We recently connected with Stitch O’Donovan and have shared our conversation below.
Stitch, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?
More and more you’re finding artists who need to do it all. At a certain level, artists are their own representation, their own social media team, their own managers and engineers. It’s freedom at the cost of time and energy, and it’s more common than ever before. My speciality is in music composition. That’s the field my degree is in. In the process of getting to know this side of the industry, I’ve learned to do a little bit of everything else that I would need to keep gigging and recording. In small doses, I really love the whole industry. Booking a show can be fun and exciting, and having creative control of the technical side of audio recording or live audio can be part of the creative aspect of music itself. It’s the grind that is expected that makes me question if I’d have a calmer life on average with a different job. My music is not my sole source of income and I have a “day job,” and I get plenty tired from working that too. I suppose when I think about the effort it takes to be a creative pitted against the alternate reality where I’m all day job, no creative pursuits, the difference is that I’m at least doing something that makes me happy while tiring me out. Otherwise I’d just be tired and unfulfilled. I’ve definitely been victim of “the grind” and needed time away from my music, but it’s something I don’t think I could ever fully abandon. In that specific instance, I was recording and engineering a full hour-long record for my band Electric Freak Show with a two person team, just myself and my friend Wes Meadows of Flowerpot Records acclaim. Wes would effectively record anything that my simple apartment setup couldn’t handle, and I’d leave the session, go home, and edit the recordings until I had drafts and drafts of versions of the songs. I did that for two and a half months with very little free time, and I was glad to not be doing music for a time. I did a lot of reconnecting with myself and with friends in the time after that. Once I felt fully recovered and human again, I was ready to get back to writing and recording. It’s a process that takes energy and requires equal parts rest. In hindsight I could have paced myself better. But I always come back to creativity, no matter what happens.
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 am Sean Donovan, best known in the music industry as Stitch O’Donovan. I’ve been active in the Cleveland DIY music scene since 2017 in various projects such as bands like Young Steve, Fruitfly, and Electric Freak Show. My debut solo album got the attention of writers for Bandcamp daily and Young Steve has been featured on a livestream for the popular online music critic Anthony Fantano’s theneedledrop. I’ve always had a creative side that was encouraged and fostered by my environment despite limited resources. I grew up in a small village in New York surrounded by family and friends who were musically inclined. I don’t know at what point I decided that writing music is something I wanted to do as my main creative outlet, but I know that I was not very good when I started. I would draft lyrics to songs on the backs of returned math homework in middle school. I began being very influenced by the pop punk scene so often associated with being a teenager, but I was also super into some of the weirder psychedelic offerings from the 1960s, particularly the Beatles, which amounted in a pop punk project that didn’t really have a direction and got really eclectic in sound. I’ve never been one to really latch onto genre with my whole attention, and preferred to write music with matching “vibe” instead of following any genre tropes. I think the aspect of my work that I’m proudest of is that I don’t like to settle on one sound and I’m always looking to innovate my own sound.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
A lot of my music is inspired by my favorite band, The Flaming Lips. They’re weirdos from Oklahoma who have a similar story to my own, small town guys just making music because they want to. They also have a curiosity with sounds that makes their music fresh each project cycle they work on. That being said, I’ve never heard music that was as life-giving as theirs, which inspired the mission statement for my band Electric Freak Show. Our mission is to make music that makes people want to live. Music that comes from the soul and feeds other souls, through any emotion.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
There are small music communities everywhere, and even going to one local show every other month goes a long way to give smaller artists the funds for their voice to be heard and their story to be told to a wider audience. People tend to be more creative on a local level too, learning to make things happen on a budget. I think people will be surprised how much they’d like their local scene if they gave it a try!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stitch_odonovan?igsh=MXNuYWtseGp1cGVkNQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/16sfnbERcU/?mibextid=wwXIfr
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-donovan-261947192
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@electricfreakshow218?si=aoobWwkY2bVJ6FD7
- Other: https://stitchodonovan.bandcamp.com/
Image Credits
Gio Zappala, Zach Marino