Spotlight: Anson Seabra Lets His Listener Into His Vulnerable World
ALWAYS STRIVING TO IMPROVE HIS RELATIONSHIP TO HIMSELF AND THE WORLD AROUND HIM - Anson Seabra’s music creates an atmosphere that discusses topics of mental health, fairy tales and heartbreak. He often reflects on society, and through meditation he has been able to look inward in order to love himself more. Despite this growth, Seabra still openly writes songs sharing the times when self-hatred feels inevitable, a very raw part of being human for almost everybody. In his latest release, Feeling For My Life, the song “Lucky Charms” holds significant meaning for him pertaining to this theme. In regards to the line, “I hate myself, but I don’t want to,” Seabra states, “I don’t think people want to hear that. I don’t think they want to look someone like me in the eyes and confront the idea that seemingly ‘normal people’ might have more nuanced ideas about themselves or might be more self-deprecating. Obviously that song was written at a different time in my life, but I thought it was still important to put out.”
This song was a challenge for him to write, because of the vulnerability and personal realizations that came along with it. “I think it’s the disease of humanity today to hate yourself in some regard. I think most people don’t actually like themselves. I think most people are sort of kicking the can down the road hoping one day they’ll wake up and feel like they’re good enough, or they’re complete or whole. I think I was blessed, or cursed, to wake up from my own delusion very early in life so that song is about realizing that I really didn’t like myself very much,” he adds.
Before Seabra realized that he wanted to be a musician, he studied software engineering. “When I was in college, I definitely thought I wanted to be a software engineer; I was obsessed with it. I didn’t go to parties; I literally just spent my weekends coding. In college I wrote two iPhone apps, so I thought I was gonna be some sort of entrepreneur or something which is funny,” he says. Although he enjoyed coding and was good at it, music fit his goals in more ways. He sums it up perfectly by stating, “There’s a certain stereotype about software engineers, and for the most part it’s kind of true. They’re just a little more reserved and very…sterile is probably the wrong word but they’re just…they’re not artists, you know what I mean?”
While music was a very different path for him to choose, there are definitely parallels between the two careers. “There is that analytical part of me that pulls on melodies and tries to tweak them. That’s just the writing part; that’s not even the production part which is probably a better parallel. I’ve spent four years working on computers and taught myself how to make music on computers so there’s some parallels there, it’s not exactly the same… but the transition was pretty seamless because I’d already been a musician for a long time so it wasn’t like I was starting from zero,” he says.
Seabra is incredibly inspired by storytelling and fairy tale imagery in his music. He loves to give people the idea of magic, and the form of escapism that comes from fairy tales. “I’m a deeply spiritual person; I meditate a lot and the more I live and understand who I am, the more I realize we’ve sort of lost touch with the magical nature of reality… There’s just this mundaneness and I think the reason people like fairytales so much is because you get a taste of this otherworldliness, this magic. What if life had no shackles, what if everything was fresh and new and we were kids again? I’m so obsessed with that feeling and am trying to live my life in that way, also giving other people a taste of it,” he says.
In terms of storytelling in general, Seabra has the idea that there are really very few stories being told when it is all boiled down. “There’s basically only two stories,” he says, “I love you or I hate you. ... [S]o if you just say the thing you’re trying to say it’s not that interesting. It’s the same thing with songs; there’s only like a couple songs: I love you, I hate you, I miss you, I want to have sex with you… It’s like we’re all just writing those songs over and over again so you’ve got to wrap it up in something, in a story and I think that’s the most engaging way of making a song.” He truly tells his stories in a unique and magical way.
Recently, Seabra’s song “Walked Through Hell'' appeared in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, an exciting milestone. A goal of his though, as he states, “has been to get my music into a Disney movie, any sort of Disney movie. I think the gold standard for me in songwriting is Disney songs. If I listen to a song like ‘Whole New World’ from Aladdin it’s just harmonically so rich and lyrically so incredible. It’s pure magic.” Seabra has a love for Disney movies, so much so that Disney Channel was one of his first thoughts when trying to come up with a favorite Halloween movie. This also comes from his hatred of any type of horror films; he states, “I never understood why anyone would want to willingly scare themselves. It just doesn’t make any sense to me…Hocus Pocus, that’s one I remember from Disney Channel. But even that one felt a little scary for my taste to be honest.”
While TikTok has had a significant influence on Seabra’s career, he tries not to use TikTok artist as his label. “TikTok’s sort of a blessing and a curse,” he says. “It’s more of a blessing I would say; I try not to be too cynical because I do have a lot of followers on there and a lot of people have found my music through the platform. At the end of the day that’s pretty much the name of the game when it comes to music is getting your name out there.” However, in terms of his overall success, Seabra is confident, rightly so, that he would still be a successful singer-songwriter without the app. “Well, I was a successful singer-songwriter; I was already making a living before TikTok,” he elaborates. Another blessing that comes from TikTok is the ability to see how his music has affected his fans, as they use his songs to tell their own stories.
He states, “I have a song called 'Broken’; the lyric goes ‘am I broken?’ I remember just feeling so fucked up when I wrote that song, just feeling like ‘am I the only person that feels like a shell of my former self, just completely lost?’ Seeing people do things with the songs and relate to the lyrics, it’s good for me because it makes me feel like my suffering wasn’t in vain, because now I’m in a better place. It makes sense; it wasn’t for nothing. Now that I have some more perspective on what was going on in my life when I wrote those songs, I’m sort of realizing no way was I alone in feeling those things. In fact, I would say most people probably feel that way to some degree; they just don’t have the clarity to maybe articulate it in the way that I did.”
Seabra had the opportunity to tour for the first time when he accompanied Alec Benjamin on his most recent tour, which ended in October. “It was very formative. I had never played for that many people before, and it was really special to get to hear people singing along to my songs,” he says. “They would give me things after the show, gifts and notes and stuff like that. It was all very sweet. It sort of solidified my idea of myself as an artist and not just this person who makes songs in their living room. I think for the next tour I’ll really be looking forward to that, that human aspect... I’ve been doing this forever, for like five or six years and to finally see people singing along, that’s really crazy.”
The most significant moment for Seabra happened while backstage in Detroit, watching Benjamin perform a song called “The Book of You and I.” “[It is] one of my favorite songs by him and I just started sobbing uncontrollably. I was so overwhelmed by the moment because I’ve been a fan of Alec’s for a very long time and I never thought I would be a singer at all. Here I was backstage at his show. It was a very surreal moment for me,” he states.
As Seabra has just recently wrapped up his tour with Alec Benjamin, he is not working on too many projects at the moment. His upcoming release is a Christmas EP, made up of two original songs and two covers. “I’m actually really excited about Christmas songs because we kind of did it as a joke, but they turned out a lot better than I expected,” he laughs. “I just put out [Feeling For My Life] so obviously there’s other projects in the works; I have some ideas but nothing concrete yet.” His newest album can be found on all platforms.
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