Seán Lightholder

Seán Lightholder is a Bay Area singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with a career spanning three decades and more than a dozen projects. An Irishman born into music and rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area, his work moves fluently between rock, folk, Americana, punk, soul, and everything in between.

As a founding member of CaliCeltic, he has spent nearly a decade helping shape one of the Bay Area's most distinctive Celtic rock bands, co-writing and singing on six studio albums, most recently West of Shannon (2026), which received airplay on Sirius XM's Celtic Crush with Larry Kirwan.

His solo work under the Lightholder name is more spare and personal: a body of singles and the 2023 EP A Danger to Yourself that draws from folk, Americana, and alternative traditions. Songs like "Some Things Never Change" and "Something to Help You Along" deal unflinchingly with addiction, isolation, and the difficulty of honest self-reckoning.

A fixture of the Bay Area open mic community since 1998, Seán founded and maintains the Bay Area Open Mic Calendar at bayareaopenmics.com, a labor of love that reflects the same instinct behind his music: showing up, paying attention, and keeping the scene alive.

You can catch him performing solo as Lightholder, in vocal harmony with duo Love Songs and Whiskey, trading guitar lines in Second Hand Fortune with Lars Kongshem, or going full rock 'n' roll with the Lightholder Soul Band.