On Oct. 10, Sawtooth Kitchen hosted local singer-songwriter Tommy Crawford and Christopher Sears, who is from New York, for their performance, “Sears and Crawford United.” The concert — with Crawford on guitar and Sears playing keyboard — lasted two hours and drew around 20 attendees.
Crawford and Sears are familiar performers in the Upper Valley. In 2019, they played Paul McCartney and John Lennon, respectively, in the Beatles tribute play “Only Yesterday” at Northern Stage in White River Junction.
Sawtooth general manager Kieran Campion said he was “determined to make a show happen” with the duo. Campion struck up a friendship with Sears when they were actors on the set of “Simple Little Lives,” a movie released in 2015, several years before Crawford and Sears joined forces in “Only Yesterday,” he explained.
The concert opened with an original solo piece by Crawford entitled “Everybody Gets to Sleep,” a musical parody about how little rest comes with new parenthood.
“‘Everybody Gets to Sleep,’ I started writing when my daughter was born and [it] is about the first days of being a new parent,” Crawford said in an interview after the show. “I started singing it to her while holding her in the hospital, while she and my wife both slept.”
Crawford’s one-man performance continued with three more solo songs, each containing personal stories on topics ranging from Greek mythology to fatherhood. These themes have become more pronounced in Crawford’s songwriting since the birth of his daughter, Athena, in 2020, he explained.
“My wife and I love mythology and Greece,” Crawford said. “I’ve composed for and acted in a lot of contemporary versions of Greek plays, including ‘Sophocles.’ I am interested in these old mythic stories and in contemporary versions of them.”
Following Crawford’s solo performance, the show shifted to Sears, who performed an emotionally charged ballad entitled “15 Minutes.” Sears described the song as a “memory” in an interview after the show.
“I was swimming in a river and feeling I could escape the world,” Sears said. “And then I heard a voice telling me, ‘You need to come back, be with people and the problems and the pain and the stickiness — you only have so much time. Don’t run from it. Be in it.’”
Before a 10-minute break between sets, Sears continued with a few more original solo pieces, while Crawford improvised on guitar as accompaniment.
“I wouldn’t say my music is one genre,” Sears said in an interview after the show. “It’s folk, I guess, but it’s also theatrical, soulful, cabaret, pop, loud, intimate.”
Taking influence primarily from 1960s and 1970s folk rock, Crawford’s and Sears’s performances each encapsulated a variety of genres — a result of the pair’s wide musical tastes, Crawford explained.
“I listen to a lot of things — a lot of old music, folk music, rock, blues, country, 60s and 70s folk and rock songwriters, Paul Simon, The Beatles,” he said. “I think it’s hard to pin down my music as one style because it incorporates a lot of different styles. Sometimes I say my music weaves many strands of Americana.”
Sears shared similar sources of inspiration, though he added he is also influenced by classical music.
“I am inspired by people who go in between, who use songs as spells: Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Edith Piaf and The Beatles, of course,” Sears said. “Classical music has also always been a major inspiration.”
Both Crawford and Sears revealed more about their songwriting processes and musical practices as the concert continued.
“Songwriting process differs from song to song,” Crawford said. “One of the songs I performed [‘The Next Nut’] popped into my head on a windy fall day in Astoria, Queens, [N.Y.] while walking in the park with my wife. It was deep in the pandemic in 2020. It made me think of squirrels collecting nuts as a parable or allegory. It’s also about socialism and sharing resources.”
Crawford’s method of music making slightly differs from Sears’s.
“I improvise,” Sears said. “I think it helps me process life and keep myself company. I sing to a moment or a feeling. That ‘song’ becomes a kind of shape and then I try and play it until it fills out and feels like it is what it wants to be.”
After the performance, Crawford and Sears closed with a rendition of “Let It Be” by The Beatles — a callback to their days of performing in “Only Yesterday.”
During the performance, the two expressed hope of reuniting for another joint performance, but for now, they will be parting ways to pursue individual milestones: Crawford will debut “The Vermont Farm Project,” an original play he wrote, at Northern Stage in May 2025, while Sears is starring in “Cult of Love,” a Broadway musical opening at Hayes Theater this November.
After attending the concert, Samuel Hirsh ’26 said he appreciated Crawford and Sears’s multifaceted performance.
“It was a cool mix of Beatles impressions and original songs,” Hirsh said. “It was definitely a fun night and made me want to take better advantage of the talent that comes through Hanover.”
