Elijah, better known as $avvy, was born on Dec 19th, he’s a Sagittarius. 

One of his earliest music memories was when he was about 5 or 6 when his parents got him a CD player/radio for Christmas. At the time Lionel Richie and the Commodores was his favorite band. They’d burned a greatest hits CD for his new player, and he played it over and over again until it wouldn’t anymore. That radio was super important to him, because it was a big part of his life. He listened to 104.3 The River and memorized the lyrics of his favorite songs. He never had an iPod or anything like that where he could take his music with him.

Growing up, his parents played a lot of “80s yacht rock” like The Police, Cindy Crawford, Hall and Oates, etc. Music has always been a big part of his life. He grew up going to church and singing in the choir and performing in plays. He’s not a stranger to the stage.

Songwriting origins:

He used to freestyle during lunch and that’s where he learned the basics of rapping and rhyming. His younger brother Fred actually taught him how to make beats. Once he got pretty good at making beats he started selling them to YouTubers or Soundcloud rappers. He was too young to get a job, and that was what he did for money. Once he was making his own beats it was only a matter of time before he was rapping over his own tracks. “I hated math class and that’s where I did all my writing. I could not focus in math, so I just used to write raps in the back of the class, and then I would go home and record ‘em.”

The early days of recording:

When he first started recording in high school he had a very DIY setup, of course. At the time the girl he was dating was really big into Guitar Hero. She had the name-brand drums, the guitar, and the microphone. He used that little Guitar Hero, USB microphone to record his first tracks. Along with a hair clip, that was connected to a hanger that sat in a glass bowl. He would plug the mic into his mom’s old laptop, a regular HP, and used Audacity (a free recording software). 

“Whatever I could make, whatever I could get my hands on, that’s what I was like using to create” says Savvy.

He was a California baby, but in Huntsville, Alabama where he went to high school there wasn’t really the infrastructure or a music scene to be a part of. After graduation, he came up to the Nashville area (Murfreesboro) to go to school at MTSU. He dropped out his Sophomore year.

What was your first show?

“My first show was my freshman year, 2019. MTSU did this thing, where they would throw shows at a venue in Murfreesboro called the Laundry Room.” He opened up for a guy named Mills Turner, a fellow student at the time, who’s actually huge now. DJ Veggi also played this first show with Savvy, Veggi went on to teach him how to DJ. He didn’t rap at this first show, he was singing some original songs along with a band.

How did living in Nashville influence your music?

“Oh, man. Tenfold. I feel like a lot of the music that I listen to today came from people who are here because Nashville’s just such a melting pot. You get so many different people from different places that listen to different shit. When you listen to different music, it makes you wanna make different music. It’s beautiful to be a part of something more than yourself, like a scene.”

How would you describe your music?

A word for the fans:

“Man, I would tell whoever’s reading this, you go describe it. Give it an honest listen, and then you describe it for whatever it means to you”.

Staying true to his zodiac sign, he’s unafraid of change. As his career moves forward he’ll always be striving to do something different because you don’t ever want it to get boring. “I think I just want to make undeniable music. Music that’s like, regardless of if it’s your style or what you usually listen to, you all have that one song that’s just like, a guilty pleasure. I wanna make guilty pleasure music for people, but you don’t feel guilty about it.”

Check out Savvy’s new single below and follow him on Instagram.