The Accidentals’ “Vessel,” is about a journey — as people, as musicians, as bandmates. The album, the Michigan trio’s third full-length, takes stock of a 10-year trip that’s been filled with twists, turns, hairpin curves and some rest stops.
It also had a journey of its own, and not always an easy one.
“Vessel,” which the group started working on three years ago, finally surfaces on Oct. 1. It was delayed by the pandemic but also benefited from time the Accidentals were able to spend working on it when its usual crammed touring schedule was stilled. It coincidentally comes close to the 10-year anniversary of Savannah Buist and Katie Larson forming the group in Traverse City, which only makes the reflective tone of the 14 tracks that much more appropriate.
“It’s about realizing there’s not a finish line,” Buist, 26, explains by Zoom from Traverse City, where she and Larson are preparing for a tour that kicks off this week in their home town and comes to the Ark in Ann Arbor for a pair of shows on Oct. 2.
Fellow multi-instrumentalist Michael Dause, who joined the Accidentals seven years ago, is Zooming from Grand Rapids, where he’s working on some of his own music projects before hitting the road again.
Much of the meaning in “Vessel” can be found in its title track, and its optimistic refrain that “we’ll get to where we want to be.” “As soon as we started playing that one live, we knew we wanted it to be the title track of an album we wanted to follow ‘Odyssey,'” says Larsen, 25, referencing the Accidental’s 2017 major label debut. “‘Odyssey’ was about moving forward boldly, in spite of fear. This album has become more about taking everything into perspective, zooming out, seeing where we are, stop feeling like we’re trying to race to get to a certain place.”
“We’ve been playing some of the songs on this record for five years now, and some songs were written in quarantine,” Buist notes. “It makes sense the album is all about perspective, that parallax notion of being stuck in something and still moving forward at 500 miles an hour. The songs are a representation of that.”
The Accidentals’ speed of sound has certainly moved at a breathless pace.
Prodigies and self-confessed “music nerds” in high school orchestra, Buist and Larson were on a trajectory for formal education, including admission into the Interlochen Center for the Arts, when they decided to pursue the band instead. Blending a wealth of influences — from Americana to alt.rock and points in between — they independently released their first album, “Tangled Red and Blue,” in 2012 and earned national notice for their sophisticated but fresh harmonic sensibility and musicianship well beyond their years.
Dause’s addition made two plus one equal more than three, and thanks to relentless touring and a DIY promotional ethic (including the group’s own teas, wine and apparel), the Accidentals have been on a multitude of radars for a long time.
“Things have seemed to go by really, really quickly,” says Dause, 26, “and in other aspects things feel like it’s been 100 years. After last year I was finally able to see the change physically. Looking back on a lot of photos from our tours I looked the same for a long time. Now after this year I feel like I’ve changed so much. I’m able to have the perspective of seeing a difference instead of feeling like the same person for so long.”
Larson, too, says that the pandemic pause allowed the trio to step off what had become a purposeful treadmill — mostly pleasant, albeit with some challenges such as having the band trailer and gear stolen in January 2019, with fans stepping up to replace everything via a Go Fund Me campaign.
“We were constantly moving and worrying about hitting a plateau, constantly pushing ourselves — ‘What can we do different? How do we improve? What new thing can we pick up? What else can we try?'” she explains. “It felt like it was going slowly, but when we stopped I was like, ‘Wow, I definitely feel 25 now. I finally feel my age.'”
The Accidentals were in Arkansas and well on its way to recording “Vessel” when the music industry, like so much else, shut down in March 2020. Though Buist and Larson had set up shop in Nashville the previous year, they picked up Buist’s cat and headed back north, bubbling together with Dause back home. There the group held forth mostly online, with a steady diet of virtual programs such as “Three For Tea” and “Daily Breather,” as well as performances for the Ann Arbor Folk Festival and other streaming events. Buist even composed a 40-page manual/tutorial of livestreaming guidelines that was sourced by the Recording Academy and Bandcamp.
They also recorded a new EP, “Time Out (Session 1),” a five-track set that featured songwriting collaborations with Kim Richey, Dar Williams, Maia Sharp, Tom Paxton and the duo of Mary Gauthier and Jamiee Harris.
“It was good to stay in a productive place for a while as we figured out how long this was going to go on,” Buist says. “It was nice to be back in Michigan, nice to hear birdsong and all of that. All of us live with immune-compromised people, so we didn’t go anywhere for a while and quarantined together to make the record.”
Dause, who also released a solo album last year under the name Treeskin, adds that, “It was kind of interesting to have an amount of time to delve into something. After six years of being on the road so much and ‘go, go, go…,’ when we decided to come back and start recording on our own, we had time to really dig into some of these tracks and spend three hours getting a cello sound and … just dig in our heels, really.”
The group had recorded parts of “Vessel” with producers such as Tucker Martine and John Congleton, but the album was primarily finished at Atticus Blue Studios in Buist’s attic and at Cedar House Studios in Larson’s Cedar, Mich., where all three Accidentals honed their engineering skills. Some songs were refined, others were re-created. Buist estimates the group worked on seven different version of the song “Slow and Steady,” while the lyrics for the revealing “Count the Rings” were rewritten from scratch at one point. The Accidentals also found additional inspiration from a broad array of other artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, the National, Nickel Creek and the Gin Blossoms, while a song such as “Go Getter” would even fit well on a Taylor Swift album.
“We had time to tap into who we are and what we wanted to sound like,” Buist explains. “Plenty of songs on this record are truly some of the most honest material we’ve ever written — that’s saying something, ’cause songs have always been free therapy for us, for a long time. There’s some real grieving on this record, and some hope. We’re really proud of it.
The Accidentals will be on the road into early November to introduce “Vessel,” and are already scoping out the 2022 itinerary. Buist and Larson are headed back to Nashville part-time for co-writing and session work, and they promise Accidentals music will keep coming — including a second volume of “Time Out” collaborations.
“We were a little low on material back in 2020,” Buist recalls. “When we felt creatively stuck we’d give a friend a call — ‘Hey, do you want to write a song together? We can use that practice, that inspiration. It was nice to get those juices flowing again, and that let us get back to (‘Vessel’) in a really good frame of mind.”
• The Accidentals and Sawyer Fredericks perform at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2, at The Ark, 316 S. Main St., Ann Arbor. Tickets are $25 and up at 734-761-1800 or theark.org.
