The Sparkle and Fade: An Unstoppable Pop-Rock Family Band Shines On

When Covid peaked in Spring 2020, Madison, Conn.-based sisters Courtney Seely and Lindsey Callahan and their husbands — all musicians — started jamming together out of creative necessity.

As every parent remembers, the world was a bit chaotic.

And in Madison, Lindsey and Jeff Callahan were expecting their second baby with a toddler in tow, while Courtney and Tyler Seely toggled full-time jobs with homeschooling their 6-year-old son. 

But after a few months, the foursome — with Tyler on guitar, Jeff on drums, Lindsey on lead vocals, and Courtney on keys and backing vocals — realized they wanted to grow. The band, whose sound harkens back to early ’00s staples like The Killers and Paramore, had become more than a pandemic hobby.

After adding bass player TJ Chalfant and a new drummer (Jeff switched to guitar), The Sparkle and Fade booked its first gig in the Fall of 2021. That’s when the magic started happening: The family band that once existed in a Covid bubble quickly built a fan base and got invites to play top-tier nightclubs and events like Hartford’s Hartbeat Music Festival.

And while 2022 was full of highs and lows, between the release of sparkly new music and bigger stages, and the breakup of one of the band’s founding couples, the original five players and drummer Mark Brundrett, who joined that year, are now thick as thieves. The Sparkle and Fade is on a tear in 2024, between the release of its single “Unstoppable” in September a full calendar of autumn shows.

Courtney and Lindsey recently sat down with Rockmommy to talk about songwriting, sibling intuition, and how they put family first even when life gets tough.

Rockmommy: Let’s get right to it. Lindsey and Courtney, you two are sisters, born and raised in Connecticut. Can you tell us about your musical upbringing?

Lindsey Callahan: I was always in the choir and I loved singing. I also sang in college with my glee club, and we traveled to Europe. After college, there was a little bit of a lull where I was focusing on my career [as a teacher] and music definitely took a backseat, but I really, really missed it. It wasn’t until my late 20s, when I moved closer to home, that I started going to open mics with Courtney and our dad playing music. Just in a small setting at first, and then we formed the family band.

Rockmommy: Did you two ever jam together, Lindsey and Courtney, growing up?

Courtney Seely: Yeah, we had our family band- Almost the Whole Damn Family for a bunch of years ­— I played piano and synth in that band and sang in that band too. Lindsey and I have also played since we were young; we did talent shows when we were in high school and stuff like that.

Rockmommy: So how did the band — which includes you two, Courtney’s husband Tyler, and Lindsey’s former husband Jeff — take off?

Courtney Seely: It started, really, during the pandemic. My other band Green Light had been playing a lot right up until then, and then all of a sudden, it was like, ‘OK, now we can’t play anymore.’ So, we were writing music at home and sharing it digitally, and Tyler was also writing songs, so we just started kind of pulling a bunch of parts together. We collaborated with Jeff and so the two of them would write parts together. And because we’re all so close by, in Madison, we could get together here and there and work on stuff.

[SEE RELATED: Courtney Seely, On Motherhood, Shifting Soundscapes, and Creating ‘Future Self’]

Rockmommy: You were like a Covid bubble!

Lindsey Callahan: We’re family, so yeah, we were in a Covid bubble. It allowed us to write and collaborate safely which was cool. And Jeff plays drums as well so he could do that work.

Courtney Seely: Lindsey had just had a baby, too. So, Tyler recorded all this stuff at our house, and Jeff played guitar and wrote some parts as well, and then they collaborated on getting some drum stuff figured out. Then I wrote the words, and then Lindsey came and sang.

Originally it was just supposed to be a recording project that we were just all gonna do during that time. It just kept going because we had so much fun with it. We found our bass player, TJ pretty quickly. We did a zoom interview for him, because we couldn’t even get together with him at the time.

Lindsey Callahan: I remember when we had our meeting with him, TJ  logged off, and we all stayed on the meeting so we could  talk about what we thought. I think it was maybe 20 seconds after he left that we were like, yes.

Rockmommy: So your first gig was in 2021?

Courtney Seely: we met TJ in December 2020. And then after that, we found a drummer. We had our first gig in the fall of 2021.

Rockmommy: Which one of you is like the social media badass?

Courtney Seely: That’s Tyler!

