Sorting Out Life as Best as She Can: Savannah Conley On Tour

Photo by Sophia Matinazad

[UNPUBLISHED:] Can you give a quick introduction of yourself and how you got started in your music career? 

[SAVANNAH CONLEY:] My parents actually met because they are both musicians. My dad is a guitar player and my mom was a background singer. She doesn't tour anymore, but they met while touring, so music was kind of all around me growing up. There's just music kind of everywhere. I had an era of rebellion where I fell into the trap of not wanting to do what my parents wanted me to do, so at 18 I moved out and said I wasn’t going to pursue music. 

I went to college for precisely six months before I dropped out. I slowly started to do music again and my mom called me and was like, “You have to pick one and we both know which one you need to pick.” It just clicked then. Like, got it, Mom. Understood. So I picked the music and then four months after dropping out, I signed a record deal. It's kind of been a weird, winding thing, but that's when it started growing. There have been some wild detours.

[UNPUBLISHED:] That’s so chaotic, but it seems like you sorted it out in the end.

[SAVANNAH:] Oh I am definitely still sorting it out. I'll always be sorting it out, I think. There's always more to figure out, things you don't know. Every stage of life is like just figuring it out more, which no one fucking tells you. People like “your twenties are awesome”. I can't wait til I'm like 40 or something. You have to have at least something figured out by then, right?

[UNPUBLISHED:] I would think so, but then I look at the people around me who are 30 and up and I'm like, “You don't have it anymore figured out than I do.” They have a bit more composure and learn to roll with the punches a little bit more. It’s a bummer, but also makes life more interesting, I think. It gives you more opportunities to just kind of divert attention or just figure out where you are going to go next.

[SAVANNAH:] I fully agree. I'm kind of in a fickle era right now where I'm like, I don't care anymore. I'm just going to do whatever the hell I want to do. You know, I've never done that before in my life, but here we are.

[UNPUBLISHED:] And are you enjoying the era?

[SAVANNAH:] Yeah, I think so. But also, who am I kidding? I'm not actually doing that. In my mind I am, but in reality, I care too much about everyone else. In reality, I'm like, “is this okay with everybody? Everybody good. Okay, awesome!” 

[UNPUBLISHED:] So we’re currently chatting in the green room before your tour stop tonight in Columbus. How has this tour been so far for you? 

[SAVANNAH:] This is my first headline tour ever. I always joke that it’s a good night if at least five people are there, and there's been more than five every night. It’s been full enough rooms where it feels like we're playing, you know, for a reason. I just really did not expect anyone to come, so the fact that people are showing up is pretty insane to me. The boys that are opening in Secondhand Sound, are some of my great friends and also double up on my band. We all are traveling together in one van, so we spend a lot of time together. Luckily we really like each other so it's really fun as we run around to a new place every day. That's actually my favorite part of touring because it suits my caretaker nature where I can make sure everyone's taken care of and do the small things that people appreciate. Plus, I get to play music, which is fucking awesome. It is best to play shows every night. Having that be your job and having the community of it is just like the best thing in the world.

[UNPUBLISHED:] That’s really sweet. I’ve always wondered though, what is it like touring altogether in a van?

[SAVANNAH:] It's pure chaos all the time. It was my goal to not take a trailer on this tour because I just don't want to deal with it. Having to figure out where to park a trailer limits you so much, so we have an extra tall sprinter van. It's my first time riding in a sprinter too, which has been awesome, but there’s a lot of unutilized space. The ceiling is probably, I don't know, seven feet high, but the seats end at like four feet. I was trying to figure out how to make it work and utilize that space, so I went to Home Depot and I bought some foam insulation panels. I bungee corded them to the back of the seats and shaped it to where it fit into the ceiling. I was like, “perfect, this is going to be great.” 

Until we all get in the van. This is when we played Nashville, the first date on the tour, which is just always actual chaos because my entire family and all of our friends live there. The show was huge and everyone partied after and we had to be up at 6 a.m. to drive to Athens, Georgia, so we like all were on like 2 hours of sleep. We get to the van, we're like loading it up it. We didn't try to plan to load beforehand, we just went full send and it worked shockingly. But then we start actually driving, and I didn't think about the sound of the foam on the seat. When I tell you it was awful, it was awful. Imagine, you just got a package and the styrofoam scrapes as you pull it out…. It was that multiplied by twenty for five straight hours. We got to Athens and then our photographer, Connor, and I drove to Home Depot and got someone to cut us plywood so we could replace it. That has worked, but it was like the most chaotic beginning of the tour. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] That sounds insane.

