Meet Savannah Staples

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Savannah Staples a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Savannah, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

Music is everything to me. I get my resilience because it is truly my greatest passion and priority. All I want in the world is to create music, so when I am struggling to get a certain chord right, or I can’t find the right lyric, I remind myself that I am so lucky to do what I do and that I just need to keep going. Sometimes resilience also does not necessarily mean going and going. Sometimes when I am at writer’s block, I take a step back and allow myself a break. This break is not ‘giving up’ it is merely a way to inspire new creativity later and let my brain rest now.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am a 19-year-old singer-songwriter. This job is so special to me and I feel so lucky to do it. I started my music career at 6 years old when I joined theater. I was (and still am) a huge theater kid, and it is where my love of music started. Through theater, I learned that singing and telling a story was my passion. By the time I was in middle school, I knew I wanted to write songs myself. I had been going through very hard times and started to journal, which eventually turned into music. It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that I wrote a full, effective song that I liked. While, I do not like the song now, I was extremely proud of it at the time and knew that this was going to be the rest of my life. Once I figured out how to write better and how I could make my songs sound more human and real (which later kind of became my brand), I started to think about recording. I worked with my voice teacher at the time and recorded my first song, then my first EP, and finally another single in the span of 6 months. Once I got to college, I had my first relationship and first breakup and a million brand-new experiences that sparked new songs. I am now working at my college on my first album and am extremely excited to share it some day when it is finished.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Some of the most impactful things I’ve learned are self-care, inspiration, and patience. I am a perfectionist. This makes it very hard to be a musician. Music will never be ‘perfect.’ It is impossible. And to me, this is what makes music perfect to me. Over the years, I have learned that imperfection actually makes me love music. Hearing a piano bench move in a song, or hearing the artist’s voice break, makes it feel so real and raw, and learning this and applying it to myself has made making music so much easier. Allowing myself the grace and patience of not having a perfect take allows me to release stuff that may not be ‘perfect’ but is so incredible real. Inspiration is also so important. When I first started writing music, it was out of a need to want to write instead of a need to write. The difference is that I was pressuring myself to want to write, instead of feeling so much that I had to write to process it. The songs that I have “needed” to write are the best songs I’ve written, and this is because I had such an intense amount of inspiration. This also goes along with patience because sometimes there is no inspiration, and it is so frustrating, but by being patient and knowing it will come, it gets better. Self-care then plays into this because the music industry is a hard place to be. It is competitive, frustrating and critical. Caring for yourself and knowing that at the end of the road, your music is for you, makes everything feel a little less lonely. I make music because I must. I don’t make music that I know the public will devour. I make music that makes my heart happy and makes me feel the most authentic. It is cliché but, be yourself and be gentle with yourself and music making will feel so much easier.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

In the past 12 months, I have grown a lot. I started college, made new friends, and released new music. College allowed me to learn more than ever before about music. As a music business major, my experiences have led to my own music being better than ever before. Being in college, and experiencing new things, gave me such a great deal of inspiration that I was able to use to write new songs and get past writer’s block. I think my biggest area of growth was my learning. I learned so many new things that helped me grow into a better musician. Furthermore, I was able to meet people who are more experienced in music and work hand in hand with them to expand my learning as a musician. I recorded in the studio at my college with people who have taken classes on how to record and people who had a lot more experience than me. These people inspire me. They are my peers but also my coworkers, and they are so incredibly important to me. They have taught me how to be a better musician, but also how to be confident in myself and my abilities, which has been incredibly influential. I feel so much more confident, myself, and educated due to these experiences and people, and I believe that my career will benefit greatly from it.

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Image Credits

Photographers: Jay Guarino and

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