Photo credit: CJ Foeckler
In November, Sean Raasch shared a Facebook post announcing the end of Twin Brother, the band he’d fronted since 2013. Then, just a few weeks later, he announced plans for a new Twin Brother album. That may sound like a reversal, but his November announcement was true in a literal sense: Twin Brother is, as he wrote in November, no longer a band. He’s recast the group as a true solo project.
“I knew that I would continue playing music in some way, shape or form, most likely on my own,” Raasch said of his plans following the group’s breakup. “But I didn’t know what moniker it would be under, if I would go by my own name or keep Twin Brother. I originally wanted to go by my own name. But I put in a lot of hard work and did some of the best work of my life under the Twin Brother name, so I decided to keep it.”
Raasch said he wrestled with that decision for months, but ultimately decided the change of scenery alone was fresh start enough. Though Raasch had always primarily written folk songs, Twin Brother had dressed them up with rich, soulful arrangements that seemed to expand with each release—the group’s most recent EP, 2017’s Alone in Austin, had been its most colorful yet, announcing itself with boisterous, Tex-Mex horns. The new Twin Brother album, Rightfully So, though, does away with all of that flair. It’s pointedly naked, the work of a man, a guitar and little else aside from some occasional keyboard accents. Raasch even recorded the songs himself, stepping into the producer role for the first time.
“This isn’t how I’m used to playing music,” he said. “I’ve been playing in a band since I was 16. Just being on my own now, even though it’s Twin Brother, feels like a door is closing, even if I’ll still leave it a little open in the future. I just felt the need to stand on my own feet. Throughout my music career, I’ve had other fantastic musicians come in and make the songs better and add their tastes to them and make them more sparkly and shiny, and it was time for me to trust myself.”
Raasch says he wrote these songs almost immediately after disbanding the group, and many of them find Raasch licking wounds and processing betrayal—particularly the album’s stark centerpiece, “Lips on Your Heart,” and its achy closer, “You Can’t Lock it Away.” They’re songs that were written to be left bare, Raasch says.
“Not having a band allowed me to do what I want as far as having multiple songs with the same chords, since there was nobody else to answer to,” Raasch says. “All the songs are kind of relatively in the same key, and I didn’t have to worry about that. I wanted to record something with a consistent mood, because that’s the tip I’ve been on lately.”
Raasch says that as good as the previous, six-piece iteration of Twin Brother was, at times it could feel like their music was jumping all over the place. “Speaking personally, I don’t go to a band because they can do a reggae song and then a country song and then whatever song,” he said. “I go to a songwriter for this one emotion that I want right now.”
The solo setup hasn’t slowed Raasch’s songwriting any. He said he expects to release at least one more album this year. He does admit, though, that he’s learned to let go of any ambitions he previously had of making a career out of music. “I don’t have expectations for it anymore,” he said. “I’m just making music because I have to in order to be who I am. I don’t expect to be some famous guy. I don’t expect to have a career. I just expect to keep making music.”
Twin Brother will play Saturday, Jan. 27, at Club Garibaldi with Old Earth, Lady Cannon and Camp Sugar at 8 p.m. Twin Brother will host an album release show on Wednesday, Feb. 7, at Tonic Tavern at 8 p.m.