[SAVANNAH:] It's just chaos all the time. You never know where you're going or really what you're doing. It's all listed for you, but like, you don't know where to park. You don't know where the venue is. You don't know what part of town you're in. You don't even know the city you're in sometimes. So it's like it's definitely chaos, but you're all in the chaos together. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] I also want to give you a massive congratulations on your recent EP release of Best I Can. How are you feeling now that it's out and especially now that you're getting to perform it live?

[SAVANNAH:] People knowing the words is absolutely insane. There have been people singing every word at these shows, and that's been totally nuts. It also feels weird because I've had such a weird history with releasing music. Technically, I only have like nine or ten songs that are available on the Internet because we just had this crazy situation that didn't allow us to release a lot of music. Once I got out of that situation, I just wanted to make music with my friends. That's what those three songs are. It's just me getting together with my friends getting in weird, rigged studios that aren't actually studios, and just making it work. 

When we did it, I was not planning on putting it out to be honest. I was already working on a record and it just felt like a different project. It's a pretty hard left from some of my other stuff. Production-wise, it's definitely different, which we didn't do on purpose, really. I was worried about if people would like it, but I ended up not caring and going ahead and putting it out and then people really identified with it, which is awesome for me.

[UNPUBLISHED:] I did notice that it was different from everything else you've been putting out. You already started to touch upon this, but what caused that change for you sonically?

[SAVANNAH:] That wasn’t planned at all, that just happened. I put that first record out when I was 19. If you imagine yourself when you were 19, what if you didn't grow at all? Writing music becomes kind of a time capsule of a moment, and I feel like I've definitely grown and changed since I was 19, so the music is going to grow and change as well. I've always written the same and I've always sung the same, so if you go back, it still sounds like me. It's just what is around it that's different. None of it was like, “we're going to make this song this way” or  “I want this to sound like this”. It just happened. I feel like it just is a natural progression when you grow; you try to grow in all ways and change in all ways, and that counts for music, too.

[UNPUBLISHED:] I love that perspective.

[SAVANNAH:] Yeah. That's why I hate when people try to hold artists to only playing one era of their music. They're the ones that have to play this music every night, so they better be doing what they want to be doing. The band that comes to mind is Coldplay. Like, I love Coldplay and I'm not a huge fan of the stuff they've been putting out the past few years, but it seems to me like they're doing what they want to do and they're playing music they want to play, so let them do whatever they want to do. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] Within your new releases, do you have any favorite lyrics or stories that you want to expand upon within them?

[SAVANNAH:] I like singing every night the line in “Best I Can” of “I don't understand why you made a plan to die when you were young / I think that's fucking dumb.” Every night I think of somebody different in my life that has made a comment about how they will probably die around 40 because I have never understood why anyone would have that mentality. People love to throw around the idea of early death, but it’s not okay to take something serious like that in such a light and joking manner. You don’t have to take yourself seriously, but you should always take your mortality very seriously, so I put it kind of tongue in cheek in the song and just think about those people around me.

[UNPUBLISHED:] What was the full process like creating this EP and how is it different from creating your last work?

[SAVANNAH:] The last stuff was very orderly and planned. I was part of a label that was very on top of things and that structure of an environment simply does not suit me. We actually created a full record that never saw the light of day because it was just too structured and it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to. We then moved to a different producer that produced the EP before this one, Gabe Simon, and he was awesome. It was much less structured, but it was such a high-stress scenario because of the label situation we were in and there was a lot riding on it. That pressure just really didn’t feel good. 

“Best I Can” is the first thing I've ever done that had no pressure and no one checking in on me. No one was saying I had to get it done or attempt to place my sound in a specific box. This one was my friend Hank and I, who we have played music together literally our whole lives. We got together and took it to another friend’s place which he said was a studio but was very much not a studio, and we just recorded everything in weird ways. We ended up recording the drums in a low-ceilinged basement, and the drummer that played on the record is 6’7, so we had to spread out the drum kit as far as we could to where he could still hit it. That created some crazy drum sounds we didn’t expect but then fell in love with. It was not in any way professional, but it was ours.

