h t ls i w a t e n m e o d i H c t A Ac e h T Days before dropping their latest album and launching their tour, the North’s hottest musical trio will play two shows where it all began
By Craig Manning In music theory, an “accidental” is a music note that is foreign to the given scale or key in which a piece of music is written. By raising or lowering a musical pitch outside of the normal melodic pattern of a scale or key, an accidental can create unexpected deviations or striking tensions within a musical composition. You might think of accidentals as little bits of seemingly random beauty floating out there in your favorite songs, making everything a little more interesting. For a variety of reasons, then, The Accidentals is an apt name for Traverse City’s most beloved indie-folk trio. HAPPY ACCIDENTS Take the band’s origin story: 10 years ago, two of the three members of The Accidentals, Sav Buist and Katie Larson, met because they both happened to be members of the Traverse City West Senior High orchestra program. Buist was a concertmaster — another term for the first-chair violinist in an orchestra. Larson was a cellist. They teamed up for a class project, which in turn led to a fast friendship.
The thought of pursuing music professionally came later, when Michiganbased world music duo The Moxie Strings visited Traverse City West for an educational clinic. The women in The Moxie Strings — Diana Ladio and Alison Lynn — both have music degrees and perform on five-string violin and electric cello, respectively. Buist has gone on record saying that, without that clinic, she and Larson probably never would have come together as a band or pursued professional music careers. “We didn’t see many other girls playing popular music on violin and cello in sustainable careers,” Buist has said in the past. “We didn’t even know that career path existed until those two women walked through the door.” That clinic, ultimately, led both Buist and Larson to audition for spots in the thenbrand-new singer-songwriter program at Interlochen Center for the Arts. It was at Interlochen that The Accidentals officially came to be. Grounded in classical music and brought together by chance. Those factors together made The Accidentals the perfect name for Buist and Larson’s band back then. It’s still the perfect name now. You might call it an accident, for
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instance, that Buist and Larson happened to meet drummer/percussionist Michael Dause at the Blissfest music festival in 2013 — the encounter that ultimately resulted in the duo becoming a trio. You might also call it an accident that The Accidentals are about to release their most assured and unique album yet — a product of the forced solitude and independence under which the music was recorded. Accidents; chance; little random bits of beauty. These were and continue to be the ingredients that define The Accidentals. AFTER SOME TIME OUT Like so many other bands and musicians, The Accidentals had their plans knocked sideways by COVID-19. The last time the group played a concert in northern Michigan was an “album preview show” in Leland in February 2020. According to Buist, the big goal of that show was to premiere a bunch of new songs, gauge crowd reactions, and use those opinions on the new material to decide which songs would make the tracklist of the band’s thenuntitled fourth album. “We even printed out ballots for the audience and everyone voted on what their favorite songs were,” Buist laughed.
As the band tells the story, those ballots did in fact inform the decisions that shaped the 14-song tracklist of their new album, called Vessel and out Oct. 1. Most of the other plans the band had in mind for actually making the album, though, crumbled due to COVID-19. “We recorded some of the album with two of our dream producers: John Congleton and Tucker Martine,” Buist said. “And the plan was originally to go record the rest of the album with Tucker in Portland, Oregon. But then COVID happened. So, we had to make the decision: Were we going to wait until the pandemic passed? Or, were we just going to get to work?” The band opted to get to work. Only now, instead of recording in a professional music studio with a seasoned record producer, they were laying down tracks in a makeshift studio in the attic of their shared Traverse City home, with blankets and unsold CD boxes serving as partitions and soundproofing material. One big upside to recording at home instead of in a West Coast studio? The cost of studio time wasn’t a factor, which meant The Accidentals could take their time. And they had a lot of it: As a band that built its following largely on the back of constant
