves? What are your self-care practices?
Sav: One of the best things Beth Nielsen Chapman ever told me was to think of your favorite color, and imagine a bubble around you in that color, whenever you need it. I still use that all the time.
We may not seem very introverted - being in this industry requires some social flexibility after a while - but all of us very much get in the van after a show and put on noise-canceling headphones and read books by booklight and don’t talk for a while. Our idea of a party is playing Settlers of Catan at the AirBnB while doing laundry.
So yeah, being in the music industry - a world of noise, networking, and constant new faces - can be overwhelming. We’ve gotten pretty good at setting personal boundaries and being open and honest about our feelings. Once everyone is clued into a person’s emotional state, we know how to protect them better. There’s a lot of looking out for each other on the road.
Savannah- You have said that you are all incredibly accident prone and found that most of the accidents you get into lead to things you didn't even know were meant to be. What can you tell me about these "happy accidents"?
I think about it best in terms of zooming out. We’ve had lots of accidents. Everything from trailer theft, car crashes, tornadoes, breakdowns, wildfires, floods...I remember one time we were telling some of these stories at a school workshop in Arkansas, and one of the kids raised their hand and said, “Why are you so unlucky?”
What I realized in that moment is that you could look at every accident in two ways. On one hand, you think, “How are we so unlucky that we keep getting caught in natural disasters and vehicular malfunctions?” On the other hand, you think to yourself, “Man, I’m lucky to be able to continue despite that.”
I remember after the trailer was stolen from a parking lot in Tucson, we lost $70,000 worth of equipment overnight. Michael and I turned to each other and, somewhat nihilistically, joked, “Well, at least we got that particular scenario out of the way.” We played a show in Phoenix that night with our remaining equipment. As we sang the line “Sometimes I will lose all I have just to see what remains” from our song Crow’s Feet, holding the instruments we had fortunately brought inside from the cold on the night of the theft, we looked out to a crowd of music lovers and gathered exactly how lucky we were. Accidents themselves aren’t always happy. You have to choose happiness. Sometimes accidents make you even more aware of the happiness you might’ve been taking for granted.
You just released your new EP Time Out this month and have said it probably would not have been written if not for this time we're in now. Having described it as being a lot like the 5 stages of grief, what can you tell me about the how the idea for EP came to be and the guest artists you co-wrote the songs with? In what ways do you feel like the process of making the EP has helped you to process what has been going on in the world over the past year?
Sav: The TIME OUT EP is the culmination of co-writes we did with Kim Richey, Dar Williams, Tom Paxton, Maia Sharp, Mary Gauthier, and Jaimee Harris. It came about really serendipitously. Katie and I had moved part-time to Nashville to do session work and co-writing in January of 2020, and our first co-write was with HOF songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman, who showed us the ropes. When the world shut down, obviously our plans did a total 180 - instead of flying to Portland to record the rest of our album Vessel with Tucker Martine, we drove back to Michigan and tried to reconcile with the fact that our income for the rest of the year had disappeared. It didn’t take long for us to start planning how to bounce back. I started digging into live-streaming, and what started as a list of what not to do quickly became a 40-page manual on how to livestream to different platforms, notably OBS. I posted the manual to Facebook and it quickly made the rounds, picked up by Hypebot, Bandsintown, and the Recording Academy / Grammys, as well as circulating to lots of familiar venues. Club Passim in Cambridge, MA reached out and asked if I could talk to an artist about how to perform a livestream on their page - that artist ended up being Kim Richey. I was geeked. I’d been listening to Kim Richey’s music for years, and it was mindblowing to even be able to talk to her, as Katie and I had seen her sharing the stage with Brandi Carlile at Ryman Auditorium only a few months prior.
Naturally, the conversation led to the idea of a virtual show together, and then a co-write. The song Wildfire was written in two zoom sessions, before we had even met in person. Once the song was finished, we knew it needed to come out ASAP. We shelved plans for our albumVessel until we could tour it, and got to work on TIME OUT.
Other co-writes came about in different ways - Tom Paxton reached out to us after hearing us perform on our weekly zoom call with our booking agency, Fleming Artists, and now we write every Monday. We’d been writing songs with Maia Sharp back in Nashville, and those co-writes transferred seamlessly online. Dar Williams was a good friend already - we had opened and performed with her at the Birchmere as teenagers - and we were blown away when she accepted the invitation. Our friend Sharon Corbitt, who had connected us to Beth and Maia, organized the write with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris, which led to us writing a song three days before Christmas called All Shall Be Well - a great sendoff for an EP all about dealing with grief and learning to heal after a turbulent year. It was therapeutic for us, since at least personally for me I was feeling creatively burnt - I was too busy compartmentalizing my feelings to fully talk about them, but something about music brings your truest thoughts to the forefront. Every co-write began with an honest, heartfelt conversation, and though the process was always different, the results were the same - we always walked away with something we were all really proud of.
