Music

Music has played a huge role in Sean's life, from various small projects to his band Moose Naslon.

Early Years
Sean first got started in music with singing. He was part of a study at Florida State University testing the effects of singing on lung function in cystic fibrosis patients.

Moving on from singing, Sean started taking piano lessens later in elementary school on a Miracle keyboard, where he mastered such favorites as "Mary Had a Little Lamb," "Ode to Joy," and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

For Sean's 4th grade Winter Choral Concert, he learned to play the autoharp in music class to accompany "O Come All ye Faithful." For his 5th grade Winter Choral Concert, he was a singing teddy bear.

High School
The summer between middle school and high school, Sean decided he wanted to learn to play guitar. He traded his mom's golf clubs for his cousin's classical guitar and signed up for guitar lessons. He took lessons for about a month and quit, citing frustration with both the slow teaching pace and his general ability.

A few months later, he decided to pick the guitar back up and teach himself, with a quest to learn "Going Away to College" by blink-182. He bought a bunch of sheet music and slowly taught himself. Over the next few months



he began to start writing his own music as well.

A few months later, due to his serious interest in and commitment to guitar, his mom bought him his first electricguitar, a Fender Squier Stratocaster. Sean used this guitar throughout highschool, participating in random jam sessions and performing live a few times (Maclay School's Battle of the Bands in 2002 and 2004). He also used this guitar in the only recording of Apollo's Army's adaptation of the anonymous poem "Cassandra Speaks of Sexual Harassment" and the associated music video.

College
In his first year at the University of Florida, Sean began to expand his music. Spurred by an Honors course he was taking, The History of Rock'n'Roll, he began to explore writing bass guitar and drum pieces in Garage Band to accompany the guitar pieces and lyrics he'd already written. By the end of his freshman year, Sean recorded his first album, A Tribute to My Muses.

That summer, Sean got even more involved with guitar, and using the money he made from an internship, he purchased a new guitar, the Fender Tom Delonge Signature Stratocaster.

The new guitar further spurred Sean's exploration into music. Over the next few months he worked on experimenting with a bunch of new sounds and styles. His musical tastes expanded, too.

By the spring, he was working on a second album, Bleary Montanan Summer. Instead of working on songs by writing the lyrics first, many of the songs began as instrumentals, and then the appropriate lyrics came based on the story the music told. The music was much more complicated than what he had previously done, and incorporated multiple layers of instruments and synths.

Disaster struck that spring when his computer suddenly crashed and he lost all of the music he'd recorded. The data was irrecoverable. As a way to help get over the loss, Sean bought himself a Fender Mark Hoppus Signature Jazz Bass. He went back to rerecord all of A Tribute to My Muses, this time relying on natural bass sounds instead of synthetic ones.

Once he was caught up, he continued working on Bleary Montanan Summer, as well as other various projects.

That summer, he entered a contest on b182.com to come up with the theme music for the podcast the site was starting. He submitted two entries. The head of the site picked one of them, and they worked from opposite sides of the country to fine-tune it until they got a version they liked.

Sean also started recording covers to various songs for an incomplete cover album he dubbed Cover Me, I'm Going In.

During his senior year, Sean created a character named Toasty based on an image he found on the internet of a plush piece of toast. He wrote a song called "Toasty's Anthem" that immediately became a hit among all his friends. This support led Sean to create a couple other Toasty songs, "Please Don't Eat Me" and "Butter in the Front."

Sean still has not finished Bleary Montanan Summer, citing creative differences with his past and the inability to recreate the masterpieces he'd lost.