In Audre Lorde’s landmark 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic, the iconic poet sheds light on the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. More than forty years later, Toronto-based artist and songwriter Savannah Ré has become one of R&B’s brightest new voices by making music with a similar unyielding intention: to retrofit her experiences into a vessel for revealing the intricacies of universal emotions.
Growing up in Toronto’s East End, Savannah was a talented dancer whose formative musical influences included R&B luminaries like Mary J. Blige, Aaliyah, and Boyz II Men. But it was her discovery of Beyoncé’s contribution as a songwriter on “Dangerously in Love” that solidified her ambition to write lyrics filled with passion understood on a muscular level.
As a highly skilled songwriter, Savannah Ré has developed an acumen for an arrestingly honest style of self-reflection that’s the mark of music’s elite. She writes everything down and due to this, nothing slips past her gaze. With a trained eye for capturing small details, Savannah Ré crafts songs that forfeit polished stories for authentic ones. Her lyrics — delving into intimate reckonings, and earth-shattering truths, about the machinery of desire, and rerouting perceptions of gratitude — are intoxicatingly relatable. Delivered with honey-hued vocals, and sung over patient, golden melodies with heady, circular beats, her music is mesmerizing in its celestial fluidity as it defers space for her voice to take centre stage.
It’s this carefully-refined formula for songwriting that has brought her under the mentorship of Grammy Award-winning producer Boi-1da and has made her the go-to collaborator for R&B’s upper echelon where she’s written with artists like Babyface, Normani, Daniel Caesar, and Wondagurl. In addition to opening for artists like TLC and Jessie Reyez on her “Being Human On Tour” 30-date North American tour, Savannah has also attended esteemed writing camps such as the Keep Cool/ RCA writing camp (Ant Clemons, Charlotte Day Wilson, River Tiber, Mereba, Brandy) and Amazon’s all-woman creative camp for Wondagurl's debut album (Baby Rose and Yung Baby Tate).
Over the course of her career Savannah Ré has released four singles (“Count Em’ Off”, ”Impressed,” "DVP," and ”Best Is Yet To Come”). It’s evidence of an artist devoted to quality control that aims for perfection, and who has fine-tuned her intuition— almost on a spiritual level —to gut check when a song has reached maturity. In 2019, her single “Best Is Yet To Come,” a silky ballad that anticipates a future with great expectations, was selected as one of the 100 Best Songs of the Year by Apple Music.
Her debut EP Opia, scheduled for release later this year, is a project that Savannah Ré could not have written at another point in her career. It’s the product of a prodigious songwriter who taught herself to uproot and replant experiences she was still processing. Written in Toronto and Los Angeles, the title was named after an entry on John Koenig’s website, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows for intense emotions that lack an official name.
By channeling the unmistakable heat of early 2010s R&B, with the sanguine choruses of 90s sophisticated pop, Opia scrutinizes fears of abandonment while also celebrating moments of satisfaction. It's for those who don’t fit into a cookie-cutter model, and who forgive trials and tribulations of simultaneously-contrasting moods—some demanding and others euphoric—that influence our capacity for vulnerability and intimacy.
During a moment where all eyes are on R&B coming from Toronto, Savannah Ré is doing more than just joining a talented group of artists rewriting the rules of the genre — she’s leading the pack in her own right. Her goal is validation: to advocate for the value of untidy, collectively-held stories which ultimately become the ingredients of reclamation and resilience.