The three of you basically built a studio and did everything for the EP yourselves-the engineering, production, playing and recording? What was that process like for you and how do you feel that it tested your commitment to each other and the music?
Sav: This was a new chapter for us. Michael and I both have academic backgrounds in audio technology, but this was like a final exam. We sketched out the attic space (hence the name Atticus Blue Studios) and figured out where to build. We used stacks of unsold CD boxes to build partitions. We thumbtacked blankets to the ceiling to pad the sound. We used our touring gear provided by our sponsors, Shure, Fender, Takamine, Boss / Roland, and more, to set up and record. Ultimately, we were really lucky to be able to utilize the time in a productive way, and to have the sources to make it happen.
I won’t say it was easy, though. We are all Type A personalities. We are perfectionists to a fault. Each of us carry different insecurities, and we had to learn to accept those insecurities within ourselves and each other. We also learned that we each have different strengths. As a result, we learned to rely on each other a lot more. What it eventually came down to is that we couldn’t make a record like this if any one of us had ego. The space had to be mutually respectful of each other’s thoughts and talents. The song had to be served in a way that gave it meaning. We wanted to be really intentional with this music. As a result, I feel like we’ve come away from this year as stronger people, and a stronger unit, than we came into it.
Michael: One of the silver linings of not being on the road last year was the time we had to really learn and work out how to record in the best possible way. I was able to dig into mixing more and have a really good feel for it now. We also dug into the engineering side of things in a big way. We would have whole days where we wanted, for instance, to get the best cello sound we could, so we spent a few hours moving mics, putting up blankets, taking down blankets, changing microphones, muffling the cello itself, trying every possible option to make sure we found what we were looking for. Like Sav said, we’re all perfectionists, so we had to settle on a sound eventually! It was an intense and informative time, and I think we came out of these recording sessions having learned some really useful skills.
You temporarily shelved Vessel, the full-length album you were working on, to release your Time Out EP. What can you tell me about the album and your decision to temporarily put it on hold?
Sav: We’ve been working on Vessel for a long time. Years, in fact. We recorded a portion of it with dream producers John Congleton and Tucker Martine, and we were excited to finish it out with them. COVID changed those plans. We ended up recording the rest of it ourselves. Right as we finished that project, the songs that would comprise TIME OUT started coming to fruition. Obviously we wanted Vessel out into the world - it had been a long time coming. But our gut told us to wait. The TIME OUT songs needed to come out when they did, capstoning a long year of isolation, wildfires, protests, quarantine, and loss. We hope that the EP can be used as something of a healing balm before we hit the road again in the fall to tour Vessel - an album all about perspective, and the way it influences your perception of time.
That’s also a good takeaway from the long year. Time is so fickle with this band. Sometimes it feels like we’re moving at breakneck speed; other times we feel like we inch along at a snail’s pace. More realistically, it’s more like a plane - when you’re on one, you don’t feel like you’re moving; when you see one in the sky, it crawls along; in reality, it’s moving incredibly fast. All viewpoints are true and real - it’s just a matter of where you’re standing. That’s what Vessel is all about.
You have said that pre-pandemic, you were moving through life at a break-neck speed, worried about "getting there" instead of being present for the journey. For the first time in 8 years, you didn't have anywhere to be. Having the time over the past year to reflect on your journey over the years, what have those reflections been like for you? What can you tell me about the experience of having to suddenly stop and to redirect your focus from touring to songwriting during the pandemic? What did you learn over the past year, personally and artistically, and do you feel it will change anything for you going forward?
Katie: When everything shut down last spring and we landed home, we dove straight into recording, putting together music videos and 20 female cover songs on Youtube, starting events like Book Club on our Patreon, and live-streaming. A lot of summer festivals hadn’t cancelled at that point, so it seemed like we may be back on the road within a few months. We started doing short, once a day “check-in” livestreams we called “Daily Breathers”. Our friends on the frontlines and in hospitals were putting their life on the line every day and we were starting to feel useless to society sitting in our houses. The daily livestreams were our attempt to send some comfort to those who needed it. We lit a candle, we played a song, we recommended books from our local bookstore, and we shared one thing we were grateful for every day. After living in transit for so long I was immediately grateful to be sleeping in my own bed, able to do laundry any time I wanted to, able to cook homemade meals, wave to the neighborhood kids riding their bikes, plant flowers, walk in the woods. There was gratitude, but also a deep anxiety. We were working 10+ hr days and feeling the weight of the world build up. Once we started getting opportunities to co-write over Zoom, it forced us to set aside time to write. That’s when everything started sinking in for me. We were still new to co-writing and didn’t know what to expect, but when we got on Zoom with Kim Richey and started writing “Wildfire”, memories and feelings started flooding in. Our intention wasn’t to write a song about lockdown, but our shared isolation and nostalgia informed the songwriting. Once the song was done I went through 5 hard drives of tour footage taken between 2014-2019 to edit the music video, and reflected on so many of those candid moments that flew by in our late teens and early 20’s. One of our biggest lessons for the year is that we’re not in a rush. We can sit on new lyrics, process our emotions, re-cut a song 6 times. We’ll get back on the road later this year, but as things pick up pace we’ll carry that with us.
