A Fragile Tomorrow

Charleston power pop foursome, A Fragile Tomorrow, has all the goods to make it well beyond the Lowcountry’s nebulous borders. Their fourth CD, Be Nice Be Careful, is set for release January 8 on Piewillie records, and was produced by Hall of Famer Mitch Easter, who lent his iconic guitar-playing to the record. Other luminaries on the the record include Don Dixon, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, and a couple of Bangles. The songs feature terrific guitar hooks, tight arrangements, smart writing, and a summery organ bouncing through standout tracks such as the opener, "Don’t Need Saving".

Above it all are the vocals of Sean Kelley, who sounds a lot like a young Elvis Costello, matched with the tight harmonies from his brothers Dominic (drums) and Brandon (guitar). The first single, "Kernersville" is a perfect power pop confection, recalling the best of so many '60s bands filtered through '80s-era college rock such as REM. Considering three fourths of the band is not even 21, this is one you want to keep your eyes on. Catch them live if you can. For a short time, you can get a free download of "Kernersville" here if you can’t wait for the CD release.

I mentioned there was a story behind it all. Isn't there always? So I sat down with members of the band to learn how they hooked up with Mitch Easter and the Indigo Girls. Sure, the band and these recordings are good enough to stand up on their own, but I’m always looking for a little more... In this case, it was more than I imagined.

Sitting down with Sean, I quickly realized there was something different about him. His legs seem to direct his body to walk to the left while his eyes drift to the right. This left-to-right twist reminded me that someone once told me Sean and his brother Dominic were born with cerebral palsy. On one hand, I was embarrassed to show up for an interview and not know something that critical. On the other, I was pleased that it was his music that brought me there, not his condition. This isn't a good record “for kids so young,” or solid songwriting “for someone with cerebral palsy.” It’s just good music.

The next thing I learned was that they are from a town about 90 minutes outside of New York City and their dad was a Bronx cop. Also, Sean and Dominic had a third brother named Paul—they were triplets. Each had cerebral palsy, but Paul’s was so severe that he was confined to a wheelchair and non-verbal. Perhaps because of the latter, Sean and Dominic picked up the volume. They'd discovered Hootie and the Blowfish’s CD Cracked Rear View at the age of three, and perform house concerts of their favorites songs from the record. Harmonizing like only twins are able, they showed a natural musical ability.

About this time, their younger brother Brandon was born, without cerebral palsy.

On the day the twins were to enter kindergarten, their brother Paul passed away unexpectedly in his sleep.

“I was the first one to find him," says Sean. "We woke up early and I went and started to wake him up. I pulled the cover from him and I saw him there, and I didn’t know what I saw. I just thought, you know, he was sleeping. And so I put the cover back over his face and left to have breakfast. And then my mom came down and found him. I didn’t tell anybody for 15 years that I found him. Because I felt directly responsible for him. I was so young, so I didn’t know what I was seeing. I couldn’t tell the difference between someone who was just sleeping and someone who was dead. It definitely had a direct effect on everything that’s happened since that point.” How could it not?

At this point in our conversation, I was a little off balance. Here was a guy revealing to me a pivotal, extremely painful, moment in his life while the sun drenched organ from his songs were bouncing in my head.

He kept the secret and buried his misplaced guilt for all those years, “because I didn’t understand it for the longest time. And when I finally did, I made a decision to not say anything,” he explains. “It was only last year that I told my parents what I had seen.”

Sidenote: I’ve listened to a lot of screaming rockers whose songs are filled with anger, noise, and rage. Most of them actually have had pretty decent lives. Many of their primary troubles are self-inflicted. So they vent through loud, aggressive music, as if to throw off their angst in a primal scream. And yet, the lilting guitar and creamy harmonies in A Fragile Tomorrow’s song, “Loyalty Lies” could not come from a soul as burdened as Sean’s. I was having trouble reconciling this.

“The years between his death and the time we started the band were probably the darkest times in our lives. My brother died, we moved into a new house, my mother had surgery on her birthday in 2001 and she developed peritonitis. And they gave her three hours to live. Then they saved her at the last second, so she came back from the brink of death. And there was my dad, who was a cop in the Bronx for 25 years. In the middle of my mom trying to recover months later—she had a gaping hole in her stomach—my dad was a first responder on 9/11. I remember that day. Him picking us up from school and taking us home, and then he had to leave. And when I finally realized what had been going on, I didn’t want him to leave. I thought he was going to die. I remember being dragged by his leg as he was walking out the door. And he didn’t come home for a week because he was down there every day, on the pile, you know, searching for people. It was that whole period of time, until two years later, when we started the band that was just probably the most influential part of my life, shaping me and what I believe.”

