The Intimate Grooves of Sean Hayes

While many of his contemporaries have migrated from San Francisco to New York in search of musical fulfillment, Sean Hayes chose to navigate the opposing path. Born in New York and raised in North Carolina, Hayes spent his formative years playing a mix of Irish and traditional American music in a band called The Boys of Blue Hill. Having now been based in the Bay Area since the early ’90s, the singer-songwriter not only infuses the essence of his former ensemble into his musical mix, but he couples it with the primordial rhythms that first attracted him to music. His songs are both an intimate expose of life as he sees it and an entrancing musical prose that addresses-and rings true-to the masses. So if Hayes doesn’t inspire the Sings Like Hell audience to tap their feet as hard as they can on Saturday night, then it is likely nobody ever will.

You have been in San Francisco for 14 years now. What makes the place so special to you, musically? It’s a destination for people from little towns all over the place, I think because its history of music and literature has a big romantic pull-and because of the land and the city and the surrounding environment. I think the music scene comes out of all that. Even the weather influences the music. It’s a weird vortex of a place. Time doesn’t seem to pass the same way it did when I was on the East Coast, where you really notice the seasons. Here the seasons aren’t as pronounced and that impacts upon things too.

How does San Francisco infuse itself into your music? I think San Francisco has a do-it-yourself element. And it’s not a music industry place at all, so it has a more a small town, hands-on vibe to it. I think it also lacks a certain degree of ambition and that makes perfect sense for me! You go to New York or L.A. and you know why you’re there. Those places really focus people because life is a lot more difficult there. You have to be focused to survive. San Francisco is a smaller city than most people realize, and life here is easy and it’s easy to get caught up in that. San Francisco de-focuses people-me being one of them. [Laughs.]