There are home studios and official studios that feel homey, but to answer the question how homey can one studio get, you’d want to visit Silent Desert Studio in Nolensville, TN. It’s built in the producer/owner’s former home, next to his family’s new home, and artists can stay there while they’re working. When I made the trip a few weeks ago, Music City veteran Sean McConnell welcomed me warmly into his tricked out ranch house with a world of keyboards in the old living room and master control in the erstwhile master bedroom. It’s a cozy space, with heavy timbers framing the ceiling and a stone fireplace defining one corner.
I ask if there’s a non-gear item or memento in the room that helps tell the story of his work here. He pauses. “It's like one of those things where, every day, I work a little bit on the studio, put another picture up, move one thing over here, and the place itself becomes this kind of meditation,” McConnell says early in String Episode 316. “It is kind of an offering in itself for creatives and for myself, and it brings me a lot of peace and joy - even just building the studio and having it feel like it's the way it's meant to be.”
That meant-to-be kismet has been at work in McConnell’s life for quite a while it seems, from the deeply musical family that gave him a view to his future, to a history of prodigy-level talent and making his own luck. Since launching in the business more than 20 years ago, he’s pulled off a deft balancing act - writing songs and even hits for the country and pop mainstream, while growing in stature as a fully indie touring singer-songwriter. And even there he wears multiple hats, exemplifying the sincere folk troubadour in the clubs of Boston or Ann Arbor or the red dirt storyteller in the Texas/Oklahoma scene where he’s found important collaborators and an excited audience.
McConnell has also been especially prolific, releasing fifteen records by the age of 40, the latest of which sparked this conversation. Skin is a transporting 11-song set about mid-life, complex love, hope and disappointment, delivered with velvet gloved punches. It feels like an occasion of reflection through honest inquiry, not self-satisfaction, because of the album’s timing. He’s been married since college, managed sobriety, and been on the music industry roller coaster for two decades. Growth and change are facts of life, and McConnell holds them up to the light with care and wonder. In the song “Older Now,” he sings, “But I’ve got a ways to go / And in 20 years or so / Oh, this man I’ve come to know / He will seem to me a child.”
Sean grew up near Boston first then the Atlanta suburbs as a teenager. His parents were both working musicians who played and practiced abundantly at home, so Sean didn’t have to break the news to puzzled parents that he was going to be a songwriter. They’d already given him a ton of advice and shown him the artist’s way. His guitar teacher offered to record him during high school, resulting in a debut album at age 15. After a few years attending Middle Tennessee State, a major Nashville publisher came out to see him at a campus coffee house and offered him a deal. This, I must emphasize, almost never happens.
His memories of this important time center on Alicia Pruitt, the A&R executive from Warner/Chappell who signed and nurtured him as he made his way into the world of co-writes, pitching, and landing cuts. He notes that she was exceptional in her sensitivity to his strengths and desires to remain a songwriter with a personal sound. “I was fortunate to have a champion who got what was important to me,” he says. “Because it's a tricky thing to navigate when your only goal isn't just to write a hit song for yourself or somebody, but to make art, to as I say, write the song that's in the room. But also now there are these expectations commercially.”
Much like the story of Adam Wright, last episode’s guest, McConnell did sell songs, though not by tailoring anything to the sound of the moment. “My only number one I've ever had is a piano (ballad) by Brett Young called “Mercy,” he says. “I was like wow, that’s crazy.” Another cut we talk about is Tim McGraw’s recording of Sean’s “Mr. Whoever You Are,” a song he wrote solo and put out on his own album. Again, not the norm, but McGraw has a reputation for his good ear as he looks for album cuts.
McConnell worked for Warner/Chappel for 14 years and now is independent, with more emphasis on producing others’ records than ever before, and often that leads to co-writing with the artists he’s working with. A very recent example and one that’s making noise at Americana radio is Silver Rounds by newcomer Olivia Wolf, an album made at Silent Desert amid Sean’s own sessions for Skin. It’s part of a winding conversation that creates a composite picture of an artist living a career that has artfully balanced all the competing forces that music will throw at a person.
“My gifts and interests and passion and obsession lie with sitting in a room with nothing and thinking and feeling what is supposed to be born here,” he says. “And sometimes that ends up being commercially successful. Sometimes it doesn't. But like we said earlier, to say sane and happy and grounded, especially in this business, whatever you want to call it, my gratitude and my excitement is writing the song. I mean, what's better than having nothing and leaving two hours later, and this song that you love has been born, and people can feel things. We all need to pay our bills and we all want success, but that's a special thing, and if you don’t sit in that as well, I think you're missing a big part of it.”