Rockmommy: I had a feeling it was Tyler. Stealthy Tyler with his Epiphone trying to keep it on the down low. So let’s talk music! Who are your influences?

Lindsey Callahan: They are the writers. I am just the player. So they write all the music, and Courtney does the melodies and the lyrics, and I, you know, put my little sparkle on top of it. But from a writing standpoint, they are the creative geniuses behind it, and I just get to go for the ride.

Rockmommy: Lindsey, your voice is sort of that the higher, like, the brightness of like a Paramore song! Like Haley Williams.

Lindsey Callahan: I love Paramore. I really like Haley’s style and that style of music.

Rockmommy: Courtney, can you tell us about your songwriting process?

Courtney Seely: In Green Light, I do a lot more of my personal writing. For a lot of the songs I write for The Sparkle and Fade it’s more telling a story for me. Lindsey and I will run the content by each other, or we’ll hear the music and be like, ‘Oh, it sounds like this’ or she’ll say, ‘oh this reminds me of this’ and we go from there.

Rockmommy: Is it easy to collaborate, because your sisters?

Lindsey Callahan: I’m personally so happy to give it away. I really have tried, and everything that comes out of me is so on the nose and literal, like middle school. So I’m able to go to Courtney and be like, ‘Oh, I just, I want it to feel a certain way. I want it to be about this, but not obviously about this.’ She’s just like, ‘I got you girl.’ And then she comes, like, two days later with all the lyrics. And I’m just like, ‘that’s it. That’s what I was trying to say!’ She’s able to put into words what is intangible for me. I feel like there has to be a layer of that’s unspoken just because we are related.

Courtney Seely: Tyler does some of that direction too. I think with us he’s really good at listening to it and then being like, the number of syllables is way more here and Lindsey will do that too. When she’s singing something, she’s like, this doesn’t quite fit here, like this, or the words or the syllables are off, or we want to change that. And so, we’ll adapt.

Rockmommy: All right, so this is the Fleetwood Mac part of the interview. Lindsey, you and Jeff are co-parents who were married when the band started, but now are no longer married. How do you maintain that relationship as bandmates and coparents?

Lindsey Callahan: Jeff and I were married for, I want to say, almost five years. We got married in 2017 and then I had our son in 2018 and then a daughter in 2020 and then about two years later, we were at a point where [things changed]. It wasn’t really until the pandemic, I think, and having our daughter, where we were kind of like forced to slow down and really take a look at what was next for us.

In 2022, we kind of came to a point where we realized that we, we truly are very good friends, and I would never change anything that we went through, especially because we have our two wonderful kids. We’re really good co parents, and we are very good friends. We have absolutely no problem being in the same room together, being in a band together. We spend multiple nights a week where he comes over for dinner and we all sit at the table as a family, and, yeah, we really make it work.

Rockmommy: Who decided to call this band ‘The Sparkle and Fade?’

Courtney Seely: That was a Tyler thing too. It’s a reference to Everclear. He pitched it to us and we were like, that’s kind of cool.

Lindsey Callahan: I feel like in our music, there’s definitely a nod to the 90s, and that kind of just fits right in.

Rockmommy: The recording: Is that, Tyler, too? Or are you going to some secret, amazing studio?

Courtney Seely: No, he does all that too. We’re always impressed by how it comes out after we put all the parts in, it’s like ‘wow!’

Lindsey Callahan: I feel so fortunate that Tyler has not only the willingness to do that for us, also the know-how and the equipment, I’m really thankful that we have that in our corner.

Rockmommy: I want to talk about music. What’s going on this fall?

Courtney Seely: Well, we do have a few shows we’re playing. The next show we have is on November 1^st at the GastroPark in West Hartford, and our single ‘Unstoppable’ just released.

Rockmommy: You guys are mostly all parents. So at this point, is it easy to coordinate practices?

Courtney Seely: I think one of the things we do best is we keep to a schedule as much as we can. And we try not to overbook ourselves. For a while there, we were playing as much as possible and taking every single thing. And now it’s like, we realize, especially when it’s the school year, we really can’t manage more than once a month to get out there unless there’s a really exciting opportunity.

Lindsey Callahan: It’s all about balance. Like Courtney said, that sweet spot for us is once a month, without it being too disruptive to every other schedule that we’ve got going on. There’s a lot to coordinate.

Marisa Torrieri Bloom is the editor and founder of Rockmommy.