Songs from the Sea: Grief, Hope & Action — Seth Glier
About Seth Glier
Musical artist Seth Glier gets inspiration from the natural world and says the ocean brings him comfort and often provides a narrative for his music. His music reminds us that we have the ability to positively influence the world.
Seth has worked as a producer, music director, and studio musician. He has collaborated with such renown musical artists as Tom Rush, Nick Carter, and Cyndi Lauper. Seth has been nominated for a Grammy and is a five-time Independent Music Award winner. He characterizes music as an empathy machine and feels incredibly lucky to be part of it.
Songwriting as Storytelling: Using Music to Connect and Heal
Seth remembers being 12 and watching television with his uncle and aunt when a 13 year old sang the national anthem before a Yankees’ baseball game. Her thought “Well I'm 12 but maybe eventually I'll be old enough to do that.” When he did begin to sing he loved what happened to his body when the whole thing became full of air and vibrated. He learned that he could get adults’ attention using his voice. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 was the first time he wrote a song. It was his way of journaling. Seth finds music to be an empathy machine and draws people together. As a songwriter he feels that he tells his story so other people can hear their own. The musical instruments like guitar and piano are like the utensils that accompany the meal, they are only the tools to support the story.
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00:00:01 Pamela Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series on womenmindthewater.com, I am speaking with Seth Glier. Seth is a Massachusetts-based musical artist who gets inspiration from the natural world. Seth says that the ocean brings him comfort and provides a narrative for his music. He has worked as a producer, musical director and studio musician and collaborated with such renowned musical artists as Tom Rush, Nick Carter and Cindy Lauper. Seth has been nominated for a Grammy and is a five time Independent Music Award winner.
00:00:46 Pamela Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast from womenmindthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their works and explores their connection with the oceans. Through their stories Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
00:01:00 Pamela Ferris-Olson I'm speaking with musical artist Seth Glier. Seth is an accomplished musician who's a five time Independent Music Award winner and has been nominated for a Grammy. Seth uses memories about the natural world to create his music. The songs on his latest album titled Everything include practical solutions for the climate crisis. His music reminds us that we have the ability to positively influence the world.
Seth, welcome. I am grateful that you reached out to me about being on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series recently celebrated its 75th podcast. Your presence here is another milestone for us; this one attesting to our desire to be more inclusive. Through our stories, we wish to demonstrate that the world is an interdependent, non-binary ecosystem. So welcome, Seth. Let's explore how the world has influenced you and your music.
00:02:07 Pamela Ferris-Olson Seth I was once told by a music teacher that children make their selection of a musical instrument to learn how to play based on the instrument's sound quality and how it resonates with them. What was the first musical instrument you chose to play and why?
00:02:24 Seth Glier Yeah, great question. Well Pam, thank you very much for making some time and allowing me to talk about my art and welcoming me into your community. Thank you so much for what you're doing too. The first instrument that I really found a strong identity with was my voice as a singer. I remember being 12 and I was watching television with my uncle and aunt and saw a 13 year old singing the national anthem before a Yankees’ game. I thought to myself, “Well I'm 12 but maybe eventually I'll be old enough to do that.” Looking back on that, I was a loud kid. I didn't necessarily have the voice that I do now but I loved what happened to my body when the whole thing was vibrating and full of air. And it was shortly around that time where as I was acculturating as a kid, I really learned that you could get adults’ attention using your voice.
00:03:48 Seth Glier As the piano which came first and the guitar which still to this day act to me as almost more organizational tools sort of separating one song from another. But for me, a song happens typically from the place where your voice is just sort of sprung into the air to call something, to say something.
00:04:18 Pamela Ferris-Olson I like that and I like that the instruments are an accompaniment to your natural voice.
00:04:25 Seth Glier Yeah, they're like utensils not the meal.
00:04:28 Pamela Ferris-Olson I like that. So when did you think music became the way for you to express yourself?
00:04:38 Seth Glier I wrote my first song on September 11th, 2021 and I was in 7th grade so that puts me, I'm 35 years old now.
00:04:52 Pamela Ferris-Olson Wait a minute, you mean in 2001, not 21.
00:04:56 Seth Glier Yes, in 2001. I was, you know, I was in history class about to watch a movie and the teacher turned on the television and we saw the second plane. This was not something I really had a whole lot of intellectual understanding of at the time. But my dad who was a day trader, I came back from school and he was stressed out. Every adult was just acting weird. Of course I understand why now. But what happened was, that was where piano and songwriting kind of started from the same place I was gifted this little Casio keyboard, not a full size keyboard but the ones where you play and the lights light up the keys.
00:05:45 Pamela Ferris-Olson Yeah, I remember those.
00:05:52 Seth Glier It’s great for anyone with ADD you know like me. And I ended up following the lights and finding four chords that felt like a container and then started spilling my thoughts of the day. And so it was much more was my first form of almost like journaling. But that's where it started, music being a self-navigational tool for me to understand what was alive in myself. And it wasn't until after that that I realized that there's a greater tool which is, which is really you tell your story so other people can hear their own.
00:06:42 Pamela Ferris-Olson So how do you go about choosing the sounds you feel best express an experience?
00:06:50 Seth Glier I tend to be pretty literal at first, sometimes that could be. You know, I've got this keyboard here called an OP1. I can travel with it and it allows me to take a sample of a waterfall and then spread the waterfall out on the keyboard. So all of a sudden I could be playing chords that were droplets of water. Other times it can be wanting to create sort of an immersive feeling like this song Somebody break my heart that I wrote about an experience with the ocean in Key West. I really wanted to feel like someone was being hugged by the water. When you when you take a seat at the bottom of a pool and the pressure just is even around your entire body. I wanted that sense of suspension in the music. So sometimes that can be created by synthesizers and keyboards and sometimes that can be achieved by layering my voice and doing all kinds of sort of studio production in that way.
