We were lucky to catch up with Sav Buist recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sav, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I chose this question because I’ve got so many meaningful projects going on, the joke is that my side projects have side projects. Music for me is such a powerful tool – I use it therapeutically; I use it to create long-lasting friendships; I think about it in terms of being such an ancient uniting practice that there are amphitheaters thousands of years old created for the purpose of gathering in a public place to honor stories and song and truth. In my band The Accidentals, alongside my friends Katie Larson, Katelynn Corll, and Patty PerShayla, we’ve been able to travel the world in a series of tours that put us on the road for 250 days a year on average. I’ve engineered albums; co-written songs with people who inspired me to write songs in the first place; cut string tracks for k-pop band BTS and songs that have millions of views in Eurovision; collaborated with some of my favorite artists of all time; scored for TV and films; and we’re working on a non-profit that puts instruments into the hands of disenfranchised kids with continued lessons from local musicians so everyone has a chance to express themselves creatively.

It’s hard to pick the most meaningful project because they all have different meanings to me. Each project does my heart a different kind of good. I think my upcoming solo album has a different kind of significance to me because it’s an album of misfit songs; the ones that don’t really work for an Accidentals show. There are songs about two-headed cows; songs inspired by reading Oliver Sacks; songs for friends I’ve lost along the way and songs that talk about the precious quality of time with all its twists and bends. This album is an experiment in defining who I am musically, as an individual – something I’ve never tried to do before, as I’ve been in bands for all 15 years I’ve been playing music. But at the same time, it’s just a collection of stories that I feel like are ready to be told.

Sav, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Sav Buist and I’m a full-time touring multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter. I play most things with strings but my primaries are violin, viola, mandolin, guitar, and bass. (I’m working on saxophone now, haha.) I got into music when I was around eleven or twelve years old. My parents, musicians who met in Nashville TN and moved to Michigan a few years after I was born, really inspired me to get into music. They were the ones who first showed me artists like Nickel Creek, James Taylor, Kim Richey, the Indigo Girls, and more; but the genre net was wide – my favorite bands growing up were Queen, ELO, Radiohead, Fountains of Wayne, Foo Fighters, and more. When I was twelve, the public school system had an orchestra program, which helped me get my start playing violin. My parents started a family band to help me get into the practice of improvising and brought me to music festivals and jazz jams, where I learned from other great musicians how to play by ear.

When I was sixteen years old, I met my friend Katie Larson through our high school orchestra program. We came together much by accident through our after-school alternative styles for strings group, which was partially the inspiration for our band name, The Accidentals. Katie, who plays cello, guitar, and bass, inspired me to start writing songs and to learn other instruments, and before we knew it we were playing coffee shops and breweries around our hometown of Traverse City, MI. We started out playing indie folk music, but over the years we added electric guitar and bass, added a drummer to our mix, and started touring nationally and internationally after signing with a major label. After a year and an album, we transitioned to engineering, producing, and releasing music independently. We collaborated with producers Tucker Martine and John Congleton on a few songs for our album, Vessel, and recorded the rest on our own during the pandemic.

Over the years, we’ve had all kinds of things happen – van crashes, trailer thefts, broken violins and guitars, crushed axels. The pandemic, obviously, had an impact on us as well. But I think what I’m most proud of is all the experiences we’ve garnered along the way. I used to be such an introverted person – in some ways, I still am, and I love the introverted side of me too. But I’ve learned to get outside of my own box and out of my comfort zone, and I’ve met so many profoundly good people; eaten so much great food; seen some truly beautiful nature; and done things I never thought I would get to do in one lifetime.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to experience as much of life as I possibly can while still making enough to live on. I also want to be as honest as possible in my writing. I think honesty is the core of what makes songs stick – if we find ourselves in the stories we hear, they resonate in such a way that we listen to them over and over again, and we’re less alone in our feelings. It’s always comforting to know someone knows how you feel. There are so many songs in my life that I’ve listened to and thought, “That’s exactly it.” Finding that essence, and using every line in the three and a half minutes (on average) allotted to you in a way that doesn’t waste any time, are some goals of mine creatively.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Obviously the pandemic had an affect on everyone. For us, touring makes up the most of our income. In 2020, we watched every show fall off the radar for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t sure if we would ever have the chance to tour again. It wasn’t something I could really wrap my head around. I’m not sure if it’s a good or a bad trait, but I tend to compartmentalize the bad things in my life, or convert them into good things. I also set my expectations for the worst outcome so that way I’m never disappointed. I think those two things may not work for everyone, but for me they drive me forward because I can find a workaround for everything, find the silver lining of it, and not be disappointed when things don’t work out.

I started delving into the livestreaming world, working with a program called OBS. Before the pandemic, most social media platforms weren’t quite set up to support livestreaming music natively – they would either only feature the instrument or the vocals, but never together; and they would overcompress everything. So I used OBS to work around that. Unfortunately every single social media platform has different settings, and I got tired of looking up every single one, so I ended up writing them all down in a document, which turned into a nearly 40-page manual on how to livestream in OBS, Zoom, Crowdcast, StreamYard, and more. I put it out on my Facebook and through my good friend Jay Gilbert, the manual was published in Hypebot and blew up. Pretty soon I was doing hundreds of consultations for venues and artists, and I even did a panel for the Recording Academy / GRAMMYs alongside Rick Beato and Adam Neely. It was a crazy time.

Pivoting like that and becoming someone known as a livestreaming engineer for a very brief period of time was something that opened up a lot of doors for me. After helping the incredible Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, TN, with their livestreaming, I played that venue for the very first time alongside my heroes Beth Nielsen Chapman, Kim Richey, and my best friend Katie Larson. I met Kim Richey through livestreaming as well and since then we’ve co-written songs, toured through the Pacific Northwest, and are even biking through Croatia as part of our first ever bike-and-boat tour where Katie, Kim and I teach songwriting and play concerts on a boat with 33 other passengers through the Croatian coastline. (Oh, and we bike in-between.) You never know what crazy one-off is going to change everything.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.savbuist.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/savbuistmusic
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/savbuistmusic
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@savbuistmusic
• Other: www.patreon.com/theaccidentals

Image Credits
Jay Gilbert Jenn Alexander Chelsea Whitaker