Hank Heaven

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. Django Reinhardt was a specialty. Still a teenager, they toured the world with jazz bands before moving to Brooklyn and becoming a guitarist for hire in the modern ranks of magnetic indie acts—Samia, Del Water Gap, and Gus Dapperton, just to sample. They were content with that career, too, locking into parts while sharpening their skills on high-stakes stages. Why would Hank need songs of their own?

But it never stays that simple. 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 heard that Hank had melodic ideas and tuneful bits of their own, and he encouraged Hank to keep working, to develop these songs of their own. Hank did, soon heading to Minneapolis to hang out and write with Meloni and Luppen, by then his partner. They developed these songs in friendship. Call Me Hank—a charming and smart five-track EP, where an aching piano ballad about dejection shared room with sharp and hooky rejoinders about substandard partners—emerged only a year later. One of 2023’s most promising EPs, those songs announced that Luppen and Meloni had been right: Hank had plenty to say, and they could also go anywhere, 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 that they’ve essentially spent their whole life preparing to make guitar-based pop, and there’s no need to betray that as they build Loaded Dice, the LP they’re finishing as you read these words. All those other loves—torch songs, textural abstraction, electronic radiance—remain, but it’s mostly folded into songs shaped by a guitarist so good that skill alone could have sustained them for a lifetime. You can clearly hear the licks of a classically trained and perennially sharp guitarist here, early inspiration recast as new fodder.  

Perhaps most important, though, is Hank’s emerging sense of self-acceptance and the way it shows up in these new numbers. 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 to, as they put it, “gambling on everything and expecting it to get you there,” whatever there happens to be. 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.

Hank is not so good at talking about their feelings, in sitting with friends for some heart-to-heart fireside. Instead, in these last few years, they’ve learned that writing a song and sending it to a close circle of pals is the best to check in, to say, “Hey, here’s what I’m dealing with—or, frankly, failing to.” Take “Plan 2,” the first glimpse at what will become Loaded Dice: Hank strolls through a crowd, swilling High Life with a girl on their arm—“the love of my life,” Hank sings, voice wavering slightly inside an electronic haze, “just for the night.” This will be fun and good, at least until it isn’t. “I’m doing better as soon as I remember,” Hank sings in the surging chorus, “but I keep on forgetting the plan.” This is the tug between simultaneously accepting and rejecting parts of yourself you don’t always love, recognizing that they exist but not giving up on the fight to reconcile them with your other priorities.

“Reno,” the Loaded Dice opener-to-be, probes the same propensity to bet on anything that might give you temporary pleasure. More settled and dour than “Plan 2,” with strings sweeping beneath Hank’s guitar jangle, “Reno” remains a funny boast about how many ladies Hank can land and how many jackpots they can win—even if it’s in Nevada’s second most-famous city. This is a beautifully sad brag, though, Hank flaunting what they think they can score as a temporary replacement for what they know they do not yet have, like stability and satisfaction. This protagonist is an exaggerated version of Hank themselves, their faults and enthusiasms blown up until Hank can see and maybe understand them from a safe distance.

No, Hank never meant to be a songwriter, but it has become an essential part of their existence now, a process through which they begin to understand themselves. Their songs and their life, then, form something of a feedback loop, each shaping the other in a circle with Hank at the center. Hank still plays guitar for hire, currently working on a stage off Broadway in a house band. 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?

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