Streaming | Bandcamp

(hey, today’s Bandcamp Friday, when all artists get 100% of the revenue from music sales on that platform)

I’ve got a new song out today, and it’s definitely called “The Hospital”.

This tune came about very recently — I recorded it as I wrote it on July 6th.

A few weeks later I invited some friends over (Bear, Bird, & Grass) to enact the whole scene, as you can see.

I hope you enjoy it, let me know if you do!

I’d love to explain a million or ten things about this piece: what it means to me, how it was recorded, how it fits into a broader body of work. And any of that would miss the point of the song. So here’s the tune for you: [ Streaming | Bandcamp ]

Under The Radar Magazine premieres the track, writing:

“Misunderstanding” is the most atmospheric and free-form of the singles Kiely has shared thus far this year. The instrumentation moves in cyclical tides, crescendoing in rushing cascades of arpeggiated guitars, rumbling drums, and wandering basslines before shrinking back into the shadowy background of the mix.

Credits:
Sean Kiely 〰️ Voice, Acoustic Guitar
Chris Parker 〰️ Electric Guitar
Chris Morrissey 〰️ Bass
Bill Campbell 〰️ Drums

Engineered by Lorenzo Wolff at Restoration Sound, Brooklyn, NY
Mixed by Adam Brisbin
Mastered by Nate Wood at Kerseboom Mastering, Queens, NY

I've been misunderstanding
Ok, that's a beginning

I've been beginning to learn how to pull
The ropes just a little further offshore

I've been offshore since '82
Isn't that a stretch?

I've been stretching back toward the sun
Ok now, that's a beginning


I've been misunderstanding
Ok, that's a beginning

I've been beginning to learn how to fold
My petal gently round the bend

I've been bending and I've been broke
Trying to think my way across the flame

I've been a flame jumping here and there
Ok, that's the beginning

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t i c k e t s

Please join me Saturday, 6/13 for a co-bill show and live-taping with Chris Morrissey. I’ll play a set with my whole band (Bill Campbell, Bobby Hawk, Jean Rohe, & Chris), and then he’ll play a set with his whole band. Chris is a special songwriter/bassist, and a recent collaborator. Last week we played a ripping front room duo show at Sunny’s Bar. Chris often plays with Mark Guiliana, Norah Jones, Aoife O’Donovan. Rows of heroes.

What is Restoration Sound? Mostly it’s a recording studio owned and operated by my friend Lorenzo Wolff. Lorenzo & I first met on a gig in 2012, and in the 14 (!) intervening years, he’s been putting his energy into not just making records (working with: Ana Egge, Mike Robinson, Taylor Swift), but building a community around a space. I love working in this studio — parts of It Sure Was Good and all of Restoration Reckoning were made there. “This Is The Year” was recorded there, along with an entirely new record (👀). What record is that? Hang on, I’ll have so many more details for you in a month.

Anyway, once or twice a month, Lorenzo presents shows in the live room of Restoration Sound, in a concert series called New Town. It features genre-skeptic artists playing their music in a room that most people only get to hear through their speakers.

So .. do you want to hear an entire upcoming record that you’ve not heard yet, in the exact room in which it was recorded? If yes, then you ought to get tickets to this one, before the 50 seats sell out. It’s a once-in-a-never event.

Chris Morrissey + Sean Kiely
at New Town, Restoration Sound
1040 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
7PM doors
7:30PM show (hard start time, this is a live taping)
$20 / 50 seats available

tickets

Back in January I got an email out of the blue from WFUV’s Alisa Ali asking if I was vaguely available in mid-February. (I was). A few hours later, I was booked to open for Sam Beam (Iron & Wine). And three weeks after that, I found myself sitting on a sofa across from the man himself — the two of us alone in a very green green room.

Some say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but Sam turned out to be generous, funny, and quite encouraging. Down to earth.

Soon enough, showtime came around. WFUV’s music director Russ Borris introduced me some time around 7:15, and I had 15 minutes of stage time to work with. City Winery was packed. The crowd was great — buzzing and respectful. They wanted to hear songs. Songs they’d never heard before. A total dream. So I started playing. And then just as I started to settle in, it was over. Thankfully WFUV was taking video, which you can see below, or check out the entire post here.

I stood toward the back for Sam’s set, which was loose and fun and quite excellent. The 22-year-old inside me had wanted to let him know I could definitely play and sing “Passing Afternoon” off Our Endless Numbered Days, if he was in the mood for a duet partner. But I never floated it backstage, and he didn’t wind up playing it.

“Passing Afternoon” is a classic, poetic lyric that feels kindred to “Brokedown Palace”, the Dead tune written by Jerry & Robert Hunter. This last stanza gets me crying in the car every time:

There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the windows closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone

Sam Beam’s music is beautiful but I don’t know if he gets enough credit for its strangeness. He’s a real poet and I’m grateful I got to share an evening with him. Maybe someday the fates will put me in another room with him and a couple of guitars. I sure hope they do.

