We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sean Makhuli. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sean below.

Alright, Sean thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I have worked on is my upcoming album, “I Wouldn’t Change A Thing”, which I plan to release in October 4. It is also the most painful piece of music I have ever worked on, as it deals with very personal pain I have gone through over the past five years. It’s been interesting navigating writing something like this, because I didn’t want to approach it simply as a victim, the “you hurt me, now time to get my payback” type of thing. I feel like I see so much of that right now, and it just doesn’t seem helpful, healing, or productive, for anyone. I simply sought to deal with my own honest feelings going through some very deep pain and abandonment in my life over the last five years. I’ve found myself in a situation I never thought I would be in, and this album was a way for me to process it, to heal some from it, maybe. I don’t know if it brought much healing or not, because these things I sing about are still ongoing in my life. I will say I know it was good for me to get it out, because I know also the results of not addressing the pain, and they are not good.

I will also say, despite it being painful subject matter, there is a lot of hope in it, and I truly love every song on the album. It’s taken many years for me to get to the point of feeling this way about my own music, but I am truly proud of this work.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Everything for me started when I began piano lessons at age 11. It was this way for me to communicate, to get out feelings, and opened up something in me I didn’t even know was there. I was always a creative kid even before that, drawing, playing pretend, normal kid stuff really, but music opened up something more. I still get that same feeling when I just sit down at the piano and compose or write songs. I have lost it at times, striving to “make it”, but thankfully I find myself coming back to it.

All I can say is I really just try to be true to the sound that is in me. I fought for a long time trying to fit into this box and that box, but the reality is that I have a unique blend that I have now learned to embrace. Even my music upbringing was very diverse, I started classical piano lessons when I was 11, but at age 12 or 13 I started playing keys in my church that was in a predominantly black neighborhood, and even to this day you can hear a blend of these two worlds when I play, and my singing has a soulfulness that has oftentimes surprised people. I’m sure part of that comes from growing up in the deep south in South Carolina.

It has taken me many years to get here, but I finally feel like I’m starting to get out the songs that have been in here for a long time, and that is a good feeling. I think anyone who is pursuing an artistic endeavor for a long time can relate with that. It’s like you sense this voice in yourself that you know is there, but you’re not quite sure how to get it out. And the only thing I can say is, just keep singing, keep writing, keep working, and that voice starts to inch out of you. I still have a long way to go, but when I look back over where I was 5 or 10 years ago, I see what the growth that has really happened during this time that felt like “wasted time”, because no one knew about me. Nothing is wasted, if you keep going.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Haha, resilience. Oh yes. I can definitely speak on it, although I’m not sure how much of mine was resilience or stubbornness, maybe it’s good to have a bit of both sometimes. One of the first things I think about was my early days in Los Angeles, where I would load up an amp, a guitar, a mic stand, and carry all of that crap over to a certain corner in Santa Monica and busk until the battery in my amp died. I remember the part I was most nervous, funny enough, was the walk to the spot, not the actual singing in front of people. Worrying about people judging me, but I knew I had to do what I had to do. I got so much joy from some of those moments too, just making somebody’s day just a little brighter, I’m sure some of them just wanted me to shut up too.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Something I tell younger musicians and artists, especially when moving into bigger expensive cities, is not not romanticize their journey so much. I remember in my first five years in LA I was just hustling, grinding, pretty much everything I did for money had to be music related. Well, I’m sure to no one’s surprise but my own, I burned out really bad after about five years at the end of a tour. I had no money and my health and sleep was freakin shot. It was then that I got a job at Trader Joe’s. That was seriously the best move I could have made for my music career. Because I didn’t have all the financial stress on the music, I actually became much more productive with music, and actual moved forward in my career more than I ever had. So, that is a hard lesson I learned, and I would encourage other people, don’t feel like you have to suffer so much, and romanticize your journey, it’s okay to be practical, and get a job that pays the bills, while you hold onto your vision of what you’re going after.

Even now, music is not my full time income. Man I wish it was, but I’m closer now that I was to that being a reality. I now have gotten an official placement(on NCIS on CBS earlier this year), but still the majority of my income now comes from social media. And not music social media, like influencer type stuff, I never thought that would be my income, but here I am, haha. And the last thing I will say about that is, while you are working your “other job” always be seeing how you can utilize that to help with your music. When I was at Trader Joe’s in LA I actually made pretty freakin cool music connections.

So yeah, that’s a big lesson I learned, take care of yourself, you don’t have to burn yourself out.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmakhuli/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seanmakhuli
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4B6J0BguPyT4vLDDxBg0ds?si=jBAiLa6vSiyNTn6oaWI8QA