Sean Hayes

indie folk

Sean Hayes is an American folk, soul and roots-pop singer-songwriter, born Sean Padrick Hayes on 27 August 1969 in New York City and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he first played traditional American and Irish music in a band called the Boys of Bluehill. After years working the southeast he moved to San Francisco, spent roughly two decades there, then relocated to Sonoma County; he now lives in Petaluma. Across more than thirty years he has released ten albums, among them Alabama Chicken (2003), Big Black Hole and the Little Baby Star (2006), Flowering Spade (2007), Run Wolves Run (2010) and Be Like Water (2021), his ninth and his first record in five years, written after the move north. His tenth, Bright On Bright, was cut live with a band in rural Sonoma County and turns on mortality, gratitude, love and connection, with guest vocals from Ariel Engle, Ben Morrison, Erika Tietjen and Tori Elliot; the opening song, Shine, was written for his friend Charley Crockett. Critics tend to describe his voice as sitting between warm soul and dirt-road folk, and his arrangements draw on unusual instrumentation, including banjo and tuba. He sang the duet Ballantines with Aimee Mann on her album Smilers, has recorded with Frazey Ford, and has toured with Ani DiFranco, Charley Crockett, Allison Russell, Jolie Holland, The Wood Brothers and Cold War Kids. His music has been placed on HBO's Bored to Death and NBC's Parenthood as well as on NPR and in national advertising; Mark Farina remixed Rattlesnake Charm for a Stephane Pompougnac compilation, and he contributed to a Natalie Portman-curated benefit album for the anti-poverty organisation FINCA. He also wrote Rosebush Inside about the imprisonment of Moreese Bickham.

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