No Sailor

No Sailor is the moniker of American singer-songwriter Kieran Garvey and his five-piece folk band. Their debut album, Anchor Broken Free, is rife with stories of spoilt love, fickle romance, and the absurdities of dating. Recorded over two years, and in three countries –Slovenia, Scotland, and America – the album was carefully crafted with Glasgow producer Paul Savage (Franz Ferdinand, Camera Obscura) and mastered by Brian Lucey (Arctic Monkeys, The Black Keys, Beck) in Los Angeles. The result of their labor is a collection of delicate, powerful, and achingly honest songs.

It Started As A Trio

“The band formed like a snowball down a mountain. I was living in Ljubljana, Slovenia when I met an English expat, Lloyd Betsworth. We started playing around with some songs and then met our violinist Jelena Ždrale, which brought the music to a new level. At the same time I was going through an intense breakup with the woman I moved there to be with, and I had to choose between leaving the country or sticking around and starting a new life with the band we just formed. Everything was uncertain, but knowing I’d found something truly special with these two gifted musicians—that believed in me—I chose the latter.

The breakup was a massive catalyst to my personal growth as well as my songwriting, and produced a series of songs which became the album. It was an intense period of my life—completely starting over in a place where my network was countable on one hand. My life shattered, and everyone I knew and loved was across an ocean. I poured this experience into the music, and it was a powerfully cathartic way to process what I was going through. It was full of ups and downs. I felt terribly alone, alien as a foreigner, and yet wonderfully free too. The songwriting process was my constant though, and the music we were making was rewarding enough to reduce the sting of the rest of my life. 

We performed as a trio for a year in small cafes, bars, venues, and on the street busking. It was upright bass, violin, acoustic guitar and vocals—so there was an inherent challenge to make each song unique. We composed the whole album as a trio in fact. I eventually recruited a female vocalist, Ines Polončič, for some duets I had written, and one night at our regular performance venue I brought my pianist friend Urban Grabenšek up on stage for a song. He nailed it, so he’s been in the band ever since.

When I brought the recordings to Glasgow the producer Paul Savage suggested adding percussion. We recorded percussion on a few songs there but I later realized we needed more. I met our drummer Keaton Thandi a few weeks later in Philadelphia at a house show and he added the final rhythmic finesse the songs needed. It was a spread out multi-year recording process, and it was all self-funded, so I was working a lot in between sessions to pay for studio time. After years of work I’m really happy with what we made though, and I hope it helps other people like it did for me.”

— Kieran Garvey (Singer-songwriter of No Sailor)