We were lucky to catch up with Sav Madigan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sav, 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?
I’m a full-time musician, but I also went to school for biology and I wrote / published a paper on biological altruism – AKA, are we hard-wired for altruism, why did it evolve, and can other animals besides people perform acts of altruism at a cost to themselves with seemingly no reward? One thing I realized in my research – sort of an epiphany moment, and I would go on to write songs about it – was that our resilience as people comes from leaning on each other. From trust, compassion, and empathy. When we are resilient, it’s because when we fall, there is someone in our lives who maybe inspires us, or if we’re lucky is there to pick us back up again.
I’m really lucky to have many of those people in my life. When I was twelve and decided I wanted to be in a band, my parents – both musicians who met in Nashville, and moved to Michigan a few years after I was born – decided to rekindle their band and allow me to test the ropes as an improvisational violinist and harmony singer. I grew up in the folk scene in northern Michigan under the wings of many mentors – mandolin players, Celtic fiddlers, jazz guitarists, funk bassists, clawhammer banjo players – who never hesitated to share a piece of something they knew and enjoyed with a young violinist who wanted to stretch beyond the classical world.
When I was sixteen, I met my best friend and long-time collaborator, Katie Larson, and was inspired by her to write songs and play other instruments. We started a band called The Accidentals and toured 250+ days a year for eight years, writing songs, passing string instruments between us, and looking out for each other.
In that band, we had trailer thefts; vehicular breakdowns; car crashes; crushed and broken instruments; plenty of times where we got lost or had to navigate a route past natural disasters, plenty of times where we had to be resilient. Whether it meant driving 22+ hours straight to get from one show to the next, or squinting through the snow-blinding blizzard; losing all of our equipment overnight or skidding nearly off a mountain pass with a van and trailer – we went through a lot in that band.
The thing that kept us resilient was people. Gas cards in the mail; baked goods brought to shows; host homes that treated us like family; sponsors that replaced our stolen or broken equipment without even blinking; people who joined our Patreon…the list goes on and on. But I find that something about music makes us so much more, well, human. Every time we perform an act of kindness, we get a biological hormonal reward for doing so. We feel good helping others for a reason. It’s probably what kept us alive at one point in our existence, and I think it still does.
Recently I changed my name to Sav Madigan. I had never really felt comfortable in my own skin, and the Madigan name was one shared my most of the women on my mom’s side of the family. In Western cultures, our last names are passed down from father to father. Yet, the majority of the genetic information we pass on comes from our mothers, who carry the tangled secrets and stories of who we are in the very cells of their being.
My mom was born a Madigan to an unmarried mother. The Madigans migrated from Scotland to Ireland to the United States during the famine. They came here with nothing but hope. Brick by brick, my Great Grandfather built the house his family still lives in without him. My Great Grandmother, Valley Virginia Madigan, carries on as the matriarch of the family. She has always been the rock and foundation our family was built upon. She was born in an abusive home with few resources and found safety in a marriage far too young. She had four children by the time she was nineteen and provided for her family working as a waitress all her life. She saved her change in a glass jar for twenty years to change her life and the lives of the people she loved. She was – and is – strong, smart, and resilient.
It was in the kitchen of my Great Grandmother’s house that the four of us – my Great Grandmother, my Great Aunt (the family historian), my mom, and I – sat down around the tiny table and talked about the legacy of the Madigan name. A name of blue-collar workers, teachers, clerks, and bookkeepers, scattered from Scotland to Virginia. A name that meant touching your fingertips to wildflowers and bruising your knuckles on the teeth of those who would slander it. A people both resilient and hopeful.
I think resiliency is in our history – the big history and the little histories we carry in our everyday. I get my resilience from my family, from my friends, from the fans who support what I do both solo and in my band; and from the people who empathize with the stories I’m trying to tell in my music. And I’m lucky for it.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Well, I’m a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, side artist, session worker, composer, and engineer living in Nashville, TN. But I’m also a problem-solver, lock picker, trailer packer-and-backer, book nerd, birdwatcher, and cat parent in my spare time. I roll with punches, I’m calm in a crisis, and I love what I do.