Tour Dates
4.1 Pittsburgh, PA — A NICE Night with Jeff Taylor feat. Sean Kiely [ tickets ]
4.2 Elkin, NC — The Martha Bassett Show [ tickets ] [ livestream ]
4.3 Asheville, NC — House Concert [ rsvp ]
4.4 Chapel Hill, NC — Woodshed Arts [ rsvp ]

“Now as I look around, it’s mighty plain to see / this world is such a great and a funny place to be” is how Woody Guthrie begins the last verse of “I Ain’t Got No Home”. It’s probably my favorite line of the tune — where Woody shows himself to be the open-eyed, brokenhearted, folk-songing idealist he was. His narrator’s wife has died, his home’s been taken, his brothers & sisters are stranded on a hot & dusty road .. he’s “worried all the time like he never was before”. But he's alive and awake, and he can’t help but laugh at the absurdity.1

I’ve been singing this tune out in the world for a little over a year now, and people seem to be having an experience with “I Ain’t Got No Home” (1938). Folks come up to me after shows and say more or less the same thing: “I can’t believe this song feels this relevant almost ninety years later”. We seem to want things to be all better, thank you very much.

We’ve been in a Reactionary Backslide for something like 17 years now, and a typical comfy liberal response is a kind of indignation or exasperation at having to fight to hold on to gains already fought for and won. It’s an impulse I sense in others, and I feel it in myself. I’m angry and incensed, and it’s hard to admit that even that is a position of privilege. If I’m honest, some degree of it comes from me wanting to be able to relax, in some other version of this world .. a version of it that’s fair and just. Why can’t I relax without having to put my own body, my own money, my own reputation on the line. How is it that I’m still arguing with my uncle about why we ought not to be — as a state or as individuals — violent, abusive, murderous, callous, and/or inhumane toward the “least among us”? Why can’t I comfortably bask in gains and progress that was all made before I was born? Really, I wonder, why has this come back around?

Don’t you know that things go in cycles? That’s what Q-Tip, another kind of folk-songer, sang in A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions” (1991). Later in the song, the band samples spoken word poet Umar Bin Hassan from The Last Poets’ “Time” (1971):

Time, time is a ship on a merciless sea
Drifting toward an abyss of nothingness
Until it can be re-charted for its own destiny

Wow. That came out just a handful of years after the end of the Jim Crow era of state-sanctioned segregation. And just a few generations after the last time a non-metaphorical ship carried actual human people from Africa to the USA against their will. The metaphor of the merciless of a ship at sea is stunning considering how African-Americans got here. So it goes.

Yes, things go in cycles. Nothing is over, nothing is won. Aren’t we always in all of the stages at all of the times .. beginnings, middles, and ends? Time is pulsing. It’s going up and down, but an up and down that extends in all directions at once, throbbing and thrumming in rhythm. Like a heart. A ship on a merciless sea. Until it can be re-charted for its own destiny.

So is there no safe harbor to be found? I don’t think that’s the case. There’s mooring in the cycle. In the wave. The wave is the truth. It goes up, and it goes down, and the down-ness of it is integral to any kinda concept of up-ness. The glib thing you usually hear sounds something like, “well, you gotta to take the bad with the good” but .. bad and good don’t quite suffice. The low isn’t just the cost of the up, it’s structurally necessary for the wave to be a wave. The low is the high as much as the high is the high. The only other available state would be a flat line, and well, we all know what that means.2

So there’s comfort and recognition, and aliveness, to be had in singing the song from 1938, which was itself written after the gospel tune from before that, which must’ve come from something before that. I love folk music because there’s no end to the story, you’re always bringing what’s come before into the present moment. The idea of my own tune “This Is The Year” is salient to me because any time you say it, it’s always true. This is the year of the middle of the end, but also the end of some infinite beginnings, and the beginning of some infinite ends. Maybe that means it’s all just .. middle. Right now, in this moment we’re at the vanishing point of, well, god-knows-what. But here we are. The whole perspective converging into a single coordinate, with richness and color and joy and grief and nothingness and somethingness vibrating around it in every direction.

I’m accustomed to playing music with other musicians when performing, but this past year I’ve been standing out there alone more often than not. It’s been a good and fascinating exercise. For that hour or two, I get to be the vanishing point in a room, and direct the energy of the baby universe that arises for a period and then dissipates. The usual image we associate with performing is a spotlight, but I’ve been experiencing it more like this — the converging of a perspective on a horizon. And, like all states, it’s temporary.

My recording of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home (In This World)” is out today. I’m getting into my failing Subaru and driving my guitar and myself to Pittsburgh to create an ad hoc, evening-long universe with Jeff Taylor. Tomorrow night I’ll stand at a mic and beam some waves out over the radio on The Martha Bassett Show. On Friday, my old friend Erik Alvar will host me in his living room for an intimate show and jam session in Asheville, and then on Saturday I’ll drive to Chapel Hill and swap songs with new acquaintance Eleanor Buckland in Dawn Landes’ community music center Woodshed Arts. We’ll gather in small rooms with folks looking for some community, a bit of relief, and a bit of recognition — that this is what it feels like and what it sounds like to be standing up right now. Here we are.

