Montana musician Sean Devine brings together the rugged landscape of the West, a wealth of original songs, and a lifetime of personal experience in Here for It All, his first album in six years, due out September 3rd. Produced by Josh Thompson (Cody Jinks), the eloquent project provides a firsthand account of second chances, showing up, and seeing it through.
A fifth-generation Montanan, Devine was born in Bozeman where his father was a linebacker for Montana State University. However, with two young children, his dad dropped out of school and found work as a carpenter. The young family lived for a time in construction work camps in northern California and in the southern Idaho mountains, before returning to Montana and settling in Livingston.
As a boy, Devine tagged along with his father and great-uncle to fiddle competitions, slinging his Sears guitar over his shoulder with baling twine. Meanwhile, at home, he absorbed the storylines from his mother’s favorite artist, Kris Kristofferson. By early grade school, Devine was writing his own songs. He composed his first one at 8 years old about his parents’ divorce – and realized the force of songwriting after playing it for his parents. “There’s never been a point of my life, since I was a kid, where at least part of my mind wasn’t preoccupied by music,” he says.
By his teens, Devine had played in a bar band with his dad and uncle as well as a rock band with his high school friends. In the ‘90s, he crashed for a while at his brother’s apartment in New York City to try the folk club circuit. Although Devine worked his way up to a gig at the Bitter End, his wife at the time gave him the ultimatum of choosing between Montana and Manhattan. He returned to the West, settling in among a number of established authors, songwriters, actors, and painters who had relocated there.
Soon becoming a regular in the Rocky Mountain clubs, he sold copies of his first album Walking Down the Road from the backseat of his Buick. After the Big Parade followed in 2004. Looking back, he says, “I always made enough money to keep going but never enough money to stop.”
The constant travel took its toll on Devine’s first marriage. In an effort to stay closer to home, he did his own stint in construction, until The Great Recession nearly wiped out his business and helped to end his second marriage. Going back to basics with his guitar and his songs as a single dad, Devine was reluctant to trust in love when he met the woman who would become his third wife. She encouraged him to make the 2015 album Austin Blues, and they married in 2017. Now 51, Here For It All is Devine’s fourth and most fully realized album.
Today Glide is excited to premiere “Texas and Tennessee,” one of the standout tracks on the new album. The simple tune feels like a nod to great Texas troubadours and outlaw country artists as Devine settles into a loping groove complete with plenty of twang and some damn fine guitar picking. Lyrically, he drops historical references to country music laced with his own commentary on what it all means. There is definitely a sense of nostalgia permeating from the song as Devine traces the connections between the two states of song’s namesake. He even gives a shoutout to his own contemporaries like Cody Jinks and Ward Davis. The end result is a solid country tune that feels almost meta in how it references musical history while Devine also appears to be carving out his own place in there…even if he does happen to be from Montana.
Devine describes the story behind how this song came to be:
“This will be a longer story. After my second tour in Montana with Ward Davis, he was invited to open for Cody Jinks on the “I’m Not The Devil” tour. Ward had been telling anyone who would listen that Cody was going to blow up huge, and that we should all be paying attention. Ward and I keep in touch by phone, and I remember him explaining to me first that they would play two sold-out shows at a nightclub called Third and Lindsley in Nashville. Ward had played there before, but never to a sold-out crowd, and he was really jacked up. The next time we talked he was raving about consecutive sold-out nights at The Troubadour in Los Angeles. This, too, was a dream come true. And, Cody had gotten booked on Conan and asked Ward to play keys in the band that night so he’d be on TV too. I’m sure he could’ve sailed home to Tennessee high as a kite on all that, but the best was still down the road.
The tour would come full circle, back to Nashville, for two sold-out nights at The Ryman Auditorium. I swear I could hear his voice tremble and crack as he told me this, and I was deeply moved. I had never known anyone personally who’d played a sold-out show at The Ryman and I got swept up in the vicarious feeling of Ward getting to do that.
I haven’t been able to make my whole living playing music since I started having kids. I’ve never regretted that, but from time to time the pull of needing to be out there singing the songs and playing shows has been damn near unbearable. The morning I’d heard from Ward about the Ryman shows I happened to be lying on my back in the rafters of an old shop, stapling rigid foam insulation to the ceiling, and I’ll admit I had tears in my eyes. It was in this kind of reverie that I started to imagine a song for them – for Ward and Cody and Sunny, who was also on the bill. At that point I think I’d opened a couple of shows for Sunny, though I’d yet to meet her, and Ward had introduced me to Cody and his band backstage at The Wilma in Missoula during the tour (as, “the Bob Dylan of Montana”:). I felt proud and in awe for each and all of them, and I guess that’s why the song I wrote for them turned into an epic history of country music beginning in geological time.”
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Photo credit: John Zumpano