00:08:19 Pamela Ferris-Olson Let's talk about one of your songs on the album Everything. It's a song about Key West, FL. So tell us what sort of story that you're trying to tell us and how you did that with the music.
00:08:29 Seth Glier One of my first interactions with water was through my relationship with my older brother Jamie. My brother was born with autism and lived his life without the ability to speak. For much of my teenage years, I was his personal care attendant and would wake him up in the morning. And for much of my early 20s I became his legal guardian for a period of time.
So we would go swimming all the time, whether it was a lake or a pool. He was a water baby and
part of his day program was swimming in the pool for sort of sensory integration. But he passed away about seven years ago and in his passing, I went down to Key West for a writing residency, I found this amazing picnic table sort of about 20 feet from the water at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. I would start each morning trying to figure out what the rest of my life without my brother was going to look like. I would work myself up into such an emotion every 40 minutes or so while typing that I could no longer see the screen in front of me and my eyes would just sort of well up with tears. Then I would run into the water and rinse and repeat. I did that pretty much exclusively for two weeks. I left Key West with a completely changed relationship with water. I could no longer tell where my tears started and where the water began. And then there was this cleaning out that I felt almost like a baptism. Every time I visit the water again, it's like I get a little bit of my brother back.
00:10:42 Seth Glier I wrote that song Somebody break my heart to try to capture that feeling. It was a particular kind of water but it was sort of a feeling of like numbness, pleading for emotion, for feeling to come in. Water was a huge aspect of the sound bed of that song.
00:11:13 Pamela Ferris-Olson You also on that same album have this song about Fire Island, which I had to look up. Shame on me. I found out it's a barrier island off the southern shore of New York. Now New York and Key West seem like they’re worlds apart. Now, I don't know what the story was that you were trying to tell about Fire Island, but the two songs I imagine are different. So how do you go about creating those different vibes?
00:11:46 Seth Glier Oh interesting, great question. Yes, they're different. They're completely different ecologies. The natural thing is to make sure that the accoutrement around them, the production around these songs, sort of matches those differences. Somebody break my heart is very much of this sort of lulling, meditative expression. Where it's sort of pulling you in and that was very much what was going on inside of me. I was reconnecting with a family member through this natural element. With the song Witches of the wind I went to Fire Island as a kid, surf cast fishing with my dad. We’d go for blue fish and striped bass and it was one of my favorite memories as a child. One of my favorite memories of my dad.
00:13:01 I wanted to build a three minute snapshot of a climate-oriented solution that had a lot of intersectional solutions working at it. So things like floating solar panels in the shipyard. Things like viable commercial kelp farming not only to protect the coastline but to protect, you know, the planet and to protect us. And so I decided to create all of these solutions through a story song about a father and a child going off not to go fishing but going off to visit the offshore wind and making sure that the journey out from the harbor was brimming with all of the positive potential that I believe needs to be infused back into the climate movement.
00:13:58 Pamela Ferris-Olson That’s a really unusual angle to take because climate solutions and the climate crisis are a big idea. They're complex and difficult to solve, and you take it back to the relationship between a father and a son so that the issue is not so big and daunting. It's so personal and affectionate. Now in terms of the music how big or little is it that you can express? So it's your voice that's expressing solutions. But how does the music support that?
00:14:43 Seth Glier The music propels you, you know, literally like a windmill. The ocean is different there. It has a jaggedness to the edges of the sounds. All of these things, you know, make up the shoreline. But to your original point I personally really think that the bigger the idea, the smaller the doorway into it needs to be. You know, it's like that with so many things that we feel overwhelmed and powerless about. You know, in a way, it's like neither one of us can hold the ocean but we collect shells. You know, I see the starfish behind you. We're taking small momentums, sort of souvenirs, to remind us of this greater thing that can't really be intellectualized.
00:15:50 Pamela Ferris-Olson So Seth, you've worked with some remarkable people and you've had amazing opportunities to collaborate with musicians from across the globe because you worked as a cultural diplomat for the US State Department. What have you learned about music from working across cultural and geographic boundaries?
00:16:10 Seth Glier I have been so lucky to travel the world and communicate and connect with musicians all over the map. What I have learned is that music’s an empathy machine. It's impossible to be playing music with another person without being changed by it. And in my experience it works faster than just about everything else I've seen. It works certainly faster than language. It works faster than touch. There is so much trust that gets built in playing music with someone and you don't know where it's gonna go. And it arrives someplace that neither one of you guys could imagine. That happens all the time. It's happened with, you know, doing tooth and throat singing in Mongolia. It’s happened in every kind of genre. That's totally an arbitrary categorization of music. I feel incredibly lucky to be to be a part of that empathy machine.
00:17:55 Pamela Ferris-Olson So before we end, I'd like to ask you, as I do with all my guests, to speak to our listeners about how they might make a difference. How might they use their voices to speak up for the ocean?
00:18:07 Seth Glier Everyone is finding their own journey to engagement and sustainable activism and incorporating rest which is a really important part of all of this. For me, nothing gets me more inspired and hopeful than the citizen science efforts, to me have been some of the most exciting things to be a part of.
00:18:41 Pamela Ferris-Olson Well, I really want to thank you again for joining me on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast to talk about your music and nature and particularly the ocean.
I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Seth Glier an accomplished musician whose songs about nature remind us that we have the ability to positively influence the world around us. Seth is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. The series can be viewed on womanmindthewater.com, Museum on Main Street, and YouTube. An audio-only version of this podcast is available on womenmindthewater.com, on iTunes and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for the use of her song Women of water. All rights for Wo(men) Mind the Water, name and logo, belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.