Tomorrow, Wednesday March 11th I’m playing in Jersey City for Art House Productions’ Unplugged series. Tickets Here. I’m headlining a bill with Sammy Mellman and Kelly Bran. Trio with Chris Parker & Bobby Hawk. We have a big songbook at this point, will be so fun to put a set together. Come out to the show ✨

Later in the month, I’m teaching a workshop on arranging for fingerstyle guitar & voice at Jam Jersey on 3/21. My piece is in the afternoon on Saturday but the fest, which looks to be very fun, is all weekend in sunny Mahwah, NJ, all ye' bluegrassers should check it out! Info.

After March I’m heading out on a brief solo tour in April, here are the dates:

• 4/1 Pittsburgh, PC: A NICE Night with Jeff Taylor (‼️) feat. Sean Kiely at the Club Cafe. TICKETS.

• 4/2 Elkin, NC: The Martha Bassett Show. TICKETS. (Live on North Carolina Public Radio)

• 4/4 Chapel Hill, NC: Woodshed Arts song swap w/ Eleanor Buckland. RSVP.

More info soon, but I’m releasing a very special solo single on 4/1. Keep an eye and an ear out.

And finally, “This Is The Year” is still floating around. The response has been so very nice, if you haven’t checked it out yet, go do it!

A quick dispatch to let you know that I’ll be opening for Iron & Wine next Thursday, 2/12 at City Winery NYC for WFUV. It sold out almost immediately after it was announced last week, but there’s a waitlist here. This is a dream gig1 for me.

If you didn’t happen to get in for that one, there’s one more chance to catch me in February: I’ll be back at the fabled Scratcher Sessions in the East Village on Sunday 2/22. This is a significantly lower key affair, but it’s no less of a dreamy gig for me. Sunday nights at The Scratcher is one of the best if you know you know things in New York — the folks who put it on do such a nice job. Glen Hansard is known to play it every so often (under an alias) when he’s in town. Come out!

How To Help This Independent Musician Finish His Upcoming Record™:

• Buy This Is the Year at Bandcamp

• Stream This Is the Year and tell a friend

• Follow @seankielymusic

• The Bluegrass Situation is featuring “This Is the Year” today as part of their You Gotta Hear This series. It includes new video of me & Kaia sitting down and playing the tune in her living room. Go check it!

• I’m playing at Sunny’s Bar Thursday, 1/29. It’s a trio hit, with Chris Parker & Jared Engel joining me. I haven’t played in Brooklyn since October — come out! Sunny’s is the best.

• Getting so much love for “This Is the Year”. The following things are helpful, please do them if you can: save it & playlist it wherever you stream music, or if you’re feeling committed, buy it on Bandcamp. (thank you Patrick, wherever you are).

  ---

  How I learned to stop worrying and love the squeeze

We continually find ourselves in [the] squeeze. It’s a place where we look for alternatives to just being there. It’s an uncomfortable, embarrassing place, and it’s often the place where people like ourselves give up. […]

This place of the squeeze is the very point in our meditation and in our lives where we can really learn something. The point where we are not able to take it or leave it, where we are caught between a rock and a hard place, caught with both the upliftedness of our ideas and the rawness of what’s happening in front of our eyes—that is indeed a very fruitful place.

Excerpt From When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön

This isn’t something I’ve talked about publicly before, but around six years ago, I gave up drinking. My story is pretty ordinary: alcohol in my 20s was fun and helped me — a somewhat tight, self-conscious, rejection-sensitive arty boy — loosen up, be in the moment, and stop worrying so much. Drinking in my 30s got less fun, more compulsive. It eventually crowded out all the other tools for dealing with life as it really is: full of rainbows & shitstorms, restaurants & DMVs, grace & boredom. My mental and physical health suffered, my creativity withered. Eventually I hit a wall and had to uh, pay the check at the end of the evening. I’m glad I settled up. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple, and my life has gotten better since then.

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Once I didn’t have a lever to manage my emotional states, I had to figure out how to deal with “the squeeze” that Pema Chödrön talks about. It’s been a real process trying to figure out how to accept things as they are, and to not fixate on how I think things ought to be. My mom always says that when I was a kid I was preoccupied with fairness, right & wrong, etc. I’m still very much that way. I get bent out of shape when the world turns out to be messy, unjust, more wrong than right. The rawness of it grates against the “upliftedness” of my ideas and my ideals.

Now, I realize this newsletter is verging close to becoming more of a mindfulness journal than a music thing, but it’s pretty tough to separate my recent experience of the world from the music I’m making. When I was writing “This Is the Year” and the line “this is the year of the open eye” came out, it was as much aspirational as reportage. Sometimes I write pep talks into my songs. Sometimes they’re reminders to myself.

“This Is the Year” is full of shitstorms & rainbows. The world is both things — you fall in love and the bees all died. You survive the drought and your heart gets broken.

It’s shitstorms everywhere today. You can’t miss them. Am I worried all the time? Yeah. My eyes are open. I see the secret police rounding up non-white people indiscriminately. My news feed the last few days has been, over and over, the same picture of a five year old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, being held by a masked agent — by his little preschool backpack, in the freezing Minnesota cold — trying to lure his family members out of their house. It’s been, over and over, image & video of Renee Good in the last moment of her life. It’s been members of the government using their microphones to tell me, over and over, that no, I am seeing something other than what I know to be true.

