Brass Mash Member Deep Dive: Sean Sullivan
Holding it down at Concerts in the Plaza
Through this blogging project, I have enjoyed the process of flipping over the river rocks of my own experience to discover what’s been lying underneath. It was a joy to chat with our drummer, Sean Sullivan, who has played with Brass Mash from the beginning! When Colin introduces Sean on stage as “the hardest working man on the Central Coast,” there are no lies detected. He’s everywhere, playing with tons of bands and sharing his craft and team-building skills through his business, DrumPerks. Please enjoy our conversation about Brass Mash!
Year joined Brass Mash: 2015 (founding member!)
Current favorite mashup:
One of the most satisfying ones for me to play is “Breakeven 1000 Miles of Human Nature.” I just love the soaring horn parts…the way the whole mash flows, it just feels really epic and uplifting with the harmony. I like the half-time through it. The drum part feels really cool to play. Playing the drums is kind of like dancing, so the way that the drum part lays is really fun! I like the dynamics in that song, too - it has these distinct moments. It’s fun for me to play the subtleties of dynamics through that particular mashup - stepping it up here, dropping it down, then the breaks. And I love Michael Jackson!
How did you come to join Brass Mash?
Colin called me out of the blue - I had known him from years ago, from being around the music circles here in SLO from around the early 2000s. He called me and said “Hey Sean! I got a crazy idea, I’m starting a brass band!” He told me that he had played in a brass band doing mashups in the Bay Area and that he had charts from that group, that he wanted to try and start a project like that here in SLO. He said, “I need a drummer that can play different styles and read music really well.” I said, “I’m honored that you think I can play many styles and read music well. Sounds like a lot of fun! Yes, let’s do it.”
It was a great call. It was a serendipitous moment, and in retrospect changed the whole trajectory of how I’d begin to spend every First Friday of my life!
Tell us about your first gig.
The first Brass Mash gig ever was in Baywood-Los Osos. I forget the exact event, but basically we did this sort of second line parade where we marched around the block. People kind of followed the band and paraded along with us, and we ended the parade at this pier in Baywood. We played on the pier for a handful of people that were hanging around. It was around sunset. It was interesting and fun! It was such a new thing. Its presentation was pretty bare bones - It was me, Brett, Colin. I’m trying to remember who else was there, there were only like 6 or 7 of us.
The music didn’t sound anything like it sounds now. We were just learning how to play together. Now the band sounds really big - we have a big sound, it’s really tight. But I don’t even think we had any microphones, it was all just acoustic. It felt sort of like street music, almost like glorified busking.
Share one core Brass Mash experience.
I have to preface this a little bit - The project was so cool, the idea was really cool, it was really novel. During the early days of Brass Mash, when we were rehearsing and trying to do little gigs. We were playing downtown a bit, like at the Frog and Peach. It was all so new, and we didn’t have solid core members quite yet.
I honestly was very close to quitting the band multiple times. I really wanted the band to sound great. I think part of it, too, was that I didn’t know how to approach playing in a horn band for music that includes synthesizers and guitars. I’d had this sound in my head of what the music would sound like from recordings of the songs we were trying to cover. Just hearing horns and drums - it wasn’t connecting the dots for me. I thought, “I don’t know if I can really serve this band. Maybe I’m not the right drummer…I don’t know.”
I was dealing with those doubts myself, about my own ability to make the music sound good from the drum’s perspective. Everyone was on a learning curve - Colin was learning how to arrange drum charts, and it was a big process. What he used to give me was totally different from what I get now. Now, I can pretty much play the parts and they sound good already. Then, I was having to do a lot of reading between the lines and I was having self-doubt.
Then, we had a gig at SLO Brew downtown. We had a big band - there were a lot of people there and a lot of players were starting to get interested and we were inviting them, we’d been rehearsing. We got on stage, everyone was mic’d up, we had a subwoofer under the stage, and there was a huge party crowd - you know how it gets downtown! The place was packed. All of a sudden, we would do these mashes and everyone would be singing along. We see that now - I could see: Everyone knew the mashes, they were singing and dancing and smiling, the band sounded huge, it was epic. I had chills…I had goosebumps almost the entire show. I realized, this is the coolest band I’ve ever played in, by far. That was the point where I never looked back.
From that point, I knew Brass Mash has something awesome, unique, fun, incredibly powerful. We don’t even have to sing the lyrics - there’s an extra dimension of mash. We’re mashing more than one song, and the audience is choosing what to mash with, with whatever they sing along to. From then on, I never doubted it again. I knew we just had to keep doing what we were doing, and it would get better and better as we stuck with it, and that’s exactly what happened.
