By Dean Wells
Two-hundred-and-fifty days on the road a year is a grind—no doubt about it.
Ask Sean Patrick McGraw.
He did it for years.
McGraw, a native of Dunkirk, NY, spent weeks at a time on the road as a country music touring artist, doing everything from headlining with his band to supporting big name artists like Toby Keith and Trace Adkins to playing one-man shows across New York State.
Now?
McGraw spends most of his time in his home in Nashville.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t busy.
McGraw made the decision several years ago with the birth of his and his wife Deborah’s daughter, Willow, to back away from life on the road and concentrate on his professional and domestic life in Tennessee—where he has lived for the last 31 years.
He still plays out: a regular gig on Saturdays at a bar in the historic Printer’s Alley and sometimes picking up fill-in spots with local acts needing a musician. But most of his time as a singer/songwriter these days is spent writing and recording in his home studio.
“I don’t go on the road at all other than a handful of gigs in New York,” McGraw said. “I used to spend every summer in western New York and gig all the time. I would literally play every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day.”
But music still pays the bills.
McGraw began writing for on-demand song platforms during the pandemic at the suggestion of Bruce Wallace, a co-writer from McGraw’s 2011 album, “My So Called Life.” McGraw said he was working for Uber Rideshare at the time.
“I just wanted to make some money because I didn’t want to be on the road so much,” McGraw said. “I didn’t want to be gone for 250 days a year now that I had a family.”
Wallace urged McGraw to look into Songfinch, an online on-demand song company.
“He told me ‘I think you have the ability to be writing for these companies I’m writing for,’” McGraw said. “I looked into it. There was an audition, which I passed. I went out and researched other companies that do custom songs. I passed those auditions, too. It kept me afloat and enabled me not to be on the road.
“The minute Willow was born, I said ‘I can’t travel anymore.’ It’s not even an option. Thank God I have (the custom song platforms). What else was I going to do? I haven’t been an employee or had a real job in over 30 years. How would I get a job? I have no experience, I have no references. I have nothing to go on.”
According to McGraw, the work came pouring in after he passed his auditions.
“At the height, I was doing 3-4 songs a day. Pre-Valentine’s and the month before Mother’s Day, I was cranking out eight a day. I would have 13 songs in my song queue for a month. I was working from the time I had my coffee in the morning until midnight every day. When you’re self-employed, you’ve got to make hay when the sun shines. It was insane.”
However, the hectic schedule came with bonuses.
“I was writing a song from scratch for every project,” McGraw said. “I think that’s what really helped hone my production skills, my songwriting skills. I would have three hours scheduled for a song. It was like playing speed chess. I would spend two hours on lyrics and one hour on recording.”
To keep his live chops in shape, McGraw plays with his band, Handsome Sumbitches, at a weekly residency at Alley Taps in Nashville’s Printer’s Alley. McGraw and his bandmates take a unique approach to their Saturday night sets—they wing it.
They also avoid the well-beaten path of playing modern country in the modern country capital of the universe.
Instead, they play everything else under the sun.
“If people start asking for new country, I’m up a creek,” McGraw said. “But I know a lot of songs I can fake my way through. Our first gig there, we basically faked our way through a whole night of music. We would listen to the first few bars (of a song) on someone’s phone. The audience knew we were winging it. It became a game of ‘stump the band.’ I couldn’t believe when they called us back to play again, because that’s not the way you’re supposed to do things in Nashville.”
McGraw said he had a conversation with the bar owner after the second gig that he assumed was going to take a sharp turn south.
“At the end of the night, he called me over to him,” McGraw said, chuckling. “I thought, ‘Here’s where we get fired.’ He told me he thought we were great and loved what we did. He wanted to know if we could play there every week.
“We just fly by the seats of our pants. We’re not taking it seriously. We tell the audience that this could be really, really bad, we could butcher this—they just laugh at us. They love it.”