SAV MADIGAN

Sav Madigan is not just one-third of the all-female, indie folk roots band, The Accidentals - she's an award-winning singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, side artist, recording engineer, and session player, hailing from Nashville TN by way of Traverse City MI.
 

Sav was born in Nashville and practically grew up on a tour bus surrounded by musicians. Her dad played piano, guitar, and saxophone - and was the band leader for country artists, Terri Clark, Doug Stone, and Grand Ole Opry legend, Whispering Bill Anderson, who announced Sav's birth from the Opry stage.  The rest is history.
 

If it has strings, she learned to play it - violin, viola, mandolin, banjo, bass, guitar, and recently she added pedal steel to the menagerie. Her dad taught her how to chart songs via the Nashville number system when she was barely a teenager, and her ear for harmonies and arrangements helped her score her first studio session when she was twelve. 
 

Sav says her first love is “supporting other artists on the road and in the studio.” She’s toured as a utility player with the likes of Martin Sexton, Keller Williams, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Kim Richey, Peter Mulvey, and more.

 

Sav and her bandmate from The Accidentals, Katie Larson, are the backup string team (violin, viola and cello) for Sista Strings (Brandi Carlile, Peter Mulvey).

 

When Sav isn’t on tour, writing and recording keep her grounded. In 2022 and 2023, Sav won several songwriting contests, including First Place in the Folk Category and Overall Grand Prize for the 27th USA Songwriting Competition, Kerrville NewFolk Songwriting Contest, Songwriter Serenade, was the Judge's Choice Winner of the New England Songwriting Competition, and was a finalist in the Folk Acoustic category of the 39th and the 40th Mid-Atlantic Song Contest (MASC).

 

Her song, Cityview, and co-write, Night Train (Dar Williams and Katie Larson), were both semi-finalists in the International Songwriting Competition, and her song The Line was a semi-finalist in American Songwriter and Finalist in the 40th Mid-Atlantic Song Search.
 

Wildfire, co-written with Kim Richey, was the #1 song of the year at Folk Radio in 2021, and her album TIME OUT was the #1 album at Folk Radio in 2023.

Sav is a certified audio engineer, string arranger, and session player - owner of Crooked Moon Studios in Nashville TN. She’s added vocals and instrumentation to dozens of songs on other artists' albums, including K-pop phenom BTS and Eurovision contestants Mia Nicolai and Dion Cooper on their song Burning Daylight.  Her arrangements have sync placements in films like One Simple Question, in advertisements for Turner Classic Movies, and in TV shows such as Amazon Prime's The Boys and Netflix's Bloodline.  You can hear the playlist On The Record here. https://bit.ly/Savontherecord

 

Sav describes herself as a “problem-solver, lock picker, trailer packer-and-backer, book nerd, birdwatcher, and cat parent in her spare time”. 

 

“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 200+ 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.” -Sav Madigan