Force of Nature

by Peter Aaron, October 28, 2011

A pinecone plummets, narrowly missing your music editor’s head. The same crisp October wind that shook it loose stirs up a swirl of dry, brown needles shed by the tall trees shading our chairs. Once in a while a car zips by on the road out front, totally oblivious to the natural drama playing out in Sean Rowe’s Wynantskill back yard—and the wild delicacies it has to offer.

“If I want it, I don’t have to go far to find it here,” says Rowe (rhymes with now). “Just looking around right now, I can see about 50 or 60 edible plants. There’s a black walnut tree across the road, and I’ve been gathering nuts from it.” Plucking a specimen from a bucket filled with them, he demonstrates how to grind off its fleshy, green outer covering with the sole of his boot to reveal the rock-hard inner prize. “You have to use a hammer or something heavy to crack the nuts, they’re really tough. But they’re great roasted.”

In literature and film, it’s been said, there are four major types of plot conflict: man versus man; man versus nature; man versus society; man versus self. To varying degrees all four appear to rage within the life and music of Rowe, a 37-year-old singer-songwriter endowed with an astonishing gift for darkly poetic, metaphor-packed narratives. “Surprise,” from Magic (2011, ANTI- Records), makes for a fine example: “My city shakes its head at my wilderness / My heart has built a mind for itself / I found a little shelter inside of a sickness / And I’ll be waiting for the icicles to melt.”

And then there’s the impossibly deep voice Rowe’s words are couched within: a cavernous baritone that easily engulfs those of two of his chief influences, Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash. But, perhaps unexpectedly, if you’ve heard him sing, Rowe maintains it was some voices of a far higher range that made the earliest musical impact on him. “My parents always had pop albums on vinyl and 8-track, and the Beach Boys were my favorite,” he says. “The space they created with their music and their voices is just amazing. Growing up, listening to records wasn’t so much of an escape for me. It was more like a meditation.”

Rowe was raised mostly in the Troy area, where his family is deeply rooted. “Everyone on my mom’s side played or sang, mostly just for fun,”  he remembers. “I sang in my uncle’s church group for a while. One of my uncles was a pretty serious jazz pianist, but he gave it up to become a doctor. I’m the only one who’s ever really pursued music professionally, and my family’s been really supportive.” His father bought him a bass guitar when he was 12, and at first the aspiring musician wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. “At that point I hadn’t been exposed to enough music that really showed the role of the bass,” explains Rowe, adding, with a laugh, “I guess I thought it was just another kind of guitar, basically.” By 14 he’d also picked up the acoustic guitar and was soon playing, bass and singing in a succession of high school bands. “I was terrified of singing, it wasn’t something I wanted to do at first,” he explains. “I only really started because the singer in one of the bands I was in quit showing up for rehearsals.”