What is there to do? Right now, giving to mutual aid is an option: https://linktr.ee/mplsmutualaid. I’m trying to connect and engage, not wither and dissociate. Do I believe what’s happening in Minnesota will expand? Yes. And Minnesotans are showing us how to stand up for what is right.

In my previous life, the Squeeze — the insufficiency of the world exactly as it is — would be the end of the story for me. I’d grab the nearest lever and check out. I would not be able to access any measure of hope or grace in the face of reality. My eye would not be open. This song came out of somewhere I’m trying to get, and it lights its own path. Where I’m at for today is: I’m not naive, but I’m also not jaded these days. This is the year ✨

The first moment a song comes into existence, shedding its previous state of non-existence, is a really fun thing to be a part of. Highly recommend. Whatever the initial spark may be (some words, some notes, some chords), an entry point opens up into a mood or an emotional state, inviting further definition. That’s how it works for me. Make space and attend to what comes up.

The initial impulse is so important, but for me those first ideas don’t often survive the editing process. However, in the case of “This Is The Year”, the entire first verse that I began with remained intact, identical to what I wound up releasing last week on New Year’s Day. That’s unusual for me!

Here’s my original voice memo from 3/11/2024.

Looking at that date, I realize now it was the 4 year anniversary of lockdown. I must have been at least ambiently aware of that when I picked up my guitar in the afternoon, made a little chord loop, and started singing those lines. Anniversaries, time loops, moments of reflection, moments of inflection. Temporality.

From the Oxford Dictionary of Geography:

In contrast to the measurable and calculated notion of time/chronology, temporality is concerned with the way in which a sequence of events, a kind of history, is physically experienced by those who live through them or experience them. Thus the passing of time is treated not as a neutral dimension but rather as being constituted by social practices.

What’s the mechanism by which “temporal” popped into my head? I love a mystery. The setup is a quick succession of the words “this-is-the-year-of-the” followed by punchlines that s t r e t c h time. I must’ve been messing with the chords & rhythm, and reaching for melody & words. Simultaneously playing and listening — opening my ear to what was floating around. Temporality was already coded into the musical idea itself; how cool for it to be the first punchline to come out of my subconscious. The way into the song.

Temporality acknowledges a truth that our experience of time is so subjective, always contingent. On whatever else is going on .. on other people .. on our linear understanding of history, of time .. on circumstance. Yes, contingent on vibes.

Childhood feels like it lasts forever as it is happening but we remember it as a flash. Middle age (so far) seems to accelerate towards uh, something. The most vivid experiences of my life simultaneously feel as if they lasted a very long time and also as if they sped by. Lockdown was a severe disruption of time and space. It feels like it was 1. yesterday. 2. decades ago, another life entirely. 3. ongoing, still present.

What even is the “past”? It can’t be any more, or less, than a narrative that we, as individually-conscious and collectively-conscious experiencers of time, place on top of a constantly unfolding, world-wide, universe-wide, unfathomably broad “nowness”. Let me put it this way: as I think of the past, I can’t actually be there in the past, I can only be »here«. My experience of memory of the past — my happening right-this-second experience of thinking about it — is one of recollection. And that experience of recollection is always subjugated by the present-tenseness of the thinker.

Memories change. In the realm of the personal history, happy experiences can become bittersweet, grief-tinged memories. Negative experiences can do the inverse and be re-coded as ultimately positive, or at the very least, portals to change. Beyond the personal, in the realm of the political, cultural, and historical, everything is relentlessly, collectively being re-coded to fit an undulating, thrumming, inescapable »now«.1

When I wrote that first verse of “This Is The Year”, I don’t imagine I was actively or conceptually thinking about all that, or anything particular — I let my subconscious open up and it spit out a line: “This is the year of the temporal”. But, at the same time, I must have been thinking about all of it. The creative act gives me a way to vibrate with different kinds of truth. It helps me find out both what I’ve been thinking and how I’ve been thinking. And music, more than words alone, seems to point even more directly at how I’ve been feeling.

Emotional states get baked right into the musical elements of song (melody, harmony, rhythm). Which means, I get to access them again and again. The same only different. It’s a way to play with time, and it’s so fun. To bend it without breaking. I can’t time travel of course, but in my relationship with songs (my own songs, other people’s songs .. all songs) I can experience that ever-evolving, ever-buzzing »now« with layer upon layer of context, nuance, paradox, mystery, and depth.

Yes, this is it, right now. This is the year, full stop.

This is the year of the temporal—
This is the year of the open eye—
This is the year that I ran
Out of things I could plan—
This is the year of the middle of the end—
It's the year of the bees all died—

Strays

• if you use streaming services, check out this years-y playlist: spotify | apple music.

• i’m working on a full record. if you want to help that work ( i could use support! ), please consider buying my existing recorded music on Bandcamp, or perhaps become a paid subscriber to this Substack:

  Subscribe now

• a video of my cover of Woody Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home In This World”, which i wrote about at length last year here, got a bunch of unexpected attention on instagram last month. it was a strange and fun experience, to play a house concert for around 15 people, to post a video from it, and to have that video reach 10s of thousands of people. i plan to release a recording of the tune a little later this year.

