SAVNT of Ghost Hounds photo by Allister Ann
SAVNT of Ghost Hounds on Building The Emotional Landscape of Almost Home
Country and blues influenced rock band Ghost Hounds released their fifth studio album, Almost Home, on March 21st, 2025, and with it took on a new kind of experiment, since the album has an emotional story arc focusing on the lives of two people in love. It traces their initial attraction, the progress of their many years together, and the final somewhat unexpected growing apart and dissolution of their relationship, leaving them reflective. For this album, Ghost Hounds also collaborated with Patty Griffin and Lainey Wilson.
Almost Home is a very emotional album that seems to hold the energy and dynamism of two people interacting through life’s ups and downs with every track. I spoke with vocalist SAVNT about building that emotional landscape for the narrative of Almost Home, how he prepares for recording, what some of these songs mean to him, and how they might be handled in live performance in future.
Americana Highways: I loved the video for “House a Home” that you all have released where you filmed in what looked like a multi-generational living room with lots of belongings. I know that you didn’t have to record in that room to make it the live play video, but some people do intentionally record in old homes.
SAVNT: I think sometimes recording at home is really cool because of the fact that it’s a more honest sound. When you go to the studio, where everything is going to be produced, that’s what you expect, but sometimes you find that gold, that special thing that you can’t recreate, that was from that demo track that was done at home. That’s why I approach everything like this, and I know the band does as well: wherever we are, recording, we try to do it with the intention of “This might be the one.” It’s really cool to always be focused on that authenticity.
AH: I think with demos, there can be an unselfconsciousness to that, where something might occur to you to do that you wouldn’t do otherwise. From what I understand, though, a lot of the crafting of the album happened in the studio for you guys this time. How much did you know and work on ahead of time?
SAVNT: I am a super-studier. I like studying! So I remain a student of the craft. What happens is that Thomas is the lead writer, and me and Thomas [Tull] will sit down and he will say, “This is how it’s feeling. This is what it’s going to say.” When you have that kind of background, you’re almost becoming an actor. Then I wonder, “How does this guy say this word?”
When you think, specifically, of making “House a Home,” I went back in and re-cut those vocals. Everyone else loved the vocals, but I was trying to get the sound more reminiscing and joyful, not so heavy. I sang that with more of a smile this time. I do a lot more self-work with these songs, and then the band comes in, and we start vibing off of each other. And I might change something based on what they are doing, so there’s improv as well. We just play together.
AH: The vocalists who I speak to who have been doing this the longest seem to say similar things, that they do work on their own to really decide the character of the songs before going into the studio. I’m pretty sure that you’d agree that you have to connect with these words, emotionally, to come up with these different interpretations, so I love the fact that you and Thomas meet in person to build that. It’s like co-creating the emotional landscape.
SAVNT: That’s exactly it! I’m glad other people do it this way, too. But there are so many times when my fiddle or bass player want to go back in and do something more. We all listen back to it and want to make the song as magical as possible, just this song. We’re not even talking about the whole album at that point. We want to make sure that everything we do is intentional and with purpose.
AH: You all sound pretty driven as musicians.
SAVNT: One-hundred percent! That’s why I love these people!
AH: With this album, it’s particularly special because there’s this theme of home, and there’s this story arc of these characters to follow. So it’s even more applicable that you say that it’s like acting, since the lyrics are often in the mouths of characters. That’s new for you, right, since it’s like a musical.
SAVNT: It really is! Then, every note, and every action, then informs the next action. But with this album, the way that I tend to talk about it is that it really is a story of meeting someone, getting to this beautiful relationship, and you believe it will continue to be, but then you also watch it disintegrate. When we were recording the songs, we starting to realize, “Oh!” Then we approached things a little differently.
So, “Past the Point of Rescue,” is kind of in the same vein of “You’ll Never Find Me,” but “House a Home” is going to lead to “Before You Leave.” With “She Runs Hot,” that first song on the album, it’s cool, but kind of chaotic. It’s saying, “You could probably ruin my life, but I kinda want you to!”
[Laughs] It’s those butterflies that you get right at the beginning of wanting to talk to somebody. The album runs the full emotional landscape of a relationship.
AH: I’m used to listening to emotional albums, but I still thought, “Man, this is an emotional album!”
SAVNT: [Laughs] Yes! One of my favorite ones that I don’t get to talk about enough is the song, “Lonely Last Night,” which says, “I hope you were lonely last night.” Because we’ve all felt that way!
