Sometimes good music is easy to find.
The mark of great music is its capacity to connote simplicity rather than denote obstruction. This is not to say that remarkable musicians mire in the linear or reduce their compositions to ceremoniously amuse audiences. On the contrary, the business end of assembling allegory may be a frustrating and fruitless enterprise, but not without its profound rewards, whereas oversimplicity is a perfectly forgettable pastime.
Sean Helean is a local musician with the skill for reassembling abstraction into concrete storytelling, while denying absolutes for his art. In fact, listening to Helean talk about or perform his music is a lesson in dynamic reinvention. "It's rock 'n' folk and roll. It's epic at times, Zeppelin-ish qualities to it other times; there's Steve Earle, then there's Peter Murphy kinda poking his head through," Helean says in
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an attempt to define his sound. "I like Steve Earle's rock 'n' roll, and lyrically I love Pink Floyd. Early Floyd drives, in my mind, the pictures that I try to paint with the words."
The 37-year-old Montana native, who has called Santa Fe home for the better part of 22 years, is as in tune with the world he witnesses as with the narratives that complete his songs. With a new band that he has recently assembled, Helean is poised to drink more deeply from the literal and figurative worlds he inhabits.
"I've been playing guitar since I was 10," Helean states pragmatically over coffee. He is accompanied by the lead guitarist for his band, John Kurzweg, who is internationally known for his production work with bands like Creed, Puddle of Mudd and Eagle-Eye Cherry. Helean was playing a gig with his three-piece band at the Cowgirl when he met Kurzweg. "John approached me at a show and we got to talking. He said he liked to sit in with people sometimes, so he started sitting with the band, and we have been playing together for about six months." Helean adds that Kurzweg is a "fabulous" lead player, a fact that was hidden from Kurzweg's production clients for years. "I liked [Helean's] songs," Kurzweg says, "and I liked his voice a lot. It was like alternative rock, with a little bit of country, definitely folk influence, and this homegrown, organic thing about it."
The current lineup for the Sean Helean Band is Matt Deason on bass, Kurzweg on lead guitar and backup vocals, Jeff Sussman, Mark Clark and Bjorn Hamry taking turns on drums and percussion, and Helean on lead vocals and acoustic guitar. Six months isn't a long time for a band to discover that they like each other, much less discover their sound. "This is really an acual band, and I've never really been in a band where everyone contributes so much sonically," Helean, who also writes all the lyrics and compositions for the group, says. "The band has done one song together," he says, a onfusing statement clarified by Kurzweg: "We were at a gig at the Cowgirl and Matt started playing this crazy bass line, I started playing some weird chords over it, I started yelling out some chords for the chorus. That was a creation that everybody was in on from the start." The song was later named "Jornada de Los Muertos" (Journey of the Dead). The name was inspired by an infamous stretch of land in southern New Mexico. "I was reading about this corridor where it's incredibly barren and a lot of people from Mexico cross the border into the US in that area and end up dying because it's such an incredibly vast stretch of land," Helean says. "It's a really haunting concept for a song."
Haunting concepts are things Helean finds comfort in while writing. "Paper Ghost" is a reflective query of the ephemeral muse, in which "a funeral, that's wedding in disguise," causes the artist to realize that death, surrender and beginning exist equally. "I write daily, whether it's prose or I sit down with my guitar." Knowing that the act of writing itself is perhaps as valuable as its content, Helean is a prodigious songwriter. "I've written a couple hundred songs, and they just seem to be pouring out," he says. "If it's true, it's going to ring, like a good joke, you know. The ultimate truth is usually the funniest thing."
At the conclusion of our interview, I ask Helean and Kurzweg if it would be possible for them to play a few songs for me. Helean arranges an impromptu set at the Candyman Music Store, where he and Deason work, after the store has closed. With borrowed equipment and price tags dangling from their instruments, the Sean Helean Band comes to life with a five-song set. The most striking thing about their music is the unspoken connection between them, the effortless summation each song exhumes, their closed eyes, bobbing heads and lilting melodies that embody both skill and inspiration.
Nina Simone comes to mind as I drive home. At the beginning of her recording of "I Shall Be Released," Simone, frustrated, stops her band and says, "You're pushing, you're pushing, don't put nothing in it unless you feel it." And "nothing" is exactly what Sean Helean intends to leave unexplored.
