Seth Glier

Using music to discuss some of the most difficult problems the world is facing today,  singer-songwriter Seth Glier spoke with Narrow as he made a stop in St. Augustine to promote his album, “The Coronation.”

Being the first musician in his family, Glier’s passion for music started at a young age.  Growing up with an older brother with Autism, the singer says there was constantly different music being played throughout the house. 

“Probably my biggest musical influence was my brother…” Glier said. “By the age of thirteen, my duty was to wake him up and get ready… music was a big part of those activities, like there would be a different playlist to take him in the bathroom and get him dressed for the day, and there’d be a playlist to have dinner to…”

Having to learn the National Anthem for his Boy Scout assignment, Glier says his singing career started early, when he started performing the song for his little league baseball games for seven years.

He then delved deeper into music after getting expelled from his public high school for playing guitar in the hallway and transferred to a performing arts high school and attended Berkley College of Music for a year.

Now, traveling the world 250 days out of the year to perform his music, he says the best part of it all is when his fans connect to his lyrics.

“So, when someone says after a show, ‘Hey I just lost someone and that song really got inside,’ that’s… when I know I’ve made it,” the singer said.

When it came to writing “The Coronation,” Glier says, like many others, the pandemic gave him “a sense of stillness,” and he used his time to start doing repairs on the home he and his wife recently bought.

“Throughout the year, repair and rebuilding became such a theme, not only in my home life, but I kept feeling that that was being mirrored out in our world,” Glier said. “When we were dealing both with pulling up this root of racism and our politics… On this record it was really important that the songs showed solutions and didn’t just show the problems.”

He described the recording process as a collage, saying a lot of collaboration with people across the world came into play, with the help of Zoom, making the album feel “broader and much more worldly.”

When looking at the order of the songs on the album, the singer said a lot of thought went into the perfect sequence in order to make the album feel like a journey for the listeners. 

With the ability to travel again, Glier plans on going to Mexico for the first time to share his music through his position as a cultural ambassador, and he also has plenty more stops planned on his current tour.

For a full list of places you can see Seth Glier perform, you can head to sethglier.com or follow him on Instagram at @sethglier.