Local school counselor a finalist in John Lennon songwriting contest
Sean Magwire is hoping second time’s a charm. The school adjustment counselor at Worcester Technical High School, Oxford resident, and Beatles “nerd” is also a singer-songwriter who moonlights around Massachusetts, from area breweries to the Middle East in Cambridge.
For the second time in his life, Magwire, 37, has a winning folk song in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and this time he’s hoping to go all the way.
His song “Erase this Day” just won the Session II Grand Prize for Folk in the 2022 John Lennon Songwriting Contest.
Session I winners were announced previously. The next step is online fan voting through April 30. The public can vote once per day to narrow the field of 24 grand prize winners — two per category — to 12 Lennon Award winners. Those 12 then go before a celebrity panel of judges — including Bob Weir, Jimmy Cliff, and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers — who help determine the 2022 Song of the Year. The winner scores $20,000 and equipment.
Magwire’s grand prize win in the folk category already earned him a “ridiculous” prize package (“They basically give you a recording-studio-worth of equipment and guitars”) from the international songwriting contest.
While he’s entered the contest a few times, he’s never gotten past this point. He also won a session grand prize in 2015 with his then-band, the Lulabelles, in Chicago.
An Indiana native who moved here seven years ago from Chicago, Magwire lives with his wife, Kristyn — a Holyoke native and orthoptist at Boston Children’s Hospital — and their two kids.
A self-taught guitarist, Magwire has been writing since around eighth grade.
“My dad’s a musician, he was in bands my whole life growing up. I was 13, 14, I started getting interested in guitar. My dad gave me a chord book and said, ‘You can learn how to play licks and flashy guitar stuff, but not a lot of people know how to write songs. So focus on writing your own stuff.’ ”
He did. “I have books of lyrics that are just cringe-worthy. When we went back to Indiana last year to visit, my mom broke out a couple from eighth grade. I was like ‘Oh my God, this is horrible.’ ”
But over time songwriting became “my therapy and my art,” he said.
Does the counselor encourage his students to play?
“Oh, heck yeah. I have a guitar in my office. I use that with students — a lot of them have never seen or picked up a guitar before. If kids need to decompress or let off steam, they know to come in and bang out a song on guitar.”
He also encourages songwriting: “There’s no wrong way to do it. You can express yourself so freely.”
To learn more about the contest and to vote, go to jlsc.com/vote.php.
‘There’s no wrong way to do it. You can express yourself so freely.’
SEAN MAGWIRE on songwriting