O’Connor Brothers Band headlines Belly Up Aspen for Wintersköl kickoff

Colorado natives and twin brothers Matt and Sean O’Connor of the O’Connor Brothers Band are ready for their first headline show at Belly Up Aspen on Thursday night as part of Winterskol’s kickoff.

“We played Belly Up for the first time in September, when we opened for Clay Street Unit, and I guess the management at Belly Up, liked our set,” said Sean O’Connor. “Aspen was a great crowd. It was cool. The audience was very attentive and were there to party.”

But that wasn’t the first time they had been to Aspen.

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“We’ve been to Aspen a few times, for family vacations,” Sean O’Connor said. “My mom just showed me a picture of a photograph of The Aspen Times when we were three years old. And there’s a picture in your newspaper of us making a snowman in the park.”

The O’Connor brothers said that aside from taking piano lessons as kids, they didn’t grow up in a particularly musical household. Their father, John O’Connor, was a professional tennis player and coach. They have continued that tradition balancing their musical aspirations with coaching tennis.

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“We have a day job. Matt and I run the Keystone Tennis Center,” Sean O’Connor said. “Tennis during the day, music at night”

Their interest in music began when they were required to pick up an instrument and join the school band.

“In sixth grade, the school made you pick an instrument. It was required to do, either vocal or band,” Matt O’Connor said. “Both Sean and I picked the trumpet, and then Sean picked the clarinet and we loved it. Both of us continued playing. I wanted to write songs so eventually, I gave up the trumpet and picked up guitar. I started writing all our music, and the rest is history.”

The brothers continued their musical journey by studying Jazz at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, where they met drummer and current bandmate Collin Sitgreaves. The band started playing college house parties around the Fort Collins area. After graduating and returning to their hometown of Keystone in Summit County they met Denver-based lead guitarist and backup vocalist, Pierce Murphy and bassist Brendan O’Donoghue and have been playing and recording together for about six years.

“All our bandmates are primarily jazz musicians in Denver,” said Matt O’Connor. “Even though we both went to school for jazz, we’re the least jazz guys in the band. It’s cool because that’s a comfort zone for us.”

Instead of sticking to one genre or labeling themselves as one thing or another, the band incorporates many different musical influences into their show.

“We’ve been billed with so many different genres,” Sean O’Connor explained. “Everything from jam to Bluegrass to folk and country. For a while venues and promoters, struggled to find a place for us, and now I think it’s turned the corner.”

It turns out that their music and lifestyle are fully based on growing up and living in Colorado. Avid skiers, the brothers live in an A-frame home in Keystone. That house is the inspiration and the cover art for their new album “The Gulch.”

The album is self-produced and recorded partly in Denver, some at the Keystone Tennis Club and also at “The Gulch.”

“We live on this old dirt road, on the river, and there are so many sounds. We wanted it to steep into the record,” Matt O’Connor said. “We stopped closing the door after awhile. We wanted the nature sounds. You can’t always pick it up, but it’s there, it’s a part of the sound. We just really leaned into it.”

The brothers are looking forward to returning to Aspen and the Belly Up stage and are hoping audiences come out to rock out and celebrate Winterskol.

“I hope that they get a musical experience that they don’t otherwise find,” Sean O’Connor said. “I would like the audience to be like, ‘Well, sh**, that was nothing like anything I’ve seen before.'”

“My goal as a singer is when I walk on stage I hope I can reach inside you a little bit and break your heart every once in a while,” Matt O’Connor added.

Sarah Girgis is the Arts and Entertainment Editor for The Aspen Times. She can be reached at 970-429-9151 or sgirgis@aspentimes.com.