• i’ll be playing live at Sunny’s Bar Thursday 1/29 with Chris Parker & Jared Engel. please come if you’re near Brooklyn.

• a veer: i’m in utter grief and paralysis at the state of the country. it’s a dark and depraved moment. we’re certainly in fascism, the only questions being: to what degree will it continue to expand, and where will that leave us if it, hopefully, fails to fully grip. how can i help, what can i do? please share your own answers with me if you feel comfortable. i need to take action, but i am, stuck.

  ---

you’re still here? ok here’s some secret video from a gig at the Irish Arts Center last month.

Or perhaps you use Apple Music or Spotify. Or something else entirely.

This is the first song off an album coming … not so far in the future. I’ll write more about the tune next week, but just for today I hope you’ll give it a spin. Scroll down for lyrics and credits.

This is the year of the temporal
This is the year of the open eye
This is the year that I ran
Out of things I could plan
This is the year of the middle of the end
It’s the year of the bees all died

This is the year of the ripening
This is the year of the running joke
This is the year of the doubt
I’d survive the drought
This is the year of the hope
And the holding it out
It’s the year of the butterfly

This is the year of the something else
This is the year of the floating sigh
This is the year it got out
And hung around in the clouds
This is the year of the lips
And the corners of mouths
It’s the year of the don’t ask why

Sean Kiely - Vocals, guitar, synth
Kaïa Kater - Vocals, banjo
Chris Parker - Guitar
Chris Morrissey - Bass
Bill Campbell - Drums

Produced by me
Recorded by Lorenzo Wolff at Restoration Sound, Brooklyn, NY
Mixed by Adam Brisbin
Mastered by Nate Wood at Kerseboom Mastering, Queens, NY
Cover photo by Amghy Chacon

Me & my buddy James Calleo went into the belly of the beast (times square) at 6:45am this morning (1/1/26), and I sang the tune to the stragglers, the cleanup crew, and the big screens. It was a triip. Click through for the post-party comedown.

Happy New Year!

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The year is ending. Long live the year. Here’s a brief dispatch and update from me before the calendar turns over and 2026 tells us what its all about.

I arrived in Nashville yesterday and hung and stayed with Abbie Gardner. She and her husband Craig moved south from Jersey City a little over a year ago and have built a nice new life in a new town. After our shows last weekend, it was a rare treat to get to see Abbie twice in just a couple weeks. She and Craig took me to the East Nashville American Legion for a weekly Wednesday night bluegrass jam. I love playing bluegrass music, and I love meeting new people over songs. I ran into some old friends and some folks I’ve only been acquainted with over the internet. A hoot!

Tonight I’m playing not bluegrass at my old friends Stacy & Tom’s place in East Nashville. I’ll be playing a set of my songs solo, perhaps with a guest here or there but maybe not. Tom Barrett and Jessie Gray will also play their music. If you know anyone down here, send them our way!

Chicago, IL ~ Saturday, 12/6 I’m performing live on air on WFMT’s Folkstage. The studio performance is members only, but you can tune in live at 8PM CST / 9PM EST. https://www.wfmt.com/programs/folkstage. I hope you can tune in — let me know if you will! I’ll be singing, alone, on a mic over the airwaves, to an unfamiliar audience. Will be nice to think of some of you all out there at the other end of s p a c e .

And finally, Go Bailers finish out the year 12/10 & 12/17 at The Archer, Jersey City. Get down to the Archer! 7-9:30pm.

Bandcamp Friday

Hey have you made it to the end? I’ve been working on new music. I’m not ready to say too much about it because it’s still in blob state, but I’m very inspired and very excited by what’s going on.

If you’d like to get behind the next thing that’s coming, I could certainly use some resource support, and one easy way to do that would be to purchase something at https://sean0sean.bandcamp.com .. particularly tomorrow (Friday, 12/5) when Bandcamp waives their fees for artists. You can also support by becoming a paid subscriber to this very substack you’re reading ⬇️

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as George Harrison said .. Thanks for the pepperoni

~ sean

PS ~ I’m sure I’m missing things, but I think my favorite records this year were:

Free Range ~ Lost & Found
Madison Cunningham ~ Ace
Foxwarren ~ 2
Will Graefe ~ Compositions for Guitar Volume 2
Olivia Ellen Lloyd ~ Do It Myself
Paul Spring ~ Dumb and Free (a late addition)
Japanese Breakfast ~ for Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
Jason Rigby ~ Mayhem
Mark Guiliana ~ questions (volume one)
Cécile McLorin Salvant ~ Oh Snap
Pino Palladino & Blake Mills ~ That Wasn’t A Dream

• I recently spent four or five days listening pretty much only to the Alison Krauss & Robert Plant version of “Killing the Blues”, so me & Olivia Ellen Lloyd grabbed our guitars, threw some beanies on, and sang through it last week. Check it :)

• This weekend I’m playing a couple shows with my good friend Abbie Gardner. We’ll be at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem PA this Saturday, 11/22 (almost sold out!), and at Jammin’ Java in Vienna VA Sunday, 11/23. I’ll open each show, followed by Abbie, and I’ll sit in w her on her sets too. I bet we’ll play this tune.