Sean and Dominic were just shy of their 10th birthdays on 9/11, and they’d already had more challenges in their lives than most of us into adulthood.

In 2002, 11-year-old Sean wrote his first song and convinced his brothers to help him form a band. Dominic took on the drums and eight-year-old Brandon, who had been inspired to take up guitar during a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was also enlisted. By the age of 13, the boys had written an album's worth of songs that were good enough to record. At least, that’s what they were told by a man who would become their first manager. He got the boys to find a bass player, Sean Rhodes (who was about six years their senior) and brought the new foursome into a studio. Their love of Hootie and the Blowfish had branched out into an appreciation for other bands—REM led to the DBs, with excursions into Let’s Active, Indigo Girls, and more. Their debut record was their first young attempt at making a go at music, with lyrics intentionally cryptic, due to Sean’s ongoing trouble wrestling with his brother’s passing.

What the boys got out of this experience, besides recording time, was their first tough lesson in the music business. The “manager” turned out to be another dime-a-dozen businessman who thinks he can make a killing off the talents of hungry kids. Five thousand CDs were pressed, but when the manager dropped the ball on any efforts to promote the CDs, he sent the band an invoice for his work. Lawyers were hired and the manager removed from the picture.

What also came from this experience was a renewed focus. Sean claims that they made a conscious decision at the age of 13 to do music full time.

Perhaps the practice of writing songs was the therapy he and Dominic needed to handle the loss of a triplet. Perhaps when they are onstage, their condition does not seem out of place. If you see them live, you’ll know what I mean—with drumsticks and guitars in hand, I really don’t see cerebral palsy. I see musicians. Perhaps when Sean is onstage, his acute stuttering condition is not apparent (yeah, he dealt with stuttering as well....) Rather, the words flow freely through rolling, catchy melodies. When he talks, there might be pauses. That can be awkward for speaker and listener. He's worked hard to limit how noticeable it is. But onstage, he can see people mouth along with every word he says. There is no pause except those he intends. I’d imagine onstage is preferable.

Whatever the driving force, being in a rock band is all they plan to do and have done since 2002. Around that time, they wrote a letter to Mark Bryan of Hootie and the Blowfish. In that letter, they told him their story. Against the odds, not only did the letter make it to the band, they invited the boys to meet them backstage at a show in New York. Young, impressionable, and in the presence of their idols, the Kelly boys and Rhodes could not have been given a better example of rock stars. “They were just regular guys,” Sean recounted.

Regular guys who had sold millions of records. After this meeting, things seemed to pick up for the band. They continued to go to Hootie shows any time they could, and made a friend in singer/songwriter Danielle Howle at one of those shows, while continuing to pursue their own dreams. Danielle took a particular interest in the band and introduced them to other artists such as songwriter/producer Don Dixon, Susan Cowsill of the band The Cowsills, among others. As their list of well respected music industry insider friends continued to grow, it seemed normal that superstar producer Malcolm Burn would ask if he could produce the band’s second record.

Imagine yourself as a musician, and a guy who has worked with Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, John Mellencamp, Iggy Pop and others, wants to work with you. It’s that Hootie “regular guy” vibe that helped the kids take it in stride (or they had no idea how cool that was). That second album, Beautiful Noise was released in 2007.

Danielle Howle continued to nurture the band, and started talking about producing the band’s third release around 2008. She brought the band down to Columbia to perform at Five Points in the Fall of that year.

Something kept pulling the band down south. From the Hootie CD at age three, and the continued pen pal relationship with Mark Bryan, to the mothering care from Howle, and introductions to guys like Eddie White of Awendaw Green, the band felt like the Carolinas were calling them. The day they returned home from that show in Columbia, Sean’s mother pulled him aside and asked if he’d like it for the family to move to South Carolina. A family meeting followed and shortly after, they put the house for sale and began the move South.