Savannah- What can you tell me about the manual you wrote during the pandemic on using OBS and Streamyard software? Did you expect it to become as popular as it has? What were some of the main lessons you learned and mistakes you made that led you to want to help others in this way?
If a future version of me time traveled back to March of 2020 and told me I’d become a live-streaming engineer with a 40-page manual under my belt, I would’ve laughed in my face. Everyone picked up one weird skill during quarantine, and that was definitely mine. It mainly started as a way to keep everything organized for personal usage. We were testing out live-streaming to different platforms, and it was getting really hard to remember how to do everything and all the steps without writing it all down. Then once I started trying to actually write that down in a detailed manner, it went from being personal to being more instructional.
Lots of musicians were struggling to figure out how to transition to the live-streaming format at the time. It was really hard watching so many friends lose so much income and feel like they didn’t know where to start. Publicizing the manual for free made sense, especially since the program I was writing about - OBS - was, and is, free to the public. From there it got picked up by multiple publications and circulated around the scene. I did tons of zoom consultation calls with venues and musicians and even spoke on a few panels for the Recording Academy / Grammys. I remember being on one of those panels with Rick Beato and Adam Neely and almost peeing myself (huge fans of both of them).
There were lots of mistakes - lots of technical minutia. We messed up all the time at first. Getting audio to translate the way you want it to sound from one computer screen to another is really tricky. Every musician had to become a sound engineer and a lighting engineer on top of playing the music. Luckily, I also had lots of people making suggestions and edits to the document, and even some of the platforms I was writing about reached out to tell me about new improvements and fixes they’d added. It’s funny - there really is a community in almost every niche thing out there, and a lot of those communities are just endearingly collaborative and kind. I really liked getting to be a part of this one.
Having talked about how you lived and breathed music from a young age, what can you tell me about the workshops you teach in schools across the country? What inspired you to open your nonprofit Play It Forward Again and Again last year, to help kids in school and make sure that the opportunity to play music exists for all aspiring musicians?
Katie: We were incredibly lucky to have supportive music programs in our public school. A duo called The Moxie Strings taught a workshop for our high school orchestra class and inspired us to become a band. Now when we tour and stop at schools, we try to encourage students to get outside of their comfort zone. We talk about songwriting, mental health, improvisation, alternative strings, etc. One time we had an epic jam session with a tuba player who turned out to be an incredible soloist. One time we wrote a song with a class about video games. Every workshop is different. Music was extremely important for our confidence, teamwork and self expression. We meet a lot of kids who can’t afford to rent an instrument or pay for lessons. Our goal with Play It Forward Again and Again is to provide students with an opportunity not only to play an instrument, but to be paired with a local musician who can mentor and provide support.
What can you tell me about your side projects outside of the band? What else do you have going on?
Katie: Sav and I have always loved arranging and recording violin/viola/cello/bass on other people’s records. We moved to Nashville part time at the beginning of 2020 to do more session work and co-writing, and luckily we’ve been able to keep it up over this last year from our home studio in Michigan.
Michael: Right before the pandemic hit, I put out a record under my project Treeskin called “Learning”. I was hoping to be able to do more of a push behind the record, but the world had other plans, so I’m hoping to move forward and put out another record under that name in the next year or so. I have a few projects with friends as well; a sea-shanty project with my friend Ben Traverse, and a yet-to-be-named collaborative project with fellow Michigan musicians Seth Bernard and Dan Rickabus (of The Crane Wives). After really digging into mixing and engineering this last year, I’m also hoping to start heading into the studio world and get my feet wet as a producer and engineer between bouts of touring in the near future.
What's next for you? What are your goals for the year?
Katie: Now that our Time Out (Session 1) EP is out, we are getting ready to release and tour our next full length album, Vessel! We’re co-writing new songs every week and looking forward to share new music.