Sean McConnell’s Magic – An Origination Story
A Path to For the Song
How does it start? Our love of song, story, music? Emotional, right? It is not easy to remember specifically when it first happens, but the feeling is one we never forget and perpetually seek to re-experience. When we take the time to listen, and to really hear.
Song can suspend time, or jumble it into fragments that reappear on the wings of sound and feeling. It can be the first time you hear a song or the umpteenth time – the connection comes.
Is it the first time you hear it or the first time you really listen that matters? Doesn’t matter if it was Lennon/McCartney, Buddy Guy, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Jerry Jeff Walker, James Brown, Billie Jo Armstrong or Jimmy Page that first suspended time for you.
It just matters that you found YOUR wings.
In June, Lynn and I experienced two favorites at the Local Yocal in McKinney, Texas. We marveled at how lucky we were to be there. We knew of McKinney and Zane Williams from The Wilder Blue. We knew Sean McConnell was joining Zane and we knew McKinney was near Dallas.
Sean McConnell at Zane William’s Songwriter’s Evening at the Local Yokel
And that was barely a beginning.
Characterizing McKinney, Texas as “near Dallas” is like saying Sonoma is near the Richmond Bridge…, it tells you nothing of the charm of the walkabout town, the humanity of its populace or its commitment to extraordinary culinary and libation arts. But I digress.
It started for us in a Starbucks in San Mateo, CA at least 15 years ago when we picked up yet another sampler CD from another has-to-be-more-than-a-coffee shop. Famous artists would include a curated set of faves from up-and-coming artists who moved them. This one featured Lucinda William’s choices and included “If These Walls Could Speak,” an early poem and ballad of Sean’s origin.
If these walls could whisper,
If these walls could speak,
they would scream out loud, they would cry themselves to sleep
They would pray to Jesus, they would sing Rock and Roll,
they would laugh with each other, they live soul to soul.
But I guess that don’t matter any way, cuz
if these walls could speak, I know what they’d say….
It became an anthem in the family car, for us all, including for our children. And that was all we knew.
We knew some guy named Sean wrote a song our family loved.
That was it for at LEAST a couple of years…, we found and sought no more. We had discovered the Braun family, Reckless Kelly, Charley Crockett, Walt Wilkins, John Fullbright, John Elliott, Wade Bowen, Alejandro Escovedo, Randy Rogers, Jamie Lin Wilson, Jeff Crosby, Courtney Patton, Hayes Carll, Micky & the Motorcars and Gary Clark, Jr. We had travelled to Dickson Productions’ festivals and built our own theory about where great songwriting was happening. We continue to believe that the “Texas music scene” is, in fact, much BIGGER than Texas.
To us, it’s a next generation Laurel Canyon, with echoes of The Byrds, CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Mama Cass, Chris Hillman, and more—while also drawing from a broader musical landscape that included artists like Jimi Hendrix, Richie Havens, and Sly and the Family Stone, whose influence on the era was impossible to ignore.
Songwriting and performance is at the center of it all. And that emphasis—on the song itself, and the person delivering it—set it apart from the heavily produced bro-country coming out of Nashville, the blues traditions of Memphis and Chicago, and the rock and pop machinery of the West Coast.
And when I finally googled Sean McConnell, I was astonished to find he had written four of my five favorite Randy Rogers songs. He played one last night and had 200 folks singing at the top of their lungs – “In My Arms Instead.” Zane hit us with unknowns to us, as we know his Wilder Blue catalog more than his solo stuff. “Hurray Home” and “Jayton & Jill” astonished, particular when you hear the story of how it was written as a part of a weekly songwriter challenge.
So we were reminded once again that music is one thing, listening is another. Music can be passive and soothing and a background part of mood and experience. Want to party? Music supports. Want to mourn? Too good at that by a distance. Want to work? There’s music for that.
But when we choose to really listen, when we really hear, we are exposed to the kind of magic perhaps most accessible to us.
Walt Wilkins was with us recently, and Jeff Crosby’s Maybe Denver circled around a playlist. Walt lived in Nashville for 10 years but never really felt at home with its approach to the music business. It took returning to Texas to feel free enough to “just be” who he is – a GREAT songwriter and performer.
The first line came on:
Tennessee, I love ya,
But I think we should just be friends…,
And I heard Walt say “DAMMIT” “Oh, MAN!” …. “That may be the greatest line EVER, mannn I should’ve WRITTEN that.” And yes, Walt and Jeff will soon meet face-to-face and have planned to collaborate.
Talk about impending magic!
Anyway, one of the most influential songwriters of our lives will always be Sean McConnell. Who has taught us so much about the art, but (through no fault of his own) not a damned thing about the magic it takes to create it.
Magicians never reveal their secrets. But with songwriting, I think it’s different still.
It’s not that if they revealed their secrets, they’d somehow have to put us down. It’s more that most of us are “civilians,” we simply are not capable of that kind of magic.
Unlike the old trope that everyone thinks they have a novel in them, a song is somehow too simple and too complex simultaneously—bound up in language, rhythm, melody, arrangement, and emotion, all at once. And when it comes together…,
…it’s magic.
It seems to me that you are either a magician or you are not. Most of us are simply civilians, watching songwriters and musicians battle on.
So we are left to make the time to listen, and to hear it when the magic reveals itself.
But the how of it?
Hey, if we could understand how they do it, we wouldn’t be civilians, then, would we?