Charleston was to be a new life for them all. Free of the cold north, the past, bad luck, and what Sean calls "dark periods in our lives."

That’s all I really have time to write today. In another blog, I’ll update y’all on what happened to the band since they’ve arrived in 2009—if it’s been all success and good karma since their relocation to our wonderful area. - Charleston Grit

A Fragile Tomorrow continues to explore 1980s indie-rock sounds here, even as they steadily build upon those core influences.

Fragile’s most recent album underscored their abiding passion for jangle-pop, even featuring turns by the dBs’ Peter Holsapple and the Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray. This new track, however, swerves into edgier fare — as the South Carolina-based group not only covers a classic Let’s Active song, but do so with its original songwriter Mitch Easter producing.

Yet this is no mirror image. Far from it, in fact. The Let’s Active version launches with a riffy turn on the Rickenbacker, while Fragile’s new take (available for download at A Fragile Tomorrow’s Web site) settles into a friendly, invitingly pastoral feel.

Fans will remember, too, that as the ’84 version spun, it seemed to move from jerky bubblegum into enigmatic shadow — recalling, in that last respect, R.E.M.’s Murmur and Reckoning, both of which Easter produced from the garage at his folks’ house. How would A Fragile Tomorrow handle this interesting turn? After all, Let’s Active was never the doomy downer that R.E.M. could be, as Easter and Co. blended in bright shards of psychedelia and a playful, deeply involving innocence.

It remains this complex amalgam that, quite frankly, A Fragile Tomorrow doesn’t begin to approximate. Thing is, I don’t think they’re trying to. Instead, they find a more direct and emotional center point — raw and somehow a little more real. Danielle Howle, Fragile’s producer for 2010's Tripping Over Nothing, replaces Let’s Active bassist and vocal foil Faye Hunter, but remains further back in the mix as Sean Kelly explores the song’s ineffable mutterings. Then, A Fragile Tomorrow simply plugs in and begins raging for a time, tearing a hole in the middle of power-pop perfectness of “Waters Part.”

The results work somehow both as tribute and as a chest-splashing update. “To tie it all together,” as “Waters Part” so helpfully reminds, “is the work of alchemists.” And good ones, at that. - Something Else! Reviews

Shattering, yet redemptively propulsive, A Fragile Tomorrow’s lovelorn new single “Kernersville” probably betrays its 1980s influences right there in the liner notes. There’s Mitch Easter, legendary early R.E.M. producer and leader of Let’s Active. And Vicki and Debbi Peterson from the Bangles.

But “Kernersville,” though it certainly makes good use of those prodigious talents, still remains firmly in the grasp of the talented South Carolina band A Fragile Tomorrow, led by singer Sean Kelly and also including bassist Shaun Rhoades, drummer Dominic Kelly and guitarist Brendan Kelly. Their more famous sidemen are just that.

The track (which you can download here) opens with a zippy little old-school riff, like something that would have come crackling out of a college radio station 30 years ago, and stays right in that Reagan-era groove. Vocals layer in, like coats of shimmering paint on the chorus, and that works in brilliant juxtaposition with the sad resignation of the lyric.

Even when “Kernersville” settles into a brief moment of reverie — recalling the first verse, Sean sings quietly: “I keep picturing your face” — it’s not for long. Just like that, A Fragile Tomorrow is stamping its way through the chorus, one that’s already begun to sound like a sad avoidance of the obvious: “I don’t know much about heartbreak”?

“Kernersville” — the first single from Be Nice Be Careful, due via Piewillie Records in January 2013 — is, in fact, streaked through with it — and that sweet sorrow is so very beautiful.
- Something Else! Reviews

Ever wonder what Hootie & the Blowfish, the Bangles, and Antigone Rising think about A Fragile Tomorrow? The new music video for “Kernersville” has all the answers.

Premiering today at American Songwriter, “Kernersville” is a power-pop anthem about heartbreak, set to a soundtrack of jangling guitars and female harmonies. It’s also the first single from Be Nice Be Careful, A Fragile Tomorrow’s fourth album. Produced by Mitch Easter (the man behind R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”) and Ted Comerford, Be Nice Be Careful is due out in January. In the meantime, fans of Big Star and Teenage Fanclub can sink their teeth into this three-minute appetizer.

