Quinn Sullivan

Quinn Sullivan

By: Lori Smerilson Carson

Massachusetts has spawned many talented artists, and Singer/Guitarist/Songwriter Quinn Sullivan is certainly one of them. This extraordinarily talented musician started his career when he was very young, earning the title of prodigy as he attracted many, many people who witnessed his abilities and became fans. One of those people who first discovered him, is Buddy Guy, who Sullivan has played with onstage as well as being featured on Guy’s 2008 album SKIN DEEP. In 2011, Sullivan released his debut CD CYCLONE. Now, his latest album SALVATION is due to be released June 7^th. Two singles have already been released, “Dark Love” and “Salvation (Make me Wanna Pray)” and are receiving over fifty thousand views and climbing. Florida fans hear these new songs, as well as past favorites, when Sullivan takes his current tour to Heidi’s Jazz Club in Cocoa Beach on June 20^th and The Funky Biscuit in Boca Raton on June 22^nd.

Catching up with Sullivan just prior to his tour, he revealed some details about his new show, his upcoming album, a bit about his remarkable past, and what fans can look forward to.

SFL Music Magazine: What can fans look forward to with the show?

Quinn Sullivan: So, fans will look forward to a lot of new music. I’m putting out a new album called SALVATION on June 7^th. We’re going to be playing a lot of music off of that new album. Also, in my show, I kind of throw some surprise covers into the mix too. So, we’re going to be playing a lot of other kinds of covers, and probably some old music too of mine from the last album that I put out a couple years ago (WIDE AWAKE released in 2021), and some other things in between that. It’s a very energetic rock and roll show. If you love guitar, you’ll love the show. If you love pretty good songwriting, I think you’ll like this show too. So, I’m excited to get back to Florida.

SFL Music Magazine: Are you looking forward to anything in particular in Florida?

Sullivan: I love playing for Florida audiences. They always bring it every time, and they always show love at the show. So, I’m excited to get back there, and get back to some good weather as well. I love playing for those audiences.

SFL Music Magazine: I read that your new album SALVATION had to do with your mom passing. I’m so sorry for your loss.

Sullivan: Oh, thank you.

SFL Music Magazine: You’re welcome. What would you say inspired the album on the whole?

Sullivan: For me, whenever I make a new body of work, I always kind of go into like a reflective period where I think about my life and I get really deep. I think this time around, I had so much happen to me from not even just the passing of my mom, but just everything in my life from probably 2021 to 2023. It was a big two years for me. A lot of things happened. Emotionally, I got out of a relationship. So, I was in a very reflective period of time. That’s kind of when I start to create music and go down the path of thinking about a new album when something, you know, some stuff happens in your life, because I feel like for me to write songs, I have to have something to write about. I can’t just go into an album not really knowing what to say. I just felt like I needed to get into this mode of writing for this new record based on everything that I was going through. It was kind of one of those serendipitous moments where I just felt like I needed to create some music. So, I went to Minneapolis with a producer friend of mine that was introduced to me from my manager. This guy John Fields, and he is a great producer. He’s done a lot of really great work over the years. He’s a really solid, solid producer. So, I went up to Minneapolis, met up with him in his home studio. We get together with this other songwriter named Kevin Bowe, who is a Minneapolis based songwriter. We created the first song. We wrote the first song called “Salvation”. That really came about from just, experience. It’s a song about change and about feeling like you’re being saved from something, and that was really a few months after we had heard about my mom. So, it was definitely like one of those periods where I was needing to be saved, and needing to have some sort of something that was gonna get me through that horrible time. Yeah, that’s kind of a song about reflection and about being saved through, just love from other people. I’d say if there’s a theme of the album, I guess it would be that. The sense of just feeling like there’s always something, hopefully better on the other side through that. Not every song I guess, is about that. There’s a lot of different subjects on this album, but I’d say as a whole, thematically for me, what it means to me, I’d say, it’s definitely about being saved.

SFL Music Magazine: I was going to ask you about that song. I loved the funky, rock guitar intro and your vocal range is amazing!

Sullivan: Oh, cool.

SFL Music Magazine: On “Dark Love”, you mentioned about getting out of a relationship. You stated in your bio, it was about a toxic relationship. Is that what inspired the song?

Sullivan: Yeah, I think so. It wasn’t necessarily a specific relationship for me. I also write songs a lot about other people’s experiences, and my friends, people I hang out with and stuff. That was definitely something that was a song that was created through another experience that I was seeing happen that kind of inspired me to write about someone, anyone going through something like that. You’re on your last straw in the relationship. You’re kind of maybe in it for the wrong reasons and stuff like that. That song was come to life from a guitar riff that I had written months before I even wrote the song because for this album, I mean, for a lot of the albums, the way I come into the writing process, is I always tend to have an idea already started. I never really write lyrics first. It’s always the music that comes first ‘cause it is sort of hard for me to write lyrics before music. It’s always for me, the music before lyrics. Music for me, it gives me like a palette to write to, and if I already have something like an instrumental piece or something that I’ve created, it’s easier for me to come up with kind of how that makes me feel, which then, inspires the lyrics. So, for that one in particular, that’s how it happened. I had the main riff of the song was prevalent, and I had it for a while. I brought it to my team and we wrote a song called “Dark Love” around it.

