I’ve known Sean Neumann for a handful of years now, dating back to when he was a writer at buzz and The Daily Illini. He’s a musician — you might recognize him from Single Player and Ratboys, both having ties to the area through him. He tours mostly with Ratboys these days, though he’s embarking on a Single Player tour this year. I caught up with him after one of their two-ish week tours with Ratboys back late last year. When he’s not playing music, he’s pounding the keys as a freelance journalist.
This was the thing that tipped me off about doing an interview with him in the first place: I kept seeing his byline pop up in a ton of different places, and not just anywhere. Well known publications: Vice, Associated Press, Noisey, and most recently, Rolling Stone.
Just look through those links at his byline and you can see right away that there’s some tenacity to his work.
There are plenty of ties to his time in Champaign-Urbana by ways of his writing (Neumann is based in Chicago nowadays), one of my favorites being this gem he penned about the legendary American Football house in Urbana a couple of years ago. When those pieces rise to the Noisey and Vice level, that’s something worth paying attention to. He’s a friend, so it resonates with me a bit more than just any byline in the sea of bylines.
Neumann (left) performing with Ratboys at PYGMALION 2017. Photo by Veronica Mullen.
He was at his parent’s house when I spoke with him late last year over the phone, returned from tour and getting ready to go back out for another stint. While he’s touring, he’s writing. And writing and writing and writing.
“I’ve truly driven down the middle of the highway, and I wrote an article yesterday from the car on the way to our show in South Bend,” he said, “I’ve produced live radio segments from the back of a Toyota Sequoia. It’s kind of fucking nuts when you think about it that way. It is a good situation for me, as someone trying to play music full time, but also make money.”
As a journalist, it oftentimes means writing about a variety of topics — one of which has been professional wrestling for Rolling Stone as of late. We arrived at the topic of professional wrestling pretty quickly — though as long as I’ve known him, music has been the thing I’ve associated with him the most, seeing as how I’m the Music Editor here, and he’s been in the scene for a while.
As time has moved on, I grew to recognize his writing and persona as much more than music, but through sports — namely through his work writing about Illini sports through The Associated Press. So ultimately, seeing an article about WWE with his name on it didn’t shock me too entirely much.
“I’m writing about professional wrestling, mostly WWE. There’s a few things coming out this week that I did about people outside the WWE too. It’s pretty cool. That’s kind of my job at Rolling Stone right now” he mentioned. “I’m just kind of freelancing, because coming out of college, I didn’t have a job locked down, so over the summer while I was looking for a job, I just started pitching story ideas to places, and it just became my job. It’s just something I didn’t expect. I always wanted to write for Rolling Stone, that was a big goal in college, and it’s kind of cool that it worked out that way.”
Dream come true, right? Well, not exactly, but there’s a deeper story within his path to writing about wrestling.
“I sometimes laugh about the fact that I get to write about pro wrestling, because over the past five or six years it’s become my favorite thing in the world,” Neumann said with a chuckle attached to it. “I love pro wrestling so much, it’s so fucking cool. I kind of grew up on it, just the same amount everyone else probably did. I knew who Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock were. But I wouldn’t watch it every week or anything. My friend Richie Owens really got me into it, and its mind-blowing. It can be beautiful at times, it can be ridiculous and stupid as fuck at times. It’s really cool that I get to write about that and I think that’s probably my favorite thing I get to write about. It’s just a lot of fun.”
It isn’t always fun, though, even when the topic is enjoyable to scribble about — being a journalist is a very challenging career. For Neumann, it was a shift from the newsroom to more of a freelance role, having been at the Daily Illini and moving on post-college:
“There are thousands of people who are doing so much better stuff than me in terms of reporting. I’m not in a newsroom working on investigative pieces throughout the year. I wish I was, but I’m interviewing wrestlers. I worked at a lot of places in Champaign-Urbana, but my first job where I realized ‘hey, this is pretty cool’ was when I was working at The Associated Press covering football and basketball. This was one of the first times where I thought that it feels pretty good to see your byline in a cool place.”
