After gaining positive reception with the viral “Keep Your Head Up Princess,” Anson Seabra returns with new music. On October 15, the singer-songwriter released his newest EP Feeling For My Life. The album came out during his tour with Alec Benjamin, where he performed some of his new releases at later tour dates. The EP has a mix of new songs such as “u hurt me hurts u” and “Lucky Charms” and previously released tracks, including “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” and “Walked Through Hell.”
Feeling For My Life explores themes of mental health, self-awareness, love, and heartbreak. The Kansas City native has been open about his own struggles both online and via his music. Anson Seabra opened up to EnVi about his career change, his musical inspirations, and future goals.
Changes: “Left Brain, Right Brain” and Career Growth
Anson Seabra didn’t plan on being an artist. In fact, when he started putting out music, he had a career in software engineering. However, Seabra found the career switch rather easy. “I gotta say I’d much rather just write songs for a living than write code, not that I don’t like writing code,” he said. “It’s funny because the first two years of my college career I was obsessed with writing code, and all I wanted to do was get a job. I would wake up in the morning, go to breakfast, and practice coding while I was eating breakfast. Like, I would have a notebook and I would do it, if that gives you any insight into who I was as a person, or still am, rather.”
Software engineering obviously has a number of differences, but for Seabra, there are parallels between both fields. He maintains an analytical way of thinking, even while producing songs. To illustrate this, he said, “If you take a melody, let’s take the start of ‘Perfect’ by Ed Sheeran; what you can do is you can take that exact string of notes, and you can say, ‘well, what if I shift it over one beat’ and you can sort of like permute the melody in all these different ways. I do that for my own songs. If I’m stuck on a melody, I’ll start switching the variable in the melody. At the end of the day, it also comes down to whatever I sit down at the piano and start playing. If it feels good, I’m going to roll with it. So yeah, there is that analytical part of me that still sort of pulls on melodies and tries to tweak them, and that’s just the writing part. That’s not even the production part, which is probably a better parallel.”
Fairytales and Fancy
While Seabra has an analytical way of looking at music production, his songs are narrative and full of strong imagery. Though he can’t pin his inspiration on just one artist, he grew up on the pop-punk music of the 2000s. “Growing up, I listened to a lot of whatever my parents and my sister listened to,” Seabra said. “My sister basically was my only taste in music, so she turned me onto Fall Out Boy, The All-American Rejects, and Boys Like Girls. It’s funny because none of those bands sound like the stuff I write now. Fun. is like my favorite band. I don’t know if there’s one artist I can point to and say, ‘okay, this is why I write inspiring songs’. One that I like to point to is Regina Spektor. I think she has a more artsy, narrative style of writing and I definitely listened to her a lot growing up.”
Seabra continues to gather inspiration from other artists for his musical workings today, including Ed Sheeran. “I just think that Ed has really walked the path so well as a singer-songwriter and he has written every type of song. And now the stuff he’s putting out is still so incredible,” said Seabra. “I listened to his new song ‘Shivers’ probably 200 times or something like that. The man is unbeatable, he’s so good and to be at that level … I don’t know, I guess that’s one person that’s really inspiring me. I think I’m always just finding random inspiration from everywhere. I really just like writing for the sake of writing. I really like Ava Max. She just has those real Swedish-sounding melodies, just harkening back to the early 2000s pop. I’m obsessed with Max Martin, so anything that sounds like that. So, maybe Max Martin is the correct answer. I’m just obsessed with everything he does.”
When it comes to Seabra’s own music, he uses a lot of narrative writing and fairytale themes throughout his songs. “I feel like I have a very whimsical style of writing, and I don’t know if there’s one artist that influenced it the most,” he said. “The example I always give is the Ruth B. song ‘Lost Boy.’”
About ‘Lost Boy,’ he elaborated: “I feel like that’s a pretty classic example. I remember hearing that song when I was in college and just being so stunned at how it made me feel, and it was so nostalgic in a way that I couldn’t put my fingers on. I just wanted to recreate that, so actually, that song was a big inspiration behind ‘Welcome to Wonderland,’ for example, which is one of my most popular songs even though that song’s not on the EP.”
Image courtesy of Matt Sawin.
We’re Not In Kansas Anymore
Speaking of popularity, Seabra’s popularity as an artist exploded on TikTok. However, he was still a successful artist and was already making a living before TikTok. His YouTube channel has racked up over 100,000 subscribers and he has 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
“I think TikTok is sort of a blessing and a curse for songwriters because it definitely has garnered me an enormous amount of exposure that I would not otherwise have,” he said. “If you look at a song like ‘Welcome to Wonderland,’ that song definitely wouldn’t be as big as it is. I try not to be too cynical because I do have a lot of followers on there, and a lot of people have found my music through the platform. And at the end of the day, that’s pretty much the name of the game when it comes to music and getting your name out there.”
Seabra sees a huge benefit in the use of Zoom sessions. He feels Zoom sessions made collaboration easier, especially when it comes to big producers. They now have more time to work instead of only doing studio sessions. “Even though people are going back to in-person sessions, I think it’s become such a part of the norm for producers to just take a song and try to do their own thing on it remotely that it’s actually been really great for a lot of artists who wouldn’t otherwise get that opportunity,” Seabra said. “I don’t prefer the virtual sessions now. I just think they were useful for me because, at the time, I was living in Kansas City, and obviously, most of the producers are either [in L.A.] or in New York. Obviously, that’s a big bonus, but I do think you’ll pretty much always get a better song if you’re in the room with someone because there’s an energy that’s very hard to replicate across a screen.”
What’s Next for Anson Seabra
He originally didn’t plan on touring, but Anson Seabra ended up wrapping up a successful tour with Alec Benjamin in October. However, none of Feeling For My Life was recorded on tour. “All of the songs on Feeling For My Life were sitting on a hard drive and they had been recorded about a year ago,” said Seabra. “I don’t know how I would’ve managed recording and touring at the same time. I mean, Dan [Richards] was telling me about how the One Direction guys would record albums while they were on tour, and it just sounds exhausting. I don’t know how they managed.” Regardless of his original plans, he plans to continue performing live, with an upcoming performance at The Troubadour on December 11, and hopefully another tour in the future.
Concerning other goals, Seabra hopes to have a song placed in a Disney movie one day. “The gold standard for me in songwriting is Disney songs. If I listen to a song like ‘A Whole New World’ from Aladdin or something like that. It’s just harmonically so rich and also lyrically so incredible. It’s pure magic and that’s why everyone loves those songs so much. Alan Menken, the guy who wrote them, is just a god and absolute savage at writing the most immaculate, magical pieces of music. So for me, I think a Disney movie would be the gold standard. With a song like ‘Walked Through Hell,’ there’s a lot of movies it could probably work in. It was just in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, so I guess [it would work in] anything dramatic or something like that, it’s hard to say.”
Image courtesy of Matt Sawin.
To keep up with his works, follow Anson Seabra on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok!
Want more coverage on artists on the rise after receiving lots of love online? Check out our interview with Luna Li here.
Thumbnail courtesy of Matt Sawin.
