How Alexandra Savior fought for her own return: “I’m just going to do exactly what feels right”
For her fans, the long-awaited return of songwriting talent Alexandra Savior after five years was incredibly exciting news. For the artist herself, though, “Honestly, it’s been a little anticlimactic.” But isn’t that how it always goes? When you want something so bad and have been working towards it for so long, it’s always strange when it actually happens.
In the moments after a dream is realised, there is always an odd, almost empty feeling where you sit back and think, ‘Oh, that’s that then.’ Especially if that dream has been building and building quietly in private, the moment you reveal it to the public as something so tender and hard-earned, there is always bound to be some weirdness.
Savior has been stewing in that weirdness for a long time now. The last time the world heard from Savior, from the outside, it probably looked like an artist riding high. Released through Columbia and helped by Alex Turner, with whom Savior also wrote for his The Last Shadow Puppets project, her 2017 debut Belladonna of Sadness instantly shot her to notoriety. To her fans, 2020’s The Archer probably looked like a continuation of that success, gaining major critical acclaim. But, by that point, Savior had been dropped by her major label, and when it comes to financing what she wanted to do next, a small indie label can never be much help.
When we talk about the injustice of money in the music industry, this is exactly what we mean. Savior, with her talent, renown, and hundreds and thousands of monthly Spotify streams, should be earning a livable wage and enough to continue pushing forward with her career. But, as we know, that is not the case. Pair that with Covid-19, which greatly impacted Savior and her health, and what you have is a grinding halt that no one, neither Savior nor her fans, expected. The rest of her tour was cancelled; she seemed to disappear.
Yet still, what seemed like radio silence from the outside was a busy creative period for the artist. The album that she’s sitting on and is now finally beginning to offer to the world has been in existence for almost all of that gap. The weirdness came in the waiting around and in the new way that Savior had to adapt to making music. With both of her other albums, the process was typical—she wrote, then she went into the studio and worked consistently until it was done. But with the circumstances surrounding this third project, that couldn’t happen.
“It drove me crazy at first, for sure,” she said, describing the painstakingly slow process. “I was writing for a year, and then we went into the studio in 2021,” with that already bringing up its own delays due to the band needing masks, clearing Covid-19 tests and careful health protection. However, there was one issue, more than most, that caused an incredibly stop-start way of working.
“I recorded it in fragments because I didn’t have a label,” she said. “It’s expensive to have a band and go into the recording studios. So we would go in for like four days, and then six months would go by. And then we would go in for four days, and then eight months would go by.”
When she told me this, my immediate response was—how on Earth do you keep a hold on your vision and what it is you’re trying to do when the world keeps stopping you like that? But for Savior, that was a strangely beneficial element, forcing her to realise what she needed to focus on. “I had made some mistakes in the past where I would not follow my instinct, and then that is always what leads me to feel, maybe some, I don’t want to say regret, but, you know, I think that is what leads to inconsistencies,” she explained. This time around, having to already endure a tricky creative context, a lesson was learnt: “The consistency is me. For this record, I was just like, I’m just going to do exactly what feels right.”
But again, the world threw Savior another curve ball. Despite her masses of fans who were awaiting her return to music, this rotten industry failed her, as it does so many. She knew she needed two more songs for the album—two singles that she could pitch to labels and try to get herself some backing. But, funds had run out. “I had absolutely no money. I was on food stamps and like was, you know, not able to pay rent, and it was a really difficult time, so we couldn’t pay for musicians. So Drew Erickson, who produced the record, he played everything.”
You’d never guess, but ‘Unforgivable’ is one of those songs, standing as testament to Savior’s talent and having the benefit of incredible collaborators and the strength that comes when an artist is determined to make it work no matter what. The fact that ‘Unforgivable’ and follow-up single ‘The Mothership’ are so polished and gorgeous while made on an invisible budget is all the proof you need that artists will move mountains to realise their art, even though they shouldn’t have to.
Through the struggle of it, a silver lining came. It would be easy to now present RCA, Savior’s new label who signed her off the back of ‘Unforgivable’, ‘The Mothership’ and the rest of her record, Beneath The Lilypad, as a knight in shining armour as they are finally backing her to put out their long-time-coming release. But really, the only hero here is Savior, who battled her way through waves of a pandemic, health issues, money issues, industry failures and more to make a return. Now, her third album, one born from that fight, will be released on May 16th, 2025, and while she might feel it as “anticlimactic” right now, what it really is is a triumph of artistic spirit and a true victory.
