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Rookie of the Years: Comedy veteran Sean Sullivan preps debut album


Sean Sullivan may be a rookie when it comes to releasing comedy albums, but the confidence and precision with which he delivered the content on Song and Dance Man is representative of his 14 years in stand-up.

When released October 13, it will have been a full year since Sullivan recorded the album at The Rockwell in Davis Square, and the wait certainly has the Brockton native on edge to share his unique approach to his craft. Sullivan recently opened up to Vanyaland about this labor of love that seen its fair share of roadblocks.

“I’m really proud of the jokes on this,” he tells us. “When comics put out their first album, there’s this greatest hits feeling to it, where they go back to the beginning and take all their very best jokes and put them into a set and record it and I didn’t do that at all. I wanted this record to be a snapshot of where I was on the night that I recorded it.”

This “snapshot” focuses largely on what family life is like for Sullivan. Recollections range from how he and his wife acclimated their dog, Penny, to their fraternal twins and embracing the right-to-farm lifestyle of living in West Bridgewater. Musings on the album include the absurdity of Thomas the Tank Engine, and how old movies like Shirley Temple and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers would be received today. While the deconstruction of Grease and the Lincoln assassination had the crowd in a consistent roll of laughter, Sullivan is already looking to the future, having used this last year to build up new material to overshadow those well-received bits used on his upcoming album, and he’s okay with leaving them in the rearview.

“I’m a very different comic than I was five or six years ago,” he adds. “I have kids now and frankly, I get real sick of my jokes sometimes. It’s actually been nice having this year long buffer from recording to release to try and build up a new chunk of material, because once this record comes, I’m putting these jokes up on the shelf and never taking them back down.”

While we await Song and Dance Man, check out Sullivan performing at The Comedy Studio in Cambridge.

Featured photo courtesy of the artist.