Photo by Anne-Sophie Coiffet

By DCist Contributor Danielle Ohl

Seán Croft has lived in four countries, speaks three languages, and makes music inspired by the likes of David Bowie and Bob Dylan that sounds like neither.

The Floridian-turned-Georgetown-student-turned-Parisian (who happened to also spend some time in Argentina and Mozambique) will open for Little Green Cars at Rock & Roll Hotel this evening in support of his latest EP, You Said.

Croft grew up in Florida and made music throughout his school days, recording his earliest tracks at age 10 with a friend’s pirated software. He experimented with school orchestra (he thinks it might have been the viola) before settling on the music he actually wanted to play—which, these days, is a lovely alt-folk breed.

He got his first taste of the greater D.C. area in at Georgetown University, which was a “random,” but ultimately positive, choice for him.

As a student, he was very much into the prevalent collegiate DIY movement. Shortly after he and his roommate started a band, he created a society to organize his fellow musicians and demand the right to practice space from the university president— except he really didn’t have to.

“It turned out some people were already working on that problem anyway,” he said. “So we started an organization, got a really nice sound-proof space, a bunch of equipment and there were a bunch of bands we played shows with. That was a lot of fun.”

One study abroad stint in Argentina and undergraduate degree later, Croft decided to take his talents to Paris, just because.

“My mom’s from Ireland and my dad’s from South Africa, so we were always going away,” he said. “All of my family has sort of a travel bug.”

Croft made an ultimatum for himself: Get a job in one week and stay, or go to New York and try there. Eight days later, he secured a job teaching English to Parisian students. It was a “good job that definitely left a lot of time for music,” which was the point, Croft said.

Oddly, being a musician in Paris means learning how to create music devoid of any drums.

“Some of the smaller venues there don’t want drums because everything is mixed up — apartments are on top of bars and a lot of things are old and not sound proof,” he said. “I wanted to write songs that I could play on an acoustic guitar, too.”

Though he found a drummer soon after, what resulted was a sort of “prog rock that could be played on an acoustic guitar.” He even tried to write a song in French once, but the result was “just stupid” Croft admitted. Since most French bands sing in English, he was a bit of a novelty as a native speaker. “People were definitely receptive,” he said.

From Paris, Croft moved to Mozambique with the Peace Corps. There, he taught English at an agricultural school, lived in a reed hut near a palm tree jungle, took bucket baths, fought off bugs, scorpions and at least one persistent black mamba, and dealt with a student conspiracy theory.

“They thought the principal was killing teachers through witchcraft, so they started protesting,” he said. “They wanted other witchdoctors to come investigate.”

On the less extreme side, he and other volunteers started an English theatre group and an informal music group with the students there.

After his tenure with the Corps, he returned to the states. He moved to Washington last month, attends law school at Georgetown and only recently began playing live music in the States again.

And now that he is, what will that music sound like?

Well, Croft has an interesting songmaking process. He is a very bad imitator, which in this case, is a good thing.

After his prog-rock phase, he started writing more pop songs with what he had on hand: an acoustic guitar and some computer instruments. The sound reminded him of what he thought was an old David Bowie record, but upon relistening to Ziggy Stardust, he realized the two sounded nothing alike.

Now, he writes songs using a lens of sound distorting nostalgia.

“I think I’m stealing from an artist, but it turns out I’m not really because I don’t remember them correctly,” he said. “Its great.

Because I get it wrong, it’s not derivative.”
As for what non-derivative derivations will be on display tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel, Croft said, “we’ll just have to wait and see.”