[UNPUBLISHED:] That sounds insane. Would you ever make music like that again?

[SAVANNAH:] Yeah, totally. The record I'm working on right now is with a producer that I didn't know beforehand, but we go in and just play all day. We set aside so much time that it's like so low pressure. I'm trying to find the happy medium of production on this record where it’s not a total fuck all like creating “Best I Can” was but is still less structured than the previous experiences that I hated. I’m finding what works and I’m happy with it.

[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you have any information about your upcoming release that you can share?

[SAVANNAH:] It's softer and more intimate. There is an element of vulnerability that I cannot avoid within it, so it is very much me at a high level. My fingerprints are all over this record, which is honestly terrifying to think about putting out, but I’m also excited. It will start coming out in the fall.

[UNPUBLISHED:] Your music has received a lot of really critical acclaim from major publications like Nylon, Rolling Stone, and more. I also saw that you received some comparisons to Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. What do those comparisons mean to you as an artist?

[SAVANNAH:] I think they're both awesome, so it's a compliment for sure. Comparison is a weird thing because I know some people that really care about it in one way or another, like in a good way or bad way. It’s normal and human to compare sounds and draw up reference points between things. Some people don’t want to be compared to others, and other people outright say they want to sound like someone else. 

Once I figured out that I literally couldn't sound like anyone but myself, I kind of let that shit go. Anything else feels silly, just like how singing or writing like anyone but myself feels like an act. So this is it, you get what you get. I think there’s a happy medium I try to sit at where I don’t really try to avoid or lean into the comparisons because I don’t want them to affect the way I create. If I fail, then at least I failed in a completely gut-wrenchingly authentic way.

[UNPUBLISHED:] As you've grown and changed throughout your music career and evolved in different ways, is there any advice that you wish you had been given when you were starting out?

[SAVANNAH:] Honestly, like…. don't be afraid to be a bitch. When you're a 19-year-old girl in a room with all 40-year-old men, it can feel hard to speak up. It's supposed to be collaborative and it's supposed to be something that feels good, but that was just not the case for me for a long time. It was definitely in large part my fault since I just went along with it because I felt like that was what you had to do. You don’t have to just go along with it, and you shouldn’t. You can voice your opinion and do it kindly, and I thought that was being a bitch when I was younger. I didn’t trust myself to voice my opinions, but looking back, I absolutely should have.

[UNPUBLISHED:] That’s always my favorite question to ask because everyone has different answers. It is interesting and not at all surprising, however, that the majority of the female artists I have talked to have a very similar story.

[SAVANNAH:] It’s just like once you get into the room, how do you have a voice in it? I know myself and a lot of women with the same story got thrown into rooms filled with men full of accolades and awards. In that moment you’re like, “who am I to tell this person what to do?” when in reality that's your job. That was my job to tell them what to do and to make the music what I wanted it to be or else nobody would be happy in the end, which is how it turned out. I know women that came out guns blazing and fared far better and I am so glad that they did that. It just wasn't my personality at the time to be that person, so I had to learn. It's pretty sad the number of women that have similar stories, but I do think that's changing. There are also more women in the studios now and just more diversity in the studios period, which is so beyond overdue but finally happening.

[UNPUBLISHED:] As you've also found your voice in that sense, has it gotten easier for you to put together music and be a voice in the room?

[SAVANNAH:] Totally, yes. That’s also because I realized that's what they wanted. They weren’t trying to leave me out of the conversation, I just didn’t speak up so they thought I was happy with it all. They want the best for you. The majority of people want the best for you, I think. It just was a lack of communication and, you know, the difference in opinion and attitudes. It's gotten way easier the more I've leaned into the fact that the way to make everybody happy is to make music at my standard because it can't be by anybody else's. 

[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there anything else you want the reader to know?

[SAVANNAH:] My dog Leo is the best part of my whole existence. When we're on tour, everyone misses my dog. If we could bring him, we truly would. I actually have merch with his face on him, I just love him so much. I always ask people to send me pictures of their pets while we're on the road so that I can just live vicariously through them. So if anyone wants to message me photos of their dogs, cats, pigs, whatever you want, I would love to see them.