On the day I called Sean Rowe for our interview, he’d just been out picking wineberries in order to make homemade fruit leather. Unfortunately, my recording technology malfunctioned, and I had to wait until the next day to learn more about the fruit leather. And about the six months Rowe spent playing house concerts so he could share his mighty baritone and inspired songwriting in a more intimate setting. And about his new album, Madman, which he says is his most personal release yet.
Erin Lyndal Martin: How is your wineberry crop?
Sean Rowe: Good! It took pretty much all day to turn them into fruit leather, but I’m happy with it.
I read about your travels and how they inspired this record. I’ve love to hear a synopsis of what the goal was of your travel and how you executed it.
The house concerts started a couple years ago because I did a couple of house concerts. It was nothing really intense; just a couple of shows during my regular club tours. There were just a few stops along the way. I thought it was a great way to get the music out there, be intimate. I thought, “man, this would be a great thing to do for a full tour.” And I had this time, about six months, between the tour for the last album and the recording for this new one, and I knew I would be homebound, and I didn’t have any shows booked. I basically just put a post on Facebook to see who’d be interested. It turned out a lot of people were interested in opening up their homes or their farms to me. It turned into a tour of six months.
When was it that you were writing the songs?
I wrote some of them while we were recording the album. A lot of them were carryover songs from the last record. I had a lot of extra tracks and they weren’t recorded yet. A lot of it was older stuff I wanted to get down. But then I started writing a bunch more demos last summer. When we were recording, once I got the feel for it, I started writing more.
Can you describe the theme or the narrative of Madman, if there is one?
More than any other record that I’ve done, it’s got more me in it. It’s a more direct album, lyrically and musically, than anything else I’ve done. I produced it myself; I had a coproducer that I’ve worked with for a long time. It was just us two, writing and arranging, so I was very much a part of the process from the start to finish, from the conceptualizing to the recording to the mixing. It means a lot more to you when you’re involved that much. Inevitably, it became more of me than anything I’ve ever done.
Are there certain songs that speak to that?
Definitely. The song called “Madman” was inspired by being on the road. I don’t know if I would get that deep into it on the next record, but this does have that feel to it.
When you’re writing lyrics, what is the hardest part for you?
You don’t know when a song is done. You can’t force it out of you. Even though I’m starting to write something that might not be done for a year or more. The hard part is waiting for it to be finished.
Before you started recording Madman, did you have any new influences in your life? Like reading a ton of Kafka or listening to Midnight Oil nonstop?
A lot of my influences are from early soul music, rock and roll, early punk music. I always come back to the feeling of wanting to strip something down to the bare bones. Things I got into when I was 18 years old and always come back to. I was never impressed with much I hear in modern music. A lot of it sounds the same to me. I don’t hear a lot in modern music that I really want to listen to over and over again.
There are some artists out there, where, even if I love them, their albums sound kind of interchangeable to me. And some artists make a conscious effort to do something different every time. Is this something you’ve given much thought to?
I like it when a record sounds like a whole, like it’s really meant for vinyl and you can listen to the whole thing. But I do like the idea of changing from record to record, and I’ve certainly done that with this record from the last record, and I’ll probably do it with the next record. Because you’re always growing and changing. It doesn’t make sense to stay in the same spot.
Are you consciously trying not to use techniques or ideas you’ve used before, or is it a matter of being in a different place?
I don’t know if you’re consciously trying; it’s just that you get bored with the sameness of where you’ve been.
Are you going back out on the road soon then?
Yeah, I have a pretty big tour coming up for the fall, including some West Coast headlining tours and then East Coast headlining tours and then support tours and then playing some shows in Europe.
When you play shows in Europe, what are those experiences like?
Germany is a really different audience from the UK. Very serious audience. Very into music, but very serious. I do well in Holland. One of my better spaces. I get a better response in Holland than I do in the US.