I learned violin and viola first, and picked up guitar and bass afterward – then moved on to mandolin and banjo, and recently I’ve picked up pedal steel. Living in Nashville makes it easy for me to co-write with others as well – I’ve been fortunate enough to write with people who inspired me to become a writer in the first place, and to develop friendships that I treasure. I’ve written with Beth Nielsen Chapman, Kim Richey, Gary Burr, Georgia Middleman, Mary Gauthier, Jaimee Harris, Dar Williams, Tom Paxton, Don Henry, Grace Pettis, Robby Hecht, Mary Bragg, Kyshona Armstrong, and many many others – all of which I respect and admire so deeply.
I’ve been hardcore touring since my junior year in high school. It began when I was sixteen, and I’m twenty-eight now. Twelve years of touring 250+ shows a year puts some ink on one’s soul. At this point the road feels like home. I’ve been on the opposite schedule of everyone I love for as long as I can remember, an observer of life and the people that inhabit it, a witness to the human condition in its most vulnerable form. There is no way to be complacent in the ever-changing dynamic of movement, crisis, and joy in equal measure. I’ve grown to love change and set my focus on self-love, gratitude, being present, resilience, and success. That’s what I bring to any project I am invited to join. I consider it a privilege to be there.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Three skills I think were crucial to my own personal success in Nashville were:
1. Flexibility
2. Knowing / speaking the language
3. Self-acceptance / self-confidence
Flexibility means being able to roll with the punches – whether that be technical issues, logistical nightmares, vehicular mishaps, problems that arise just by merely existing in a fast-paced environment. Being flexible and focused on solutions has been truly the skill that I utilize the most. Typically when a technical issue arises with my equipment – sometimes during the show – I am the first to both identify the problem and fix it.
Which leads to knowing and speaking the language. As a certified audio engineer, I was the only non-male presence in the audio major at my college. I think that story is changing. There’s such a freedom that comes with being able to articulate exactly what you want and how you want it, without being gaslit or condescended to by others. And while that may still happen, it feels really good to be able to hold your ground by knowing your shit. I’m at a point where I engineer my own records and the band’s records, and it truly has been such a confidence-booster to be able to find a way to release music exactly how you’re hearing it.
Speaking of confidence, this is something I still struggle with today. I know rationally that I can do a lot of things and there are lots of tricks in my arsenal – playing multiple instruments, writing with legends in my life, engineering and problem-solving and hell, even backing up trailers – rationally I’m confident in my abilities to do those things. But I think all of us struggle with a little bit of imposter syndrome, especially if you’re living in Nashville. There’s always someone who can do what you do. But I think it’s important to accept yourself as you are – that in this time, you’re still an individual contributing something unique and truly yours when there’s a reality in which you don’t. In this reality, you have the means and the privilege to create something. Who cares if someone else is doing the same thing? Allow yourself to be inspired by that, not defeated. Learn something new from them. Tell them you appreciate them. I bet there’s someone in their lives they feel similarly about. Accept yourself as you are and be confident in that – it really goes a long way.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
There have been plenty of times in my life when I thought I didn’t have certain strengths, and told myself that I would just focus on what I THOUGHT were my strengths and ignore my perceived “weaknesses.” For instance, when I first started playing music, I told myself that my strengths were playing violin and singing harmony, and my weaknesses were writing songs and playing other instruments. Now here we are writing songs and playing multiple instruments for a living.
We never know unless we try, and not just try for the first fifteen minutes, consider it not a natural talent, and proceed to never try it again. We have to lean in a little bit, ignore the judgmental voice in the corner of the mind (it’s not real), and sound bad until we don’t sound bad anymore. The sounding-bad-period is part of the process – it’s not a reflection of who you are.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.savmadigan.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/savmadigan
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/savmadiganmusic
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/@savmadigan
- Other: www.patreon.com/savmadigan
Image Credits
Jay Gilbert Ellen Joy Photography Carter Furland