• Restoration Reckoning is OUT now on all streaming platforms. Thanks to all who grabbed it on Bandcamp, that really helps! Add it to yer playlists and share widely 🧡

• I recently made a v silly and niche bumper sticker, which you can also grab on Bandcamp if you’re interested in such things. My dream came true earlier this week as I sat in traffic, and looked in my rearviewmirror to see a confused looking gentleman staring down. I then watched as he mouthed out each word of the sticker “KEEP HONKING I’m whistling along to Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church” from Miles Davis’ 1971 masterwork LIVE-EVIL”. He then cracked up laughing, huge smile. It made my night.

  

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• Tour rolls on 12/4 in Nashville (House Concert, rsvp) and 12/6 in Chicago (Live set on WFMT’s Folkstage. I believe you’ll be able to tune in). Come out, tell a friend!

• I’m in the thick of making a new album. I love how it’s coming together and everything sounds new and exciting. Ask me anything.

  
  That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

Today is Bandcamp Friday, where they waive their fees and all the bread goes to the artist. A great day to get some music & merch and support musicians.

It’s been nearly a year since Postcards came out. It’s been such a good year playing those songs in different cities, on different stages, with different musicians, and to see them evolve.

I’ve gone on two tours of the east-ish coast (one with the band, one solo w Jeff Taylor). I opened up for Richard Thompson (still can’t believe that one). I released some additional songs, and also began to perform a slew of brand new ones. A wonderful year. I’m grateful for everything Postcards of the Reckoning has brought me .. it keeps growing!

At the end of 2024, shortly after that album came out, I got the chance to spend a day at Restoration Sound, a Brooklyn studio owned by my friend Lorenzo Wolff. I knew I wanted to record “Mother Tongue”, a song Jean Rohe & I had recently written. I also got the idea to record the Postcards tunes in a different setting, acoustic & live, without overdubs. I asked Chris Parker and Bobby Hawk to join me, and Jean Rohe sang on half the session.

Those recordings from 12/22/24 make up Restoration Reckoning, a very “day-after-winter solstice” take on the songs. The redux record is full of both renewal and reflection. These songs have taught me so much.

I’ve been releasing a lot of music lately, but it hasn’t always been that way. For big stretches of my life, I didn’t record very much. I was blocked, worried — afraid to make a mistake, afraid to finish things. I don’t carry a lot of regrets, but if I could suggest anything to that younger version of myself, it’d be to not grip so very tightly, and to just record the songs and keep moving on.

So, I’m glad I made Postcards when I did, the way that I did, and with the people I did. I’m also glad I got to capture this music in this way with Chris & Bobby, and Jean, at Lorenzo’s place.

We recorded in one room with a handful of mics and no headphones. We’d play each song through a couple times until a take felt nice. There was a particular magic in not chasing after anything. It felt wonderful to be in that with Chris, Bobby, & Jean, and for it to sound so very good. That credit goes to Lorenzo.

This music is available on Bandcamp only for the next month or two. I won’t get too deep into the politics or business of the state of music and streaming right now, but spotify is feeling very not good. (I’ll upload this music there at some point, but not today). On the other hand, every Bandcamp sale and every Substack subscription feels good, like real support from real people. I’m gonna go with that for now. This record and these songs mean a lot to me. Hope you dig!

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wait, what album?

Well yes, this Friday, right after that beautiful Sunny’s show, I’ll release a new album called Restoration Reckoning. It’s a completely new version of the songs from Postcards of the Reckoning, recorded live & acoustic with Chris Parker, Bobby Hawk, & Jean Rohe in a day at the very end of last year, at Lorenzo Wolff’s Restoration Sound studio in Brooklyn. It was some real practical magic.

Restoration Reckoning will be available exclusively on my Bandcamp for a little while. (after a month or two, it’ll pop up on the other places you might find music). Even better, 10/3 is Bandcamp Friday, during which Bandcamp waives their percentage of sales. So when I write you again on Friday, please consider buying the album on that day!

I have more to say about these songs, the last year of my musical life, and the process of making the record, but I’ll save that for later in the week.

Restoration Reckoning
12/22/24, Brooklyn, NY

1. All Of Them Singing
2. Hold Me Out (or, Hold Me In)
3. Easy
4. Bright Idea
5. Irises
6. The Times
7. Oh, Sarah
8. Reckoning

Ten years ago this week I put out my first proper solo record, Your Logo, My Logo. Up until around 2012, I’d been playing in a band I loved called Square Wave Punch with Pat Van Dyke and Kellen Harrison. (We never properly released a record, but the closest thing is probably Arch Envy, which came out under the ill-advised name Sean0Sean in 2012, after we were just about done as a band).

As Pat & Kellen’s music careers started pulling each of them in other (great) directions, I began playing a whole lot of acoustic music, formed a duo with upright bassist Bobby McCullough, and wrote a bunch of songs that seemed to tap in to questions of truth collapse, tribalism, money, and celebrity culture.

