The Accidentals Back On Tour with New Album on the Way

After a “psychologically turbulent” year, The Accidentals have found themselves happier than ever, eager to get back on tour and preparing to release what they describe as their best and most satisfying studio album yet.

“We’re really excited to put it out because it is summing up the past 10 years of us just building up to this point of music that we’re really excited and proud of,” multi-instrumentalist Sav Buist said of “Vessel,” the album set for a late September release that the Traverse City folk-rock trio wrote and recorded.

The Accidentals play at Meijer Gardens. The Traverse City group is releasing a new album this fall.

Added band member Katie Larson: “The most important thing was to put it out this year and we wanted to release it ourselves and have our hands on it and have our vision out there. We feel super-proud of all the production.”

The Accidentals already are back on the road, playing dates in Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin and Indiana over the next two months. To promote “Vessel” this fall, they’ll launch a co-headlining album-release tour with Sawyer Fredericks, starting with two shows at Traverse City’s City Opera House Sept. 29-30.

They also play Mackinac Island and the Bay View Music Festival in Petoskey at the end of July, as well as Beulah Park in Beulah on Aug. 26.

“We’re very emotional about it,” Buist said of the return to live concerts, noting the band had been playing more than 250 shows a year for several years before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down in March 2020.

“We’re going to try a bunch of different sets so every show will be different.”

Added drummer Michael Dause: “I’m looking forward to it, but it’s definitely kind of a little bit nervous. What’s it going to be like? What’s it going to feel like again?”

Nerves aside, band members are thrilled to reconnect with fans in-person after more than a year of isolation, live-stream shows and deep-dive songwriting that produced the collaborative “Time Out: Session #1” album featuring co-writes with renowned songsmiths from across the country.

Make no mistake, the pandemic-forced quarantine changed a lot of things for The Accidentals and gave them new perspectives on the business, touring, writing and taking control of their art.

“It’s incredibly fragile,” Buist said of a music industry that was blind-sided by the COVID-19 shutdown. “I think we learned more than ever that there are some things that we can’t do alone. It’s good to rely on each other when you need it most.”

Losing nearly all their income for what was projected as a robust 2020, The Accidentals relied heavily on fan support through the Patreon membership platform and completely overhauled their recording approach for the new album.

Reaching out to other writers such as Kim Richey and Tom Paxton to create the “Time Out” EP “pulled me out of that super dark place,” conceded Katie Larson, noting that endeavor helped band members process what they were going through.

They also took a full year to record and create “Vessel,” for which most songs had been written prior to the pandemic.

They built a studio in an attic, doing “all of this crazy stuff” such as thumbtacking blankets to the ceiling and using empty CD boxes and blankets to create “a drum cave” for their sessions.

“We were just taking what we had and turning it into what we knew we needed,” Buist said, conceding the young band faced plenty of adversity and had “a lot of growing up to do” over the past couple years.

Indeed, that could be the story of The Accidentals in a nutshell: Self-reliance, hard work and resilience.

“We were being 110 percent intentional with the music,” Buist said. “This is music that we’re incredibly proud of because we worked every single second (to make it) the best it could be. It was not easy. There were definitely ups and downs of just being in isolation and being in the same space together and not constantly moving (on tour).

“We accepted that none of us could have an ego going into it. We just had to serve the music and I think we did that.”

The result? A “really diverse folk-rock sound” that’s very different from other projects, especially the “Time Out” EP, said Larson.

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