SEAN COSTELLO Source: The News Tribune Date: 02/2008 Writer: Ernest A. Jasmin

Well before Sean Costello gained notoriety as a guitar prodigy and rising star on the national blues scene, he found Howlin’ Wolf.

That’s whose music changed his life at the tender age of 11.

“I was like, ‘Whoa! OK, that’s what I was lookin’ for,’” the 28-year-old Atlanta blues man recalled during a recent phone interview. “That’s the potent stuff. I just sort of became obsessed with that sound and that power and that emotional intensity.”

Obsession paid off three years later when Costello won the Beale Street Blues Society talent competition, a career-launching moment he chalked up to serendipity.

“I was just on vacation in Memphis, and I wanted to play on Beale Street,” he said. “Instead of a jam that night, they were having a contest. I wound up winning, so I was able to get my career started. So it was great at the time because I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to play guitar.”

Through his teen years, Costello played blues clubs and toured with the likes of fellow Beale Street contestant Susan Tedeschi. At 20, he received a W.C. Handy Award nomination for Best New Artist Debut for his second album, “Cuttin’ In.” And by his mid-20s, Costello has already shared the stage with the likes of B.B. King and Buddy Guy.

“I was very successful early on because I was playing traditional stuff pretty right on for a young guy,” he said. “Now I’ve been, over the past several years, sort of trying to go beyond just (being) a student of a particular style.”

Costello’s self-titled 2004 album marked a shift from pure blues towards a more varied approach, with bits of funk, soul and a remake of Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate.” And he continues to cherry pick from his favorite styles on his new album “We Can Get Together,” due out Tuesday.

There are brash, ZZ Top-style blues rockers, gospel and soul-inflected numbers and southern rock. And having read an unflattering review or two in recent years, he realizes some blues purists aren’t so smitten by his eclectic approach.

“There are people that just either want this rocked-out guitar blues thing, or they want this traditional zoot suit kind of thing,” he said. “I don’t really know. But I’m just trying to be who I am and be in the present moment and take everything I’ve learned and make something new out of it.

“What I’m trying to do is keep a sort of a blues feeling or the knowledge that I gained from blues, and then I just expand it in my own personal way,” Costello said. “I try to be tasteful with it, but put inflections of jazz or inflections of rock or inflections of African music. … I try to let it come out in (a natural) way.”