It was still the Obama era, but the vibes had shifted, and ‘hope & change’ was curdling. Looking back, Your Logo, My Logo documents what all that undercurrent felt like (for me) in 2013-14 when the songs were being written. The music was finally released on July 24th, 2015, and within another year or so, the undercurrent became the overcurrent.

y’all, I put so much care and vulnerability into this album. I was pretty certain it was going to be very well and very widely received. (that…didn’t quite happen). But, it was the first thing I had ever made that was fully realized. I worked on the lyrics until they were as bulletproof as I could do. I finished the damn songs. And I learned how to play guitar. And I learned how to make a Record™, with a lot of help from producer Rich DeCicco, engineer Jon Graber, and John Agnello, who was the mix engineer, but also mentored me into big boy album making. So in all those important, real, tangible ways, Your Logo, My Logo changed my life. Even if the record didn’t break.

So, give Your Logo, My Logo a listen for its 10th birthday. And if you want to hear the songs live, get down to Sunny’s tomorrow. (7/22/25, 8PM)

Your Logo, My Logo lyrical strays: ‘This Might Be True’, ‘Ginsberg at the End’, and ‘Leave Us Alone’ are still some of my favorite things I’ve written, and ‘Me & My Bros’ and ‘My Logo’ were the hitz.

• i still like most of the lyrics in the title track, but particularly:
  
  Your logo, my logo blend
  together, cover up the hem
  I’m Detroit, you’re Paterson
  

• the cheekiness in How You Lie:
  
  I saw the movie about Vietnam
  now I know how that ends
  now I know what now is
  now I know just everything
  just about everything you need to know
  to go and talk about it on TV
  

• this part of Easy Money still gets me:
  
  Oh, it’s a lot to take in
  all of the memories hot
  all under your skin
  
  You know it won’t be okay
  you know it’s all you can do
  to keep up with your friends
  

• i’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years that people have an ineffable, yet strong emotional response to Me & My Bros, but they have no idea why. and no idea what the song is about. it’s a song about different kinds of tribes, and the things that tribes do. i really like this line:
  
  We bought a van
  took it across the bridge
  me & my bros, we sell
  the same things
  

• This Might Be True is actually one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever written, the whole thing. It was written after reading this article.
  

• for my money, Ginsberg at the End is the best song on the record, and i love:
  
  You were minor, I was massive
  every couple has their thing, nothing more
  
  and:
  
  How I love this
  how I love you
  how I love the Buddha
  on the bedroom floor
  

• and finally Leave Us Alone … i guess i’m realizing for the first time that i wound up rhyming “day” with day”. ah well. this song is a beaut.
  
  In the purplish daze
  of the evening tomorrow
  I’ll be wondering why
  I feel so late
  
  and I’ll talk up so much
  that the words become music
  and the music will sound
  like the end of the day
  
  and the end of the week
  and the end of the month
  and the end of the year
  will all happen someday

  ---

if you’re still here, thanks for reading. drop your favorite Your Logo, My Logo memory or moment in the comments yo.

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This feels like it was longer than four months ago. Time’s been funny.

I’m glad we closed with these three tunes. Electric stuff on ‘Irises’ with Hawk & Jean .. Ragged but right duo w Jean on ‘Mother Tongue’, on the day it came out .. Woody Guthrie’s ‘I Ain’t Got No Home In This World’, a perfect song to go out with.

Words don’t work when I try to relate my experience of this night. It was some highly elevated version of “fun”, but in the most gratifying & precious & boundless sense. How do I get back there?

It took me a minute to look at and assemble this video, but here it is for you. Many thanks to Mick Lewis for filming the whole show from the balcony for The Big Takeover. I cut in my video from onstage, which feels intense and intimate. That’s how it was!

Strays

• I’m playing on Governor’s Island this Saturday 6/21 for the lovely, annual, very free, very unamplified, Porch Stomp. It’ll be a hot day, but come sit on the cool grass w me for some tunes at 2:30 on the Hoover Dam Collective “Stage”.

• Recs:

  • I recently revisited the Jesca Hoop album Stonechild from 2019. Might be an all time great. I believe it is under-recognized.

  • I’m obsessed with the new Will Graefe record Compositions for Guitar Vol. 2. I also love Compositions for Guitar Vol. 1, which was released on the same day.

  • from the friendzone, check out Bobby Hawk’s Ad Hawk, and Bill Campbell’s latest Breastfist record Umami (side B).

• I’m available for musical work this summer. I have a busy fall coming up, touring plans coming together in December and beyond, but June, July, & August I have availability for recording & production, guitar & songwriting lessons, and performing. Let’s work!

• Speaking of, check out this Craven Moorhaus song I co-produced, called ‘WTF Happened to Star Wars?’.

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This Song™ should be taught in songwriting classes .. maybe it already is! In the first verse Kaïa sings:

Carved up my life just for The Internet
You take the leg, the wing, the shoulder
and sing all hail, to our God, The Internet

My friend commented on this bit, “like honestly how dare” and I tend to agree.

In the second verse, the singer spills their drink on “The Internet” .. I love the metonymy1, subbing the Big Thing for the laptop that must’ve received the actual beverage.

