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

Hi Sean, thanks for joining us today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

I feel incredibly fortunate to live in a world that loves art. It might be a cliche to say, but all art (and especially music) is a universal language. If we’re lucky, what we create transcends time, space, culture, and geography to reach an audience. While we’re here for a finite number of years, what we create today can theoretically live on for eternity. We have the potential to change others long after we’re gone. However, valuing art is different.

Living this side of Napster in the music business, it has become increasingly harder to earn a living as a musician. I’m not necessarily saying that the music business is unfair, but the as a simple matter of fact, it is nearly impossible to make a living on streaming platforms and record sales, unless you are in a highly successful newer artist or a still popular legacy act with a good following. We have the world at our fingertips for free, so why do we feel the need to pay for it? I’m not removing myself from this group, either. Times are tight and we’ve got to count pennies and cents these days. I consume just as much free art as the next person! We might at least ask that multi-billion dollar companies pay their artists a fairer wage, at least. Last I checked, Spotify execs don’t have any hit albums to their name. That money comes from actual artists. The system is broken, perhaps intentionally, by those in power.

Touring has also taken a major hit with the pandemic where tours are canceled because of safety concerns or illness in the touring crew. Like record sales, unless you are an act with a big draw, making a living touring was hard even before the pandemic. I’m not quite sure exactly what the answer is, and we are certainly in this thing for the long haul, so we are determined to figure it out. As the adage goes, every successful band is actually just a shell organization for a tshirt business. We are in the tshirt business now and that seems to be going well.

The long story short, times are tight for all folks, but when they DO get a little easier, consider a shirt or an album or a concert ticket for your favorite person or band.

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?

We branded ourselves as a “Nerve Pop” band years ago and that label still seems to reflect us well. We are beholden to a pop melody, but spend most of our time in this band trying to push that melody as far as we can towards a tipping point. How far can pop music go before it is no longer “pop?” We try to find that line and spend a song or an album or a show’s length trying to dance around it. To be more tangible about what we do, I’d say we try to write indie pop songs with a bottom to them. We are driven equally by bands like Orange Juice and Women. Another example might be White Light White Heat vs third album Velvet Underground. We like a good melody, but we never want it to be easy.

We started Small Reactions as a kind of improv project. The songs themselves were secondary to the improvisation and “jamming.” Around 2009 we found Stereolab, Television, and the Velvet Underground. Stereolab notoriously wrote through basic sketches and improvisation in the studio. Television wrote this intricate, heady songs that paired punk ethos with superb instrumentation. And what young band doesn’t like Velvet Underground? In each of these examples, we saw bands we saw examples of a collective, bands that operated as the sum of their parts instead of just a band leader and some backing players. We’ve always tried to make our band a unit and each of those groups did that.

As we figured out what we wanted to do and the approach we wanted to take, we learned how to collectively write songs. Our first album Similar Phantoms was written entirely through improvisation, as a group. We’d bring a scrap of a melodic line or a beat to our basement and work on it as a group. The second album RNX_002 was half songs that Scotty brought in to the space, and half songs that we wrote through improvisation. Our most recent album New Age Soul is made of all songs that Scotty wrote. Though Scotty bro melodies, lyrics, and structures, we still found ways to work collectively on them. As we’ve just started working on our new songs, we’ve intentionally sought to write them through improvisation again. It has been a full 10 years since we operated entirely like that, so having come this far along as players and as a band makes for much more interesting interplay between the band. So, in short, I’d say we’re a noisy pop band that collectively tries to push boundaries. We want everything to be in the moment, exciting, and off the cuff. But it always needs to feel like a pop band.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I’m personally not into NFTs, but not everything is about me, either. What I create likely isn’t for everyone, so who am I to judge? I think any attempt to release more art in the world is a good thing. Do I think NFTs are fleeting? Perhaps. But I’ve also been wrong about a number of things before, as well. In the end, art is artifice. And not every piece has an audience of everyone in mind. Art evolves, artists try new things, people experiment with technology. I say the more we are reach an audience with our art, the better. Long (or short) live NFTs! Either way, it’s fun to experiment.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

My goal has always been, first, to create the art that I most want to create. As long as I am proud of what I do, I’m sold. I have a feeling I could pretty easily pivot to creating something a little more mainstream or palatable to more people, but then it wouldn’t be a reflection of who I am as a person. Past that, my goal has always been some form of growth and forward momentum. I’d love to see crowds continue to grow and more folks decide to check out the music. I’m playing the long game here. Hopefully, I’ll live forever. If I don’t, hopefully I’m making records and performing as long as I possibly can. As long as we’re moving forward, cool. I’ll be here all life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.smallreactions.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/smallreactions
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/smallreactions
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/smallreactions
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/smallreactions.
• Other: https://linktr.ee/smallreactions