Meet NewSong finalist Reece Sullivan

Originally from Arkansas, singer-songwriter Reece Sullivan now lives in Lafayette, La., and plays the surrounding states regularly. He’s reinvented himself many times: piano to guitar, classical to art rock, art rock to folk, flat picking to fingerpicking, solely songwriting to performing. In 2022, Reece released a full length album, Arkansas, and a single, The Riverband (Dockside). In 2023, he released a full-length acoustic album, Gethsemane, and a live EP, Live in the City of Gold. He’s putting the finishing touches on a new album, False Summits, which will be released early in 2024 and he has a single, “Song for Edward de Vere,” planned for November 2023, the 400th anniversary of the first Shakespearean Folio.  

 

Reece: Not much! I had a very limited amount of vinyl that I remember playing such as an album by The Beach Boys, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” and a kid’s song album. Other than that, one of my bigger and more fond memories of music was listening to what cassettes my dad played in his truck. I remember listening to the album An Innocent Man by Billy Joel and Tumbleweed Connection by Elton John. I loved those albums and the memories associated with them of riding with my dad singing along.  

  

What was your journey to music?

I was classically trained. I started taking piano lessons when I was six; I still remember getting out of the car that day and the lessons, also. Though I did learn a lot like so, it wasn’t until I got an acoustic guitar at age 15 that I truly started learning music theory and playing by ear, which I had beforehand thought of as extremely mysterious. At age 20, I majored in piano performance, but I quit that after a mere year. My professor and I got along really well and would talk a lot about The Beatles and Beethoven, both of whom I greatly love, and he advised me to simply quit college if I knew I really only wanted to write music. Majoring in piano is a very time-consuming degree. I was practicing at least a couple hours a day for five or six days a week, and I felt even that wasn’t enough. It pained me because I was dedicating all that time to learning someone else’s music, however great it may’ve been, instead of working on my own. Thus, my professor’s suggestion that I quit, which I think of to this day as good advice.  

 

What is the first song you wrote that you were proud of, and why?

I wrote my first song, “All I Wanted,” at my friend Jeff Fox’s house when I was 16. I still think of it a somewhat catchy tune and not all too bad. The lyrics were certainly extremely juvenile, but what can one expect at that age? As far as being satisfied with what I write, it’s a difficult thing. I feel no song is ever really perfect and can almost always be made better. Often it’s hard to figure out how to do that, though! I wrote a lot of stuff in my 20s that certainly showed talent and such, but there was a major shift in my music starting at the end of my 20s. I dedicated myself more fully to lyrics and aspects of the craft that I’d somewhat ignored up until then. When that phase started, I wrote an incredible amount of material; some of the material to arise from the early part of that phase I still enjoy and some of them I still play, but the first song to arrive where I realized I’d improved and that the improvement seemed lasting was a song titled “Suffering & Pain.” That song was released on the album “All For You, Dulcinea.” Though the vocals and production and recording quality on those songs was drastically lacking, I still really like “Suffering & Pain.”

 

 

I believe in writing whether one is “in the mood” or not. So I try to generally treat it like an author would while writing a book. I tend to write predominantly on acoustic guitar, but I’ll sometimes write things on piano. Though there are definitely exceptions, I almost always get the music totally to my liking. This includes verses, choruses, bridges, breaks, and phrasing. After that, I write lyrics.