AH: Yes, these are kind of classic moods. Did you record songs that didn’t make the album, and if so, did that make it tricky to tell this arc in just a limited set of songs?
SAVNT: That’s exactly it. There are sometimes songs that don’t really fit the soundscape. From what I remember, we all fell in love with this one song, but listening back to it, it wasn’t the song for this album. Sometimes it does become hard to make those decisions, because a song is like our baby, which we brought into the world, but we want to be intentional about everything. I want everyone who listens to this album to get what you got from it, which is: “This is an emotional album.” You’re going to have your favorite songs, and some of them are a little more fun, but there’s emotion here. And that’s what Ghost Hounds is about. We are authentic.
AH: How does the story aspect of the album relate to what you might plan to do live? I can see that the songs can exist separately from each other, but do you want to play them as a group?
SAVNT: We haven’t talked about it much yet. “She Runs Hot” is one of those that, just like it starts the record, is probably going to start a show. You feel like you know what is going to happen next. But the way that we’ve built a lot of our sets is tried and true: We start strong, then we come down into a place below, that gets you in your feels, then we pick it back up. From the sets that we have been playing around with, it feels like exactly that. We’re also bringing in some of our older songs, like “First Last Time” and that leads really naturally into “House a Home” because it’s in a similar pocket. So the performance isn’t necessarily telling a story of a relationship from beginning to end, but the soundscape is always dynamic. We’re always going to be changing and moving. And we have always got to throw some Blues in there! That’s our heart and soul.
AH: The song “You’ll Never Find Me” has got to be played as the second-to-last song, or the last song of a set, right? It’s so intense. It has that post-breakup feel.
SAVNT: Yes! That song is from my previous work, and I brought it over here. Thomas gets the voice of this band, and when he heard this, he said, “Do you want to play this for a show.” It was for The Roxy, our first show together as a band in Pittsburgh. I said, “Yes!” Then, he asked, “What do you think about releasing this?” I said, “Are you kidding me??” It’s been really cool to have this song, and see it grow over the years, and to have my band’s interpretation now. It went above and beyond anything I could have imagined. Then, my fiddle player said, “Hey, I hear strings on this. What about an orchestra version?” I said, “Yes, yes, do all that!” It’s been fun to see.
AH: That’s wonderful. I saw there was a strings version. The sound is so big on the album version that I can only assume that the band members are contributing as much as they possibly can. They were all clearly very inspired.
SAVNT: Even my bass player, when he hit a certain part, asked to double that part. Every time we play that song, I think everyone can really feel it. I think everyone can relate to it, feeling like renegades.
AH: It brings up a bad subject in a good way, in my opinion. The bad subject is thinking back on relationships that didn’t work out, and unfinished business.
SAVNT: Absolutely.
AH: But the reason that it brings it up in a good way is that it channels those emotions. It says some of these things that you might feel that you need to say, to yourself, if not to the other person.
SAVNT: That’s where it was written from. I’m so glad that you said that. And sometimes, the victim does become a little bit of a villain, like the lines where it says, “I set their hearts on fire, and you were my alibi.” Because a person hurt you, you end up doing that to other people. Sometimes it takes the reclaiming of self to understand what you did wrong, but also to say, “I never deserved that either.” It’s a reclaiming of self and remembering or finding out who you are.
AH: Talking about the patterns of behavior that we have to overcome in life is something that doesn’t fit into songs very often, so it’s great that you included it.
SAVNT: Exactly, thank you.
AH: Even on the Patty Griffin cover, “Long Ride Home,” where you collaborated with Patty on this album, it’s a song that’s talking about a beloved person who is gone, but it made me think of how that experience teaches you about yourself. When you find yourself alone, what happens?
SAVNT: That was the reason that we chose that song, as a band. The Roxy gave Ghost Hounds a lot of great moments, and Thomas asked what we thought of that song. I absolutely wanted to do it because one, it’s Patty Griffin, but two, it’s the story of that song. It’s a song that reminds us, “I spent so much time worrying about things that were trivial and created distance between us. Now, all I can do is think about you, and all I want is those moments when you leave your cups on the table, and it pisses me off.” [Laughs] You know? It’s all those things.
Even when she says, “Forty years of things we said we wish we never said.” That makes me think, “Whaaat??” It goes back to her being a really great songwriter and a really great storyteller. That’s the reason the whole band said, “We’ve got to do this.” Having her jump on the song was huge of itself. When she said yes, we knew that it was special, and that’s why we wanted to honor that the way that we did.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, SAVNT! More information about Ghost Hounds is available here on their website: https://www.ghosthounds.com