SFL Music Magazine: On the album you have a bonus track “Eyesight to the Blind”. How did that come about?

Sullivan: I did a film a couple years ago near my hometown. A town called Plymouth, Massachusetts. I really loved that show. I was really proud of it. We had somebody come and film it, record it. So, I had that show for a long time, and I was listening back to it, just really proud of how everybody played that night. Sometimes you just have these shows that they’re like homerun shows. It’s really rare almost to have those shows because it doesn’t happen a lot. So, when you do have them, it’s kind of something that you take notice to a bit. Then for me, I was listening back, and I was like, man, I would love to showcase one of these songs on the album as a bonus track. How about we do like a cover? A song that people might know. So, “Eyesight to the Blind” for people that don’t know that song, it’s actually a really, really old, old blues song by this guy named Sonny Boy Williamson (II). He wrote the song in probably, I don’t know, probably the forties or something, but The Who, for the TOMMY album and the Tommy movie, they actually did a version of that song, and Eric Clapton is actually in the movie playing that song with them. Eric actually ended up doing a version of that in the seventies with his solo band. So, that version of that song inspired me to this version that we do now, which is inspired by The Who and Eric’s version. I thought it was just kind of a nice touch to add to the record. It was a nice way to end the album. So, yeah, it felt right.

SFL Music Magazine: You have played with Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana, correct?

Sullivan: Yeah. I’ve been on the same stage as Eric. One time at the Crossroads in 2013, and with Carlos, I’ve been able to become really, really good friends with him over the last five or six years. I’ve played with him now probably five times. We’ve developed a really cool friendship together.  I’m very, very lucky to call him a friend.

SFL Music Magazine: What would you say you took away from those experiences? You also were discovered by Buddy Guy. What would you say you took away from playing with these legends?

Sullivan: I think the main takeaway is, from a playing standpoint of course, you look up to these guys as these idols of yours at three, four years old. You grow up thinking that it’s almost unobtainable. It’s almost like you think they’re not even real people sometimes when you’re that age. You just think of them as these monsters of people, and then you meet them and they’re very normal people. They are like all of us except that they just have this massive talent, and these songs that everybody knows. I think the main takeaway that I’ve had is, just to be yourself. There’s a lot of music out there, and there’s a lot of styles to never stop learning and stop listening, because I feel like the greatest of the greats, even at seventy-five, eighty years old now, they still don’t stop listening and don’t stop learning. I mean, for instance like Carlos would talk to me about still discovering newer styles of music that he’s inspired by. Never really talking about himself as being that great or whatever. Of course, we all know that he’s one of the best to ever do it, but just that humility that they have, that he has anyways. I just took to that, and it’s like, alright. This is how you should be. You kind of have this ownership of this thing that you have, but you can take it wherever you want to take it. That’s really inspiring to me, and something that I’ve taken from these huge people in my career.

SFL Music Magazine: Is that what you would recommend to a new artist? That’s sounds like great advice!

Sullivan: I think so, yeah. Everyone’s career is different. Everybody’s got a different story, a different experience. People come into the industry in very different ways. I was very blessed and lucky to have had such great mentors including Buddy Guy and Carlos. I guess the same goes for everybody. Follow your path. Follow what you love. Follow what you believe in. Don’t necessarily follow a trend just to follow a trend. I think being authentic is vital. I think in any aspect of life, it’s good to be authentic for your own mentality and stuff. I think, as far as being a musician, that’s the go to right there because that’s when you’re going to be your happiest. That’s where you’ll be able to flow in your natural way and just be you. I think the best of the best have done that, and the people that I love the most you know, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and The Beatles. People like that. That’s what they’ve done. I just try to kind of follow in their footsteps (he laughed).

SFL Music Magazine: You’ve been touring since you were eight. How did you become a musician? Was it just like a natural thing?

Sullivan: Yeah. So, I first picked up the guitar when I was about three years old. My mom and dad were both very, very, very huge music lovers. My dad was a drummer for a long, long period of time. He played in a Grateful Dead cover band for a long period of time, locally in my area. So, music was always very, very present in my household, and I just took to it. I don’t really have a moment where I felt like this was it for me. I don’t have like a defining moment of when I knew that I was gonna be doing this, but I think it was just more of like a natural progression that happened. I remember they got me a toy guitar for one Christmas I think, at three years old. I remember never putting it down and just always being compelled to pick it up and play it. Some kids that age might be picking up a baseball or basketball, playing in the yard, whatever. I was doing all that stuff too, but I think the guitar was definitely sticking a lot more than those other things. And watching people play onstage. We just lost the great Dickey Betts recently, and I remember my first ever show that I got to see was Dickey Betts, at three years old, playing at a local blues festival in New Bedford. That was a really pivotal moment for me because that was the first time that I saw anybody play a guitar onstage live in a big festival setting. That was just a huge shock to me. I was like man, that would be so cool to do one day. I wasn’t really even hip to all of their music yet, but from that night, kid point, just seeing somebody play onstage, had a deep effect on me. I don’t know, I think it just was something that I knew very young. I didn’t know how I was gonna do it, but I knew that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life. I definitely did have many moments like that and still to this day, have moments like that, even though I’m about fifteen, twenty years in now. I mean, I still have those moments where I’m just like yep, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else. That’s kind of how it is.

