The idea of the itinerant bard is often romanticized in film and fiction, moving from town to town and singing for their supper. That’s the life singer-songwriter Savannah King chose when she gave up a rooted existence for one on the open road.
Several years ago, she quit her day job to fully dedicate herself to her music, leaving her hometown of Buffalo, New York.
Today, she lives out of her camper van with her boyfriend here in Arizona most of the year, the youngest snowbirds in the Valley.
King’s new album “Cliffrose” is available now.
Full conversation
SAVANNAH KING: Well, I always say that that we are, we're the luxurious side of van life. We're more a complete RV because we have a refrigerator, we have heat, we have running water. There's even a toilet and a shower in there, and we totally renovated it and we put new hardwood floors in, new counters. We really made it home.
We've taken it to Florida and Texas and Colorado, but it doesn't matter where the van is parked – when I get in, it's home. It's where all my things are, it's where my guitar is and that is a strange dynamic to be in Mexico and you wake up in your own bed, you drink coffee out of the same coffee mug that you always drink it out of every morning, but you open the doors and there's the ocean.
KAELY MONAHAN: What's the nomadic life like and how has that sort of constant travel affected the way that you write and think about music?
KING: The constant travel can be hard sometimes when we're moving really quickly on tour, but we have learned how to slow down. When we first moved into the van, we were moving really, really quickly because we were excited to be able to tour.
So now we slow down, we spend our winter in Phoenix, we'll spend most of our summer back in Buffalo. And it's allowed me to appreciate what I'm doing because it can get really overwhelming. It can get difficult to have alone time to write when every day you wake up and you're driving 200 miles to the next show. So we've had to really learn to take that time for ourselves to be able to create.
MONAHAN: All right, so you're gonna play a song for us now. Which song are we gonna hear?
KING: I'm gonna play “Cliff Rose.”
MONAHAN: So, let's talk about the new album. This is largely inspired by your travels in the Southwest and by the desert here. What is it about this landscape and this place that makes you want to write songs?
KING: I think for me initially it was that it's the opposite of what I grew up in. And when I got here and I kind of felt the energy, I think that is out here. It was so new that it was immediately inspiring for me and the album is called “Cliff Rose,” and it came from a book that I was reading by Edward Abbey called “Desert Solitaire,” and he was talking about how the desert is so much different than the forest, that each thing that grows in the desert has to fight to survive and that it has a purpose, and I was reading about the Cliff Rose and how it's so beautiful in a landscape that it almost shouldn't be able to grow in, and I thought that was just fascinating.
MONAHAN: So as you were releasing this new album and thinking about what you want to say with it, tell us a little bit about the intentionality in the music and the way in which you're trying to communicate that message with just you and a guitar. Like this is very paired down in that way.
KING: I think the people that we met on the road and the other people, living in vans and kind of living this lifestyle has been a huge influence to me. Not only the nature that we were surrounded by, but people that think differently and people that grew up different than I did and in different circumstances and learning about them.
And realizing that there's more out there to the world than I grew up in. And I really wanted to tell those stories, and I wanted to tell them in a way that just encompassed everything that I am. So the record has a lot of my favorite musicians on them. And, yeah, I was really happy with the way that it turned out and the way that it said everything I wanted it to say.
MONAHAN: All right, let's have you take us out on a song, which one?
KING: The song that I'm gonna play is “Fresh Start.”
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