Seems everyone wants Savannah Ré
GTA-raised R&B singer, releasing debut EP today, got attention of A-listers
It’s one thing when 11-time Grammy winner Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds requests your presence once … but twice?
That’s the situation that Scarborough R&B singer and songwriter Savannah Ré, who releases her debut EP “Opia” on Friday, found herself in a few years ago.
She entered a songwriting talent search sponsored by Edmonds — the man who dominated the mid-1980s and ’90s as either writer or co-writer and producer of such R&B pop chart-toppers as Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” BoyzIIMen’s “I’ll Make Love to You” and “End of the Road,” and Bobby Brown’s “Don’t Be Cruel” — and his Good Vibes Music Group, a publishing company established in partnership with Mississauga-based music entrepreneur Jason Murray.
“He hosted one in L.A., one in Nashville and also one in Toronto,” Ré recalls.
“You have to submit your three best songs just for a chance to come to this weeklong camp. You’d get broken off into groups with your peers and, at the end, Babyface would choose a song that he liked, and you’d get to record the song with him and his engineer of the last 20 years.
“Honestly, it’s a blur, but my group won the one in L.A.”
Ré’s Babyface experience may have ended there with the song “Bad Decisions,” but when he set up the camp in Toronto he asked for her again through Meghan Eliza, who first introduced them.
“He actually reached out through Meghan and said, ‘I want to work with her again.’ It was a second audition, if you will, and that time he put me by myself. He said, ‘I want to see what you can do and see if anything has improved.’ ”
If Edmonds had any plans to scoop her up as an artist with that second visit, he had already been beaten to the punch by Matthew “Boi-1da” Samuels, who by that time had signed her as the flagship artist to his 1Music label.
Ré said she had been writing over the beats of Boi-1da — his hit-making resumé includes Drake’s “Best I Ever Had,” Eminem’s “Not Afraid” and Rihanna’s “Work” (featuring Drake) to name a few — and sending them to him for three years with no response.
“It’s one of those things where you don’t get in direct contact with the person,” Ré says.
“I was just hoping he was hearing the demos I was writing, but I wasn’t sure.
“Eventually I met him and he told me, ‘Oh, I love the demos you’ve been sending and I’ve been sending them out.’
“More time had passed and when he got his first imprint with Universal, he reached out again and said, ‘Hey, I wanna sign you.’ In my mind, I thought, ‘Oh, obviously as a writer. ‘And he’s like, ‘No, no, no, I want to sign you as an artist.’ ”
Ré said that signing to 1Music was “super humbling and affirming.”
“Boi-1da is a legend, so for him to sign me as his first signing to his label was a vote of confidence that said, ‘I can do this.’ ” There were times when Ré had her doubts.
Born in Montréal, Ré’s family moved to Scarborough when she was only a year old, biding her time in the Markham and Sheppard neighbourhoods before later travelling east to Port Union and Sheppard.
“Pretty much all my youth was spent in Scarborough,” she says. “It shaped who I am; it shaped my sound. There is so much culture — in all of Toronto, but in Scarborough, especially — all of my friends looked different than me and there was a whole bunch of languages and different cuisines growing up; just this melting pot.”
She decided to pursue singing while attending Pope John Paul II Catholic Secondary, although she admits an earlier fascination with Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé Knowles served as a catalyst.
“With Beyoncé, when I was really, really young, one of her songs that really impacted me was ‘Dangerously In Love,’ ” Ré says.
“I would try and sing that song until my face turned blue. I had to conquer this song, so I spent a whole summer trying to sing it.
“I started doing my research and saw that she co-wrote the song as well. That blew my mind because, prior to that, my understanding of major artists is that you don’t write your songs as well. You’ll have someone do it as a specific role and then your specific role is as an artist. I thought the two things had to be separate.
“Seeing that, I decided, this is what I want to do.”
There was only one obstacle: stage fright.
“I was a very shy person and had tremendous stage fright. I refused to go onstage for a really long time.”
Tika Symone, a.k.a. Tika the Creator, help put an end to that: Ré worked the Lambadina Resto Lounge at Ossington and Bloor streets attending gigs and to scope out performers, and Symone accidentally heard her sing.
“She said, ‘I don’t understand. Why aren’t you going up onstage?’ I told her no and she said, ‘Don’t worry, it takes time to get comfortable.’
“Literally the next week she went up onstage and said, ‘We have a great show for you tonight, including Savannah Ré’ — without telling me. So I ended up going onstage, because it’s not like I couldn’t since she called me out.
“She kept doing that to me: throwing me out into the water. Eventually it started to become natural.”
Taking her time to release soul-drenched jams is also a Ré specialty: hits like “Best Is Yet To Come” — which has registered over one million streams on Spotify — and “Where You Are,” a song included on “Opia,” have been building a steady buzz.
Edmonds and Samuel aren’t the only A-listers who have responded: Jessie Reyez offered Ré a 30-day opening slot on her recent “On Being Human” tour before it got squelched by the pandemic.
“Jessie and I go way back,” Ré says.
“We would see each other at every open mic — because Toronto didn’t really have a whole bunch of shows where you could perform — so every year we’d see each other three or four times at these same shows. So you start to build a certain level of respect.
“After she released ‘Figures,’ she was starting to do some interviews and she was asked who she believed was up next in terms of talent to watch for and she named me.
“So I reached out to her to say thank you; we stayed in touch with Instagram and then, when she was going on tour, she literally DM’d me three weeks before the tour and asked me if I wanted to come on tour.
“All the shows were already sold out, so her doing that for me is completely selfless. She could have any opener that she wanted.”
It seems that these days, everybody wants Savannah Ré and that demand will only increase as “Opia” begins a life of its own.
Gifted with the ability to spontaneously freestyle her songs on the spot, Ré says she’s trying to commit to the lessons learned with Babyface when it comes to her creativity. “He doesn’t overthink” she says.
“Part of what he tried to instill in us is to go with how you feel: go with your gut. Nothing more, nothing less. And after that point, I’ve tried to embody that every time I’ve tried to write a song.”
And with “Opia” being a selfdescribed “stepping stone,” Ré envisions a future that benefits both her and her community.
“I want the things that everyone wants: the Juno, the Grammy,” she says.
“But I also want to do things for my community in Scarborough as far as bringing back any knowledge that I learn.
“That’s a really big reach-forthe-stars thing for me to bring it back to my community and who knows what’s next? In the grand scheme of things, I’m just enjoying the day.”