Sean Hogan   -  Biography

Sean Hogan was born alongside Lake Huron in the blue-collar border city of Sarnia, Ontario. Being about two hours northeast of Detroit, he was able to tune into that city's radio stations, hearing its famous Motown music.

Hogan attended Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, in 1986-87, studying the music industry. Though he was not exactly taken with the engineering aspects of recording music, he was considerably interested in the writing of songs and performance of the material. The curriculum was enough of an industry preview and never being one for overdoing academics, Hogan moved to Toronto to perform. However, he was not a songwriter whose first instrument was guitar or piano. In fact, he was a drummer who sang, and though he loved his chosen instrument, he found its limitations when writing. After spending a year hanging out and writing lyrics in Toronto, Hogan enrolled in Humber College as a percussion major and vocal minor. Though he had a respect and appreciation for jazz, what he related to most was the singer-songwriter rock genre.

After a trip west in the summer of 1989, Hogan returned to Toronto with a sense of duty to preserve the natural environment and the wildlife in his own corner of the world. His heart was not into returning to an academic life at college in Toronto, so he left the city (and a failing relationship) in the spring of 1990. Choosing to live in the capital city of Victoria instead of the faster-paced Vancouver, he reconnected with friends in the environmental movement and before too long became the promotion rep for the Victoria branch of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC). By then 25, and not sure if the choice was a little too late, he rented an acoustic guitar to learn basic chords to go with the lyrics he had been writing.

In the three-and-a-half years he worked with WCWC, Hogan learned a great deal about standing up for both your beliefs and the integrity of one's chosen vocation. Meanwhile, his interest in music grew from a smoldering desire into a raging dream. Unaware what kind of full-time artistic career in music he would develop, Hogan continued writing and applying his new guitar skills through those years and was now ready to front his own band and sing his own songs.

His 1996 debut album caught the attention of country radio programmers and listeners across Canada and earned him the first-ever Canadian Country Music Association's (CCMA) independent male artist of the year award. The albums Hijacked (1999) and Late Last Nite (2001) won two consecutive West Coast Music Awards in 2001 and 2002, each for best country album. In 2003, he won the CCMA's roots artist of the year, the first independent artist to capture the prize and the only nominee without label support.

Hogan currently resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He has released the album Ruled by Mercury in the U.S. and will offer a new studio album in spring 2004.