Hank Heaven, Sweet Baby Jesus — live event
Hank Heaven never intended to be a songwriter. Raised in New York’s Hudson Valley in a family of professional musicians, Hank emerged as something of a guitar wunderkind, enamored with and excelling in the swing music of yore. Still a teenager, they toured the world with jazz bands before moving to Brooklyn and becoming a guitarist for hire with magnetic indie acts—Samia, Del Water Gap, and Gus Dapperton, just to sample. Why would Hank need songs of their own? But early in 2022, Hippo Campus singer Jake Luppen co-produced the start of a new quartet called Peach Fuzz—Samia, Hank, Ryann, and Raffaella Meloni. Around that time, Luppen realized Hank had melodic ideas and tuneful bits of their own. He encouraged Hank to develop these songs. Call Me Hank—a charming and smart five-track debut, where an aching piano ballad about dejection shared room with sharp and hooky rejoinders about substandard partners—emerged as one of 2023’s most promising EPs. Hank had plenty to say and so many ways to say it, hopscotching from hyperpop to pop-country and from melancholy to mirth. The evolution of Hank, both musically and personally, has since been brisk by necessity. In the first category, Hank has realized they’ve essentially spent their whole life preparing to make guitar-based pop, and there’s no need to betray that on Loaded Dice, their debut LP. You can hear the licks of a classically trained and perennially sharp guitarist, early inspiration recast as new fodder. Perhaps most important, though, is Hank’s emerging sense of self-acceptance and the way it increasingly shows up in their songs. As Hank came out as nonbinary, they too began to wrestle with personal issues that felt like the barriers between adolescence and adulthood, from substance abuse to love addiction. If Hank Heaven used to be a character for an emerging songwriter still struggling with their old identity and born name, it is now a full person, wrestling with all the intricacies that entails. No, Hank never meant to be a songwriter, but songwriting is now an essential part of their art and their being, the lens through which they see themselves in the world. And the struggles in these songs are not just Hank’s, of course. If you’ve never wobbled on the complicated precipices between being fun and being good, between growing up and getting wild, have you ever really lived?
Starts: 2024-11-18T19:30:45Z
Ends: 2024-11-18T21:30:45Z
Where: 1647 Weirfield Street, New York 11385, United States
Price: $19.57