It takes a lot to throw Sean McConnell for a loop. The veteran singer-songwriter is as comfortable writing and recording his own songs as he is collaborating or producing with some of the biggest artists in music. So when he set off on a European tour in 2023, he didn’t think much of it. He’d play a show in one city, then hop on a train to the next, just like he always does when he’s on an overseas run. But then, on those train rides between gigs, with nothing but a journal in front of him and a rolling landscape in motion outside his window, an album found him.
“It’s not my normal style, just writing lyrics,” McConnell tells Rolling Stone, “but I was just on these trains, and songs started happening. ‘Skin’ was the first one that popped out. About halfway through that tour was when I realized there was some record that was trying to be made.”
The record took the title of the first song. Skin — McConnell’s 11th studio album — dropped on Friday. Across its 11 tracks, Skin is an intensely personal record. The 40-year-old McConnell — who has been releasing music since he was 15 in 2000 — wrestles with demons and angels alike on the project.
“The long and short of it, I guess, is that it’s kind of a dismantling and a building back up of myself in a way,” McConnell says. “I don’t know if it’s being 40, or living the sort of life that I’ve led, but all of these songs started popping up with questions that needed to be answered or just something that needed to be sat with for a while. I needed to figure some shit out.”
Whether he accomplished that, only McConnell can say for sure. But Skin leaves little doubt about the journey itself. The title track is also the first song on the album, and McConnell sets the tone in the lyric, “It almost took me 40 years to figure out that the call was coming from inside the house.”
But he’s not just pushing himself lyrically. McConnell brought in most of his touring band and recorded the album live in the studio, a departure from his recent preference to cut his albums in his home studio with only the help of bass player and producer Justin Tocket. Most of the songs on Skin are heavily layered musically, ranging in sound from simple string arrangements on “Skin” to a full allotment of keys and percussion on “The West Is Never Won.”
“My entire live band from the last 10 years just kind of all became producers on this record,” he says. “We cut most of it live as a five-piece, and the band is a huge part of why this record is what it became. It’s the fingerprints of all the guys being the best versions of themselves for this record.”
“Skin” sets the tone, but “Demolition Day” is the song that takes the most direct aim at McConnell’s perspective on life. The keyboards and electric guitar in the song work to create a swampy backbeat that would pass for arena rock if one did not know that McConnell’s current tour is taking him through dive bars and listening rooms.
“It’s the demolition of myself — of habits, of ways of thinking, and old ways of being that aren’t serving me anymore,” he says. “Changing my whole paradigm, rethinking my whole structure, and just killing things that need to die, so that new things can be reborn.”
There’s one bona fide love song on the album. “Never Enough” is written for McConnell’s wife, Mary Susan. But the most powerful is “The West Is Never Won,” which McConnell wrote for Abi, his 14-year-old daughter. Abi is a special-needs child, and McConnell wanted to capture her wonderment at the world in a song.
“I wanted to write a song for her that kind of got across the idea of, you are this amazing, beautiful soul,” he says, “and this world will try to take parts of that away or tell you who you are — through religion, or school or friends or this or that. I just wanted to tell my daughter, ‘Never don’t trust yourself. You are this beautiful soul.’ This is a hard world to live in, when you get all these different messages. So, this is kind of like an adult lullaby or prayer.”
The notion of self-reflection extends to the album’s artwork, which is a drawing of a hand adorned with tattoos. It turns out that McConnell keeps a folder of images that he says are ideas for tattoos he may want. When his manager saw it, he suggested turning it into the record’s art.
McConnell has a tour lined up in support of Skin that starts Friday and runs through June. The tour will take him from coast to coast, including stops in both New York and Los Angeles.
When he’s not on the road, you can expect McConnell to be back in his studio, collaborating, or working on something even newer than Skin.
“I’ll wake up every day and I’ll go to my studio, whether I’m writing by myself or somebody’s showing up to write a song,” he says of songwriting. “My philosophy, and my songwriting religion is, there’s a song that wants to be born today, and I want to write that song. My goal is to set my compass to that frequency, and try to figure out where it is. To me, it’s all about finding your space for it to come to you, in a way. And then, you do your work.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, was released in December 2024 via Back Lounge Publishing.
