On a tour bus crossing America, the singer behind “Here” on coffee, Uno and why the road is better for her songwriting than home.
Sasha Sloan has worked out the maths of touring. As she describes it, each day is 45 minutes of work and 23 hours and 15 minutes of nothing to do, in a city she has never been to, usually parked in a lot that stays open all night.
The day starts with a search. When we spoke, she was hunting for a Starbucks in Charleston, South Carolina. “Pretty much my routine every morning,” she says. In a different city almost every day, even that is hard to keep up.
The bus doesn’t hold many people. “You prepare for, well, I’m on a bus. It’s me, my guitar player, my drummer, my tour manager,” she says. The rest of the hours get filled however they can. “Uno, we’ve been binging Netflix, playing lots of video games.”
The spookiest thing she has done on tour so far, she says, was eat at an Applebee’s in Georgia.
Odd as it is, the road is good for her work. “When I’ve been on the road for a while I feel like, ‘Oh shit, I need to create again,’” she says. Home is where the work slows down. “Going on tour is really great for writing because when I’m home I get lazy with it.” Even the signs in grocery stores feed her songwriting.
Ask her how she writes something as sad and exact as “Here,” the song that closes her Sad Girl EP, and she doesn’t have a neat answer. “I don’t know if I really have a process… It just happens,” she says. “I know it’s the cheesiest answer ever.” What she has instead is a life, and the same feelings as everyone listening. She feels, as she puts it, “the same shit as everyone else.”
She plays down the thing everyone notices first. “I’m just lucky that I have a voice that sounds ok,” she says.
Her new EP, Loser, is due out at the end of the month. Her songs come from relationships, not ambition, and the people who listen hear themselves in them. Or, as she puts it: “I’m not the only [one] who’s like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’”
Words by Sam Farrell. Photography by Anthony Caebero.
