An Interview with SJD (AKA My Dad)
INTERVIEW | ARTS & CULTURE
Interview by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor
From Debate 2024 | Issue 5 | Music
Sean James Donnelly, known as SJD, is a musician based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He’s also my dad. He’s spent decades in the music industry, writing and producing many solo albums, as well as music for film and television. When he’s not telling me to rinse my dishes, or giving me hap-hazard relationship advice, he’s creating soulful music and writing lyrics more poetic than they have any right to be.
His latest album, Sweetheart, is a semi-lockdown album that covers themes of isolation, loneliness and depression, while also being tonally beautiful and heartwarming to hear. Featuring on the album are many other talented NZ artists including Julia Deans, Tami Neilson, Don McGlashan, James Milne, and more.
So, as I’m no musician myself, I decided to cosy up on a rainy Saturday and ask my ol’ papa some questions about his career, his thoughts on the music industry, and some advice for up and coming artists:
As someone who has been in the music industry for several decades, what advice would you give to aspiring musicians who are just starting out?
I think that right from the start it's good to realise what you’re in it for, and what your metric of success might be. Because only very few people are able to make it to the point where they can make a living out of it. That’s pretty rare. So, you gotta do it for the love of it. And you’ve got to - it sounds like a cliché - but you’ve gotta find your own way of doing it, and find out what it is that you do alone that other people don’t do.
How do you approach the songwriting process?
It’s subtly different each time, but I guess the thing that I’m always looking for is a seed. Whether it's a sound, lyric, melody, rhythm, chords, or whatever. It’s something inside you that, if you explore it, you can open it up or see something growing out of it. It's good to not force the process too much, which isn’t a problem for some people. But it can be a challenge because if you don’t start doing it, then you might never do it. As much as possible I just create. Everything that has to do with effort and forcing things to happen goes into creating the conditions in which songwriting can occur, as opposed to putting effort into the actual action itself.
How did being a parent of three kiddos influence your music?
Well, um, it probably meant that from the beginning I had a limited amount of time in which to make music, so I’d do it when you were at school. That’s for a start.
You’re supposed to say that we inspired you, that we were your muses!
I haven't finished yet! There’s always crazy little things that you guys do, your ways of looking at the universe, and your speech patterns. I’ve got heaps of nifty little ideas. It wasn’t even original but it's original to me, like Sam’s (my brother) “Make a wish on a satellite”. He was talking about making a wish on a star, and somebody said “That’s not a star, that’s a satellite”, and he said, “Well, I’ll make a wish on a satellite, then”.
Do you think New Zealand’s landscape or culture has influenced your songwriting?
Yeah, heaps. Particularly the geography. I found that in Dunedin, the geography of the place and the landscape definitely affected what I was doing. In a way that’s hard to quantify, but I guess it affects the form [of the music] very much. And the culture obviously, in terms of language, again, in the way language is used. I think my music has a New Zealand-ness about it, but I find with lyrics if a term has a very New Zealand colloquialism or whatever, I’ll take it out, because it just sounds too… Not because of culture-cringe but because it sounds too pointed, sounds almost contrived.
Which New Zealand artists or bands have had a significant impact on your taste and the kind of music you make?
A person that was a big influence on my writing was Don McGlashan. I was a big fan of his music. And he’s done a lot of things, I mean he did Front Lawn, Blam Blam Blam, Mutton Birds, From Scratch, and his solo work as well. All those things were important to me. His lyrical conceits, and the angularity of his melodies all had a big impact on me. And that idea of just taking unusual and colloquial subject matter and turning it into pop songs.
That’s what I love about Front Lawn.
Yeah, see that’s pointedly New Zealand, but in a way that they’ve mastered. And to me, if I try to replicate that, it sounds like I’m doing a Front Lawn impression or a Flight of the Conchords impression. I think obviously Flight of the Conchords owe a lot to Front Lawn.
How have you seen the music scene in New Zealand change over the years you’ve been working in it?
Well, there never stops being amazing artists coming up and doing things. And there’s always been a fight between art, and the commercial imperative, an industry that - living under a capitalist regime - needs to make money. I think it’s proven a long time ago that commercial pop music, or alternative, or just weird-arse stuff can foot it anywhere in the world and that never changes. I just feel we’re going through a bit of a phase at the moment where people are obsessed with trying to make commercial pop music. And like everywhere else in the world, because of Spotify and the commodification of music, and the decreased income potential that it has, I think people probably spend rather too much of their time having to second guess algorithms and produce content that is not the music, and learn how to promote. It’s very understandable but it’s a bit of a sad state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.
Do you think there are any positives about this digitalisation?
Yeah, it’s a wildcard, isn’t it? Lots of artists, who maybe 50 people might have bought their record, have gone online and there's been some virality to what they do, and they might have millions of listeners. Weirdly enough, probably the income hasn’t changed that much. Do you know Salvia Palth? A New Zealand artist, who did one album, it’s on Spotify, with something like five million monthly listeners. On something that would have been completely obscure. Having said that, it really does mean that for most people achieving that level of virality or success is just odds on impossible. Just because there’s so many people doing it and not everybody can achieve it.
The way that algorithms work is they encourage people to listen to things that they’ve previously liked, generally speaking. Which means it's just the same part of the brain every time gets teased by a piece of music. I like music that takes you somewhere different that you haven’t really heard before, or somehow combines elements of familiarity with things that are unfamiliar.
Yeah, it sucks putting on an Elliot Smith album and then having Spotify show you every sort of guitar indie-folk song that they can think of that you might like as well.
Yeah, as opposed to somebody that might have the spirit of Elliot Smith but makes music with modular synthesisers, or whatever.
You often collaborate with a variety of other artists. Can you talk about the role collaboration plays in your creative process?
I guess most of what I do is 80-90% me, and people will quite often come in at the end of the process and help me finish something or see it through. But I enjoy collaborating; the beauty of it (even if you don’t create anything) is that you can do anything with it. It rejuvenates you, gives you ideas, encourages you, and helps you keep your chops. And then you get the unique melding of sensibilities which creates not the combination of the one and the two, but a new chemical reaction, or new substance.
Looking back on your 30-odd years as a musician, what are some of the most memorable moments and experiences that you’ve had?
I think I want to generalise on that. Like, a big one is when you have a really good gig. Like, I mainly think about recording music, and creating recorded music, and that’s chiefly what I do. But going out and playing live and taking your songs to a group of people. And then those times when you get a good reaction out of it, it’s so encouraging and inspiring. It’s a very necessary part of the process as far as I’m concerned.
SJD’s music spans a wide variety of genres, there is a little something for everyone. I’m personally a big fan of my dad’s music, maybe because I’ve been hearing it ebbing through the floorboards my whole life, but I like to think I’d be a fan regardless. So if you’d like to listen to songs written in between changing my dirty nappies, or driving me to school, check him out under SJD on Spotify, Bandcamp, or YouTube, and on Instagram under @sjd_musick. There are also vinyl copies of his latest album Sweetheart available at most of your indie record stores.