SFL Music Magazine: You were on Oprah (The Oprah Winfrey Show) and Ellen DeGeneres (The Ellen DeGeneres Show). What was that like?

Sullivan: Yeah, the first time I was on Ellen, I was six years old. So, this was before YouTube. This is definitely before TikTok and Instagram and Facebook were ever really popular. I don’t even know if they existed at this point, but I was playing around town, doing a lot of things in my area, and people around here were taking notice to it. I think just because I was a young kid and was playing. I think I was picking it up quickly, so people started to take notice of that pretty quickly. When I was around five, my dad was emailing, he got emails from T.V. producers. He would look it up online and research it, and would send kind of a video package of certain things that I was doing around town and you know, just hoping for the best. To my parents and I, it was just more of a oh, this is cute. This is fun. That’s never gonna really happen, but that’s funny. Let’s just try it. Let’s just be kind of cute for a second. Then Ellen’s people got back within a few months and they had a lot of interest in it, and they wanted to have me on the show. So, a year later, my dad and I, and my cousin actually came with us too. We got on a plane to L.A., my first time ever on a plane, and we went out to L.A. and I got to go on Ellen. I got to do my thing. I was a musical guest and I was a guest too. She talked to me for a bit. She ended up giving me a guitar that same day. I mean, it was a whole world wind of events that happened. It feels so long ago, yet it feels like it happened yesterday at the same time. It’s one of those experiences that I didn’t really know at the time, that it would carry me into now, but I still get asked about it at shows. I think a lot of people discovered me too from that because I think a lot of people that I come across will be like, “oh, the first time I ever saw you was when you were on Ellen when you were six.” It’s just kind of a big deal to people still to this day. So, I think it’s pretty cool that people still find that interesting. Then for Oprah, that was one of those things that probably, a trickling down effect from Ellen. I was on Oprah when I was like eight or something. That was another situation where I think again, it was just like you know, emailing different producers of T.V. shows. I mean, I got some buzz from Ellen, so it was like, alright. Let’s see what else we can do here? Let’s see where else can we take this thing? So, Oprah was the next opportunity to do that, and it was kind of a specialty show where she had six or seven talented kids on the show. She had a really great singer. She had a piano player. She had ballroom dancers. These were all kids my age, eight to fourteen or something. It was all of us on the show. We all went on, and it was one of my first times to Chicago, going to her studio. Yeah, these were just very formative experiences. Just great!

SFL Music Magazine: You also did a project, Trouble No More with the Allman Brothers, the music? Is there anything new that is coming up for fans to look forward to?

Sullivan: Yeah. We have a lot of shows happening this year. Shows that are being worked on, and being worked out still, but I know that the next time we are going to be playing together, we’re going to be doing two nights at this venue in Portsmouth, New Hampshire called Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club. It’s going to be on May 30^th and May 31^st. So, people in the New Hampshire area can look out for that, but we’re going to be doing some stuff down south this summer. I know that there’s some stuff that’s being worked on for the fall. It’s kind of gonna be one of these things where I’m gonna be doing a lot of solo stuff, but I’m also gonna be kind of splitting my time doing shows with them too this year, which is really an exciting endeavor for me, because I, believe it or not, have never been part of a band before. So, this is kind of my first entrance to playing in a band. It’s exciting, and these guys are all incredible, monster musicians. So, it’s really fun.

SFL Music Magazine: I saw the videos for “Salvation (Make me Wanna Pray)” and “Dark Love”. I love how you have the photos and the lyrics. Are there going to be any other videos coming out for fans to look forward to?

Sullivan: Yeah, we’ve got a couple more lyric videos. There’s going to be some more live videos too that we’re going to be putting out along with the album as the album comes out. There’s going to be definitely some more singles and stuff before the album comes out. We have a single coming out, I think in May. Then, we’ll have a single come out too as the album comes out in June. Yeah, lots more to look forward to. Lots more music to look forward to, and this whole album unfolding is pretty exciting. It’s always a very interesting feeling when you put out a new album. So, I’m just really delighted and excited for fans to hear this new music. I’m extremely proud of it. It’s very personal. It’s gonna be really, really fun to have it out there.

SFL Music Magazine: Anything else you want to add about the show (at The Funky Biscuit and Heidi’s)?

Sullivan: It’s a rock and roll show. We play some slow stuff too, but it’s mostly upbeat. I always try to kind of bring a party atmosphere to my shows. I always try to make the shows a little bit loose too. Not super, super calculated. We have a set list that I create every night. I mean, it definitely can sometimes get a little bit loose. Songs might get mixed up. We might do some unexpected things. A lot of improvisation too in the show. I also don’t love to play things sometimes just like the record. I like to do some other kinds of things in the show that might not be on the records. I just like to have fun with it.