From there we go all the way from a COVID-isolated bedroom out to near space, the “satellites of The Internet”, before landing back on Earth, with the singer yearning hard for somewhere beyond the reach of the place you’re currently receiving this newsletter:

Oh how I long to just feel any rush
Out beyond the pull of The Internet

relate!

I imagine that after she wrote it, Kaïa must’ve had a chuckle—a lovely, private moment with her tune—before putting the wheels in motion to record and release it .. actions which would eventually necessitate promotion on the .. well you know.

That’s the squeeze. How do we talk about the thing from inside the thing? How do we interrogate the soup when we are the mirepoix?

I use one corner of The Internet to ask for 12-90 seconds of vague yet thoroughly metricked Attention, in order to ask for 180 seconds of Attention on another platform, in order to ask for the Cadillac option: 2700-4500 seconds of Attention out in the material world. With a cover charge.

So may I now ask for the Cadillac option from you? I’ll be at the Irish Arts Center, in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, this Thursday 6/5 for one of my favorite things: A NICE Night with Sean Kiely & Friends. The cover charge is $18 incl. fees. The estimated run time is 8100 seconds. In that time you’ll hear a bunch of my music played in new configurations; you’ll see & hear an original live-scored silent film by Jared Engel; and you’ll feel the considerable gravity of Lily Talmers’ craft. I’m astounded by her music.

In her Song™ ‘My Mortal Wound’, Lily addresses an unnamed person who’s never bothered to explore their own emotional atlas, thus never bothering to consider really living. Lily implores:

Life is a party, don't you want to be part of it?
Don’t you want to be part of it?

Well, don’t you?

TICKETS

1

i’m not walking around ready to drop metonymy in casual conversation—i def had to google “rhetorical devices” to remember what it was called.

---

strays

• Have you listened to Easy? I feel like this tune may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Go give a listen in my ‘What Folk?’ playlist … It’s really hard to not add a “the” in the middle there.

• Day of the Catch is silly, joyous, & pitch-perfect, and happens to co-star an up-and-coming young actor named Cass Kiely.

• We’re likely to play Alec’s tune ‘Airplane Mode’ on Thursday. He sings “Don't always want to know who you were with and where you went / I only need to know the things that I was there for.”

• The first line of ‘The Internet’, the subject line of this email, is a heartbreaker, especially the more you turn it over in your mind. This thing has named itself undisputed middleman in our communication, our dating, our art, our transportation, so on. so forth.

• I’m thinking of putting on a show someday that’s promoted only via forwarded text messages. No apps, no digital promo. idk if I have the stones to actually go for it, but it’d be fun. No, this is not where I ask you to provide your mobile number to be the first to know.

☘ Sean Kiely & Friends
•  Full‑band set with Chris Parker, Jared Engel, & Alec Spiegelman

🌟 Lily Talmers
•  Opening set + surprise collaborations in mine

🎥 “Day of the Catch” (live scored)
•  Bassist/filmmaker Jared Engel scores his silent short—featuring a cameo by my son 🥹

Devlin Café at Irish Arts Center is beautifully intimate .. once seats are gone, they’re gone. Grab your tickets now for June 5 ⤵

buy tickets for the NICE night 6/5 @ IAC

April was active .. ‘Easy’ floated out April 4 (Spotify’s algorithm gave it crickets, so if you missed this breezy tune, dive back in now—and I swear never to bug you about pre‑saves again 🥴).

The Infinite Bros tour with Jeff Taylor was a dream, here’s the recap.

All told I played 14 gigs in April, marking my most active musical month ever. New tunes are bubbling, and recording plans are emerging for the next record. Thanks for being here with me!

Local heads up .. if you’re in Jersey City this week, I’m backing my old friend Abbie Gardner for an intimate duo set Thursday May 15 in the Heights. RSVP → https://partiful.com/e/sXTGyThHdWIOVy8CuuTx

see you out there ✨
~sean

I’m excited to hit the road with Jeff Taylor. We’re playing a mix of venues and house shows in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Have you got a friend in any of these towns? Tell them we’re coming by! Seriously 🤝

Speaking of Jeff, he and I recently pulled off a video project I’ve been kicking around for a little while, called either ‘Postcards of the Karaoke’ or ‘Karaoke of the Reckoning’. (hey, let’s put this to the committee: vote below). It was super fun to hear him sing my song ‘All Of Them Singing’. I’m seeking more participants. Would you be comfortable being on video singing one of my songs? This is *actually* karaoke, so it doesn’t need to be “good” so much as it needs to be .. authentic .. enthusiastic. The awkwardness is a feature, not a bug.

‘Easy’ has been out for a few weeks now. Have you listened? Go give it a spin ✨

One final note. “@sean0sean” has been retired .. as a social media handle .. as the artist name for the long lost Square Wave Punch record “Arch Envy”. So long, old friend. I believe you were somewhat confusing, if likeable. But not even that likeable. ✌️

From now on you can find me @seankielymusic on the socials, and on here I believe I’m sticking with at seankiely.

That’s all for now .. see you at the shows ✨