Video Premiere: A Fragile Tomorrow, “Kernersville”
By Andrew Leahey November 1st, 2012 at 10:51 am


Ever wonder what Hootie & the Blowfish, the Bangles, and Antigone Rising think about A Fragile Tomorrow? The new music video for “Kernersville” has all the answers.

Premiering today at American Songwriter, “Kernersville” is a power-pop anthem about heartbreak, set to a soundtrack of jangling guitars and female harmonies. It’s also the first single from Be Nice Be Careful, A Fragile Tomorrow’s fourth album. Produced by Mitch Easter (the man behind R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”) and Ted Comerford, Be Nice Be Careful is due out in January. In the meantime, fans of Big Star and Teenage Fanclub can sink their teeth into this three-minute appetizer.



“‘Kernersville’ was probably my favorite song to record on this new record,” says AFT vocalist/drummer Dom Kelly. “There’s something really upbeat and energetic to it, but yet everyone can relate to the lyrics on that deeper level. When Sean wrote the song and brought it to us, we knew right away that we wanted to have Vicki/Debbi Peterson of The Bangles and Susan Cowsill sing on it. There was something so right about it. Mitch Easter, who produced the record, wound up doing the guitar solo at the end, and it all came to place.”

“When it came time pick the lead single, we knew this had to be it,” Kelly adds. “The vision we had for the video was a sort of a Spinal Tap insanity with the fun and goofiness of the classic Beatles movies. We wanted to poke fun at ourselves as a band, as well as those gigs where you’re playing a smoky bar with 6 people watching, including your normal crazy drunk lady that dances all night, the creeper hitting on the bartender, the guy passed out at the bar, and of course, your embarrassing overexcited family member or friend — in this case, our mother.” - American Songwriter Magazine

Ever wonder what Hootie & the Blowfish, the Bangles, and Antigone Rising think about A Fragile Tomorrow? The new music video for “Kernersville” has all the answers.

Premiering today at American Songwriter, “Kernersville” is a power-pop anthem about heartbreak, set to a soundtrack of jangling guitars and female harmonies. It’s also the first single from Be Nice Be Careful, A Fragile Tomorrow’s fourth album. Produced by Mitch Easter (the man behind R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”) and Ted Comerford, Be Nice Be Careful is due out in January. In the meantime, fans of Big Star and Teenage Fanclub can sink their teeth into this three-minute appetizer.

Video Premiere: A Fragile Tomorrow, “Kernersville”
By Andrew Leahey November 1st, 2012 at 10:51 am


Ever wonder what Hootie & the Blowfish, the Bangles, and Antigone Rising think about A Fragile Tomorrow? The new music video for “Kernersville” has all the answers.

Premiering today at American Songwriter, “Kernersville” is a power-pop anthem about heartbreak, set to a soundtrack of jangling guitars and female harmonies. It’s also the first single from Be Nice Be Careful, A Fragile Tomorrow’s fourth album. Produced by Mitch Easter (the man behind R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”) and Ted Comerford, Be Nice Be Careful is due out in January. In the meantime, fans of Big Star and Teenage Fanclub can sink their teeth into this three-minute appetizer.



“‘Kernersville’ was probably my favorite song to record on this new record,” says AFT vocalist/drummer Dom Kelly. “There’s something really upbeat and energetic to it, but yet everyone can relate to the lyrics on that deeper level. When Sean wrote the song and brought it to us, we knew right away that we wanted to have Vicki/Debbi Peterson of The Bangles and Susan Cowsill sing on it. There was something so right about it. Mitch Easter, who produced the record, wound up doing the guitar solo at the end, and it all came to place.”

“When it came time pick the lead single, we knew this had to be it,” Kelly adds. “The vision we had for the video was a sort of a Spinal Tap insanity with the fun and goofiness of the classic Beatles movies. We wanted to poke fun at ourselves as a band, as well as those gigs where you’re playing a smoky bar with 6 people watching, including your normal crazy drunk lady that dances all night, the creeper hitting on the bartender, the guy passed out at the bar, and of course, your embarrassing overexcited family member or friend — in this case, our mother.” - American Songwriter Magazine

"Opening act A Fragile Tomorrow delivered a hook-laden, energetic set of poppy rock that layered tightly woven harmonies and searing guitars over well-crafted songs. They are everything that is right with music and they served as a perfect appetizer for Sweet." - masslive.com