We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Osuch a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chris thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you as a business owner?

As far as “business owner” this is for the band ‘SEAGRAVE’ but I find a lot of musicians forget that being in a band, IS a business.

I’ve been playing in bands since I was a teen (now 33 years of age) and I think the most important thing that I’ve learned, is you need to take the time to find good people.

With a band, you’ll be spending such an insane amount of time together, from writing, practice, in the studio, on the road, you need to make sure you can all get along. I’m very lucky to have the guys around me, that I do with Stiv, Ali and Doug. We have fun, we joke around, but we still take the band very seriously, and are able to disagree on things without egos clashing or getting in the way.

Lastly, as I stated,
A band is a business. It’s not called the entertainment business for nothing. You need to treat it like a small business you’re trying to get off the ground. Take any advertising or promo you can, get in front of as many people as possible, and always take your time, to put out quality, rather than rush and have things look sloppy.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve been playing music for about 16 years now. I have always been infatuated with artists and bands. Always reading up on them, watching live performances to pick apart what they do, how they move, etc. I get pretty nerdy about it.

Many projects that I’ve had over the years have fallen flat, due to a variety of reasons, so I’m happy to be a part of something that finally works, and we’re all happy with.

With SEAGRAVE shows, if you’re coming to it, we will entertain you, we will engage with you, and make sure you remember that night. As I stated before, we’re in the entertainment business, and if you’re not entertaining your fans, and just standing still on stage, not engaging the crowd, then you’re not doing your job.

We dropped our latest single ‘Aether’ a couple of months back, and are working on a new single currently. We have started a bit of a different direction with our sound with ‘Aether’ and we plan to continue down that path.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

How I met all the guys:

Stiv (Guitar)
Stiv and I used to play shows together with our old bands Embodier and North Shore. I had met Stiv when he was still too young to get into bars, and had to basically play his set and leave. I always admired his stage presence. We tried to get something going a few years back, but nothing came of it. When I joined the band, it was one of our past members who approached me first about joining SEAGRAVE and I happened to walk in and see Stiv there.

Doug (Drummer)
I don’t have a big story with Doug, I actually didn’t meet him until I joined SEAGRAVE. Dougie’s the best though. You can bet, if anyone in the band is going to have a reckless night, it’s Doug and I hahaha.

Ali (Bass)
Ali was well known in the scene with his previous project ‘Out of My League’ and I met him just by hitting him up to do photos for a previous project of mine. Him and I hit it off well, and we had done some more photoshoots over the years. When we had the space to fill on bass, he was the first one I hit up. At the time he was reluctant as he had another project on the go. Funny thing was, just when we were somewhat looking hopeless on our front, is when he hit me back and said “you know what, let’s do it”

As I said, no one can picture SEAGRAVE really being anything besides the 4 of us.

Have you ever had to pivot?

So we actually used to be called Sunnyvale before we landed and kept the name SEAGRAVE. The band was a little less serious and the time had come where we wanted the band to be taken more professionally, so that’s where the name change came in. The name is actually a small township that’s exactly the half way point between our jam space, and our drummer Doug’s house.

Additionally I joined the band on bass, we had a few lineup changes, with the final one, being our old vocalist parting ways with the band. I had always been a vocalist in all my other projects, so it was just the natural thing for me to move on to vocals. That’s when we hit up Ali to take over on bass.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://linktr.ee/seagrave905
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seagrave.core/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seagraveslaughter?mibextid=LQQJ4d

Image Credits

Joshua Vicente
Watermark Missing