Neumann wrote for the AP for quite some time, but then started exploring other options as a freelance writer:
“After college, I just started pitching stories to different people, and kind of asking around to other people that I knew, just asking for contacts or editors to reach out to at different publications. And that’s how it got anywhere for me, at least in my experience, but I’m sure it is different for literally every person. But that’s the way it runs for me. You just kind of introduce yourself to somebody, and build trust with them, and say, ‘This is what I’ve done in the past, and this is what I want to write about,’ and give them a clear run down of what you want to write about. And they’ll email you back and say, ‘I’d like you to write about this’ — or some people just ignore emails — and some people say, ‘OK, this sounds great, but we can’t do it right now’. Just reaching out and putting yourself out there is beneficial.”
Every step with a new publication is a building block. The path is fairly clear, if you look at what he did, starting that The Daily Illini, and running buzz, both taught him a ton about learning what it means to be in control, learn, and make mistakes — which is invaluable experience for him.
Journalism and freelancing doesn’t come without challenges: Neumann even referred to the struggle: “I can do freelancing to supplement and keep myself afloat, you know, like if I have my mouth on the floatie, blowing it up every once in a while when it gets flat. To be completely honest, it kind of sucks, but it helps while I am on tour and can do both.”
Honest truth, for sure. You can tell he’s just possessed by being a journalist, and being a touring musician. As we spoke, he said that even though he felt not-so-great, he couldn’t wait to get back on the road.
Photo by Cody Owens.
Speaking of which, as a musician, writing about music has proven to be the most difficult thing for Neumann to write about. He gravitated towards sports, which is something he loves, but going beyond the Xs and Os was something that he was most interested in doing. You’ll see what I mean with the ending quote, because it speaks to his viewpoint as a journalist, and the challenges behind writing about topics you’re already so close to:
“I understand that there’s a person behind an artist, and there’s a story behind something they’re doing, and there’s a goal and a message behind their artwork. So, in a weird way, I felt weird at first writing about art for the Creator’s Project for Vice, but then after a while I realized that maybe I’m the perfect person to write about that stuff because I’m not getting bogged down in what kind of brush stroke did they use on this painting.
It’s like they painted about someone being discriminated against. I don’t want to waste a single word on what type of oil painting that they did. I want to talk about why they did that. In a weird way, maybe this is what it’s like when I write about music. If I interview a musician or something, the worst part about writing a music article is actually writing about the songs, it’s the most difficult part about writing about a musician is trying to describe their music, because you wanna talk about that person and about that artist and about the story behind it, and actually tell their story rather than say, ‘yeah, they did that song in 7/8’. You know, I don’t fucking care. If I wanna listen to the song, I’ll listen to it.
Covering sports was the best possible things that I’ve ever done. Covering a team day-to-day and getting to know that team, that was some of the most important building blocks that I’ve ever had. It’s like ‘yeah, one team beat the other team… but why?’ There’s so much personality and emotion that goes into every single sports game.
Sports is one of the most beautiful things to me in the world. There are reasons behind everything, like ‘maybe that dude was sick today and that’s why he couldn’t run faster than the other guy?’. There’s just so much shit that goes into it. Especially with college students, they’re under so much stress, and then they have to go out and play a game in front of tens of thousands of people each week. It’s like, ‘maybe that dudes girlfriend just broke up with him and he got an F on his paper and he’s worried about dropping out of college?’, and he gets booed when he drops a touchdown. And it’s like, ‘fuck, that guy is going under so much mental stress right now!’, and it’s cool to tell people’s stories like that. Just get behind the questions of why.
There’s this writer who writes for ESPN who is one of the best sports writers in the world. He does some of the most important sports writing work in the entire world and probably over the last century. But he fucking hates sports. I talked to him, and he said, ‘Yeah I can’t fucking stand sports. I hate watching sports’. But he’s the best sports writer! He writes the biggest articles of all time. He did a profile about Johnny Manziel and his alcohol abuse in college. It’s stuff like that where someone’s life narrative is told by this guy. Everyone knows about Johnny Manziel’s issues because of this story that he wrote, and he can’t watch a football game. It’s just kind of crazy that you can be totally detached emotionally from something but you’re doing a job. That kind of mentality is so awesome with journalists. There’s this hardworking nature within them. I don’t care if Texas A&M beat Missouri in football this week, I care about doing my job and writing the story. I can’t ever call myself an Illinois football or basketball fan. I don’t give a fuck about Illinois football or basketball, but I went to every game each week to write the story and help people who do give a fuck. You just have to remove yourself sometimes from being impartial.”
Top photo by Robert Prochaska.