Despite having 45-minute work days, ‘Sad Girl’ Sasha Sloan keeps herself moving while on tour.
Sasha Sloan is on tour right now and she’s trying her best to have it resemble a level of normalcy. The American singer begins to speak as she frantically searches for a Starbucks in Charleston, South Carolina. “Pretty much my routine every morning,” she says, which is pretty hard considering she’s in a different city almost every day.
Daily routines like coffee are one thing. What she’s also worried about besides her caffeine intake is that her creativity and work ethic remain moving alongside her many stops across the United States. “When I’ve been on the road for a while I feel like, ‘Oh shit, I need to create again,’” she explains. Sloan is flipping the proverbial “all work and no play” on its axis and enjoying it from city to city. “Going on tour is really great for writing because when I’m home I get lazy with it.” It’s an odd world when a person’s most comforting place can be the Achilles’ heel of creativity, and Sasha Sloan’s ability to get out and go hone her craft further has made a great impact on her singing and songwriting. She even said that signs in grocery stores and other parts of daily life have had an impact on her songwriting skills.
A downside to venturing outside the symbolic duvet of your house, of which there has to be many, would be the strange interactions one encounters when they leave like it life is designed by Rockstar Games. Especially in Sloan’s case, because she’s been humming along in a tour bus across the far and wide stretch of land called America since October. She describes the spookiest thing she’s done on tour so far as eat at an Applebee’s in Georgia, which, if anyone has ever eaten at an Applebee’s in any of the continental states, is a pretty weird experience. Any place of business that offers $1 zombies for a whole month is asking for trouble.
Dealing with the peculiarisms of driving around America and the many bad dinners one can only imagine that she’s eaten, comes from the downtime she says she’s both a victim and a bystander of taking part in. She describes touring as 45 minutes of work and 23 hours and 15 minutes of nothing to do in a city you’ve never been in before, most often stationed in a parking lot that is open all night to anyone willing to stay. It might be safe to assume that the crowds that opt into a deal like that that aren’t an elegant singer and her band.
“You prepare for, well, I’m on a bus. It’s me, my guitar player, my drummer, my tour manager,” she says. Sloan then goes on admit that her creative growth, like most people, is helped with TV shows and books even when she is at home, which is good because TV is now online and books weigh one pound each. “Uno, we’ve been binging Netflix, playing lots of video games,” she says. Despite being pensive, she isn’t shy but rather laidback and straightforward in her point, and almost undercutting her serious talent to make that point. “I’m just lucky that I have a voice that sounds ok.”
Sloan emanates a sense of confidence that isn’t false or unappreciated. Her position right now, even if for 23 hours of the day is abiding by her own schedule, isn’t getting to her head. She’s already doing something extraordinary like driving in a bus across a country and singing to thousands of people, but the real beauty, at least to her, is providing a structure in a lifestyle that’s hard to keep together. Even finding Starbucks in the morning is tough, and that’s right at the beginning of the day.
I tried to discuss her process for how she writes such beautifully tragic songs like the last track off of her sad girl EP entitled “Here,” but her creative world is not structured that way. “I don’t know if I really have a process… It just happens. I know it’s the cheesiest answer ever,” she says. Her true process is just being a human who has emotions and pain and happiness. Artists and others of the like are made from the same stuff as us plebeians, and, because of that they, “feel the same shit as everyone else.” Relationships create her music, not a desire for wealth and influence. She likes it that way. And it leaves the beautifully simple Sasha Sloan with a different worldview with an enlightened following who also see humans as emotional beings. Or, as she put it, “’I’m not the only who’s like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’”
Words by Sam Farrell – Stream Sasha Sloan’s newest EP “Loser” on Spotify now.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://lyfstyl.ca/sasha-sloan-interview/