Twenty-one year old Pasadena-based artist Charlie Hickey recently announced his debut album. The Marshall Vore-produced ‘Nervous At Night’ will be released on May 20th via Saddest Factory Records, and today Hickey shares another track off of the forthcoming album. Following the title track is album opener ‘Dandelions,’ a winding, confessional monologue, built on a folk foundation, that moves effortlessly into a shimmering pop dream.
Nervous At Night is a gorgeous, 11-track record that finds Hickey detailing life’s graceless passage between teenage years and adulthood, and all of the noise that permeates. Hickey has always navigated the intricacies of life through a musical lens, both as a child of two musicians and as an artist who has surrounded himself with talented peers. “It feels almost too good to be true,” Hickey says of the small crew of friends that assisted him on the record—label boss and childhood friend Phoebe Bridgers, producer Marshall Vore, and fellow musicians Harrison Whitford, Christian Lee Hutson and Mason Stoops who are featured on the album. With all of the talent surrounding him, it’s Hickey’s remarkable voice, masterful songwriting and relatable storytelling that shine through on Nervous At Night.
Tracklist
- Dandelions
- Gold Line
- Mid Air
- Thirteen
- Missing Years
- Every Time I Think
- Nervous At Night
- Springbreaker
- Choir Song (I Feel Dumb)
- Month of September
- Planet With Water
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Charlie Hickey’s debut album, Nervous At Night, began with a journey. Having grown up in Pasadena, in the quiet shadow of downtown LA, Hickey moved away to college at the same time that he got more serious about music, and found himself moving back and forth between his hometown and his newfound independence to play around with song ideas and demos with his friend and collaborator Marshall Vore. These two worlds reveal themselves in numerous forms across Nervous At Night.
Born into a musical family, as a child Hickey would obsessively watch videos of his parents on tour with their old band Uma, learning all the lyrics that he loved but didn’t understand. This introduction to music and songwriting sowed a seed, and Hickey was soon writing songs of his own, playing on the guitars that lay around him and singing about the little details of his school days. He continued this throughout his teen years, and the worlds he conjured becoming an outlet for his growing anxieties, which Hickey now understands to be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. “It gave me a safe place to let my mind run wild and explore all its little corners,” he says. “I still struggle with my mind but music has really made me a happier person.”
Nervous at Night shifts between quiet, heavy-hearted ballads and gleaming, hook-laden tracks. While Hickey calls the album a pop record, he admits that sonically it moves in many directions, an amalgamation of his love for folk singers of yesteryear and more contemporary peers, from Taylor Swift and The 1975, to Elliott Smith, to Conor Oberst. Like those heroes, Hickey shares a clarity in his songs that is specific in its songwriting but still inviting, open and generous.
Across the album, he lays out those fears, frustrations, and faith in friendships in richly detailed ways. The topsy-turvy narrative was only noticed by Hickey in hindsight when he stepped back to view this collection of songs as one whole body of work. “I only realized the theme in retrospect because they were written over a really long period of time,” he explains. “But it is true that there’s a thread of growing up running through it, also transitioning into adulthood and having your inner child still be a very big part of you.”
This age of disconnection leaves its mark across Nervous At Night. Hickey admits that he often finds himself applying the lens of nostalgia to events as they happen, occasionally viewing the meaningful moments of his life as an outsider, acutely aware of how fleeting such sweetness can be. But there is community here too, a genuine sense of connection that holds Nervous at Night in place. Hickey grew up in the same neighborhood as Phoebe Bridgers, the two becoming close friends from the age of thirteen, and he says that he views his songs as taking place in such a suburb, one similar to the dream-like safe-haven of Pasadena.
Nervous At Night comes alive in its juxtapositions, chronicling the constant push and pull of life, both its stagnancy and motion in refreshing and honest ways. Chiefly though, this is an album about connection, how even through those struggles we rely on the people around us to keep moving forwards. “I’d like to write songs that are for everyone, that let people into my inner world while also hopefully making people feel less alone on their own. I hope that these songs can be there for somebody the way my favorite songs have been for me.”
