Charlie Hickey Vibes
I talk with my good friend, singer-songwriter Charlie Hickey, about mood, music and wHaT it meAnS tO be a MaN!!!!!!!!!!
I’m very smart and I learnt what access journalism was last week. Is this that?
I mean today, I’ll be sharing an interview I did with a very good friend of mine. And because of the bumbling nature of this humble, little Substack, I probably would not be able to have such a “get” without the hard work of friendship. Folks, Charlie Hickey’s on the show today!
Charlie is one of my closest friends, and our friendship is made all the more special by the fact that it’s relatively new. Just over a year ago, I was introduced to Charlie through, ironically, an interview. Charlie and I had, at different times, both gone through the same electronic music program, Young Producers Group (YPG), and I was doing some work for that program by helping them conduct interviews with some of their most illustrious alumni. I was tasked to write questions for my boss to ask Charlie and thus was sent on a mission to listen to Charlie’s then-new EP, “Count The Stairs.”
Upon listening, I was struck by the impressive specificity of Charlie’s writing, his deft, pop-ear for melodies, and an inventive sonic palate that elevated his music above so much of the “singer-songwriter” drivel that flows to our ears every day. After helping with the interview and feeling para-socially connected to him from afar, as well as feeling newly spirited after my first round of vaccinations, I reached out to Charlie to meet up. That one casual hang quickly unraveled into a whole summer and he remains one of my most special friends and thinking-partners.
Charlie’s new album, “Nervous At Night,” is an expansion of all the elements that made “Count The Stairs” so special. The budget is UP baby! Working once again with producer Marshall Vore, these 11 songs are marked by moody, murky guitars and strings and ambient textures. And there is a cinematic quality to them that makes the small feel huge.
And the songs themselves capture a certain melancholic, adolescent self awareness that is so rarely articulated. He has an uncanny way of using specific moments, or turns of phrases, to illuminate something much larger. But the truths that Charlie is gesturing towards are never cliched or overwrought. There’s a delicious ambiguity to the songs, and that’s what makes them feel timeless and listenable. Even as Charlie’s friend, and as someone whose discussed these songs with him, I still find myself chewing over new details, new lines that strike me differently than last time.
I wanted to talk to Charlie about the record and a little about the themes of this Substack. As we discuss, Charlie is signed to Phoebe Bridger’s label Saddest Factory, and as I’ve written about in recent writing, there is a tendency with Phoebe's music and the entire indie genre, to cast all of it in the mood pile. “This is sad music.” “This is cry-music.” I think this is all fucked up and basic, and I thought that our conversation could be, in many ways, a way of discussing how some of the ideas I’ve explored here play out in practice. How does the idea of mood-music shape artists today? And thinking of mood-music’s connection to gender, what does it mean for a boy to inhabit that space? I hope this conversation is as fun for you to read as it was for me to have and hey, go stream “Nervous At Night”!!!!!
Tobias: I obviously don’t want this to be an “interview-interview” because we’re close friends and we’re just talking, but I thought we could just talk about the record and hopefully this can be a way for you to talk about it in a way that you can’t at other venues.
Charlie: Yeah absolutely.
Tobias: One thing I was wondering is how are you conceiving of this record. Does this feel like your debut or just the stuff you’ve been working on and now you’re sharing it with the world?
Charlie: I don’t know. I guess that it doesn’t feel like my debut to me, but I recognize that it is to everybody else. I sometimes have the disease of thinking that I’m further along in my career than I am. And I feel like I’ve been doing music for a long time, which is true, but this is the first time a lot of people will be hearing me. I mean it is the first thing, other than my EP, that I can fully stand behind.
Tobias: Going off of that, do you think of this record as a project with set themes and structure. I mean, I hear themes, but I don’t know if you thought of that.
Charlie: I did not have any conceptions of themes. These really were 11 songs that I wrote that I liked the best. But it’s interesting, with doing press around the album, people keep pointing out themes about it and they always say the same thing, which is that it’s a “coming of age album” and it’s about growing up. And that’s true, so I would say that now. I mean I wrote the songs while I was growing up and the songs were all written in really intense times of transition and also in very different times of transition, so that’s definitely there.
Tobias: Something I’m also really interested in your music, and with you as a project and a figure, is your relationship to masculinity. In the record, that was a throughline I was hearing that really interested me. There were of course ideas of growing up in general, but also about becoming a man in a very specific way, which is something I don’t think is being that deeply explored in music today.
Charlie: That’s really interesting, could you say more? I haven’t thought about it a lot but that does make sense.
Tobias: Well the song that makes me think about it the most is “Thirteen.” It’s very directly about that because it’s about this more masculine boy who was in your life who is no longer in your life, who played “Call of Duty” and who says he paid a prostitute for sex. And it was a story I related to a lot about having male friends and having to do a certain intense performance of masculinity and realizing you can’t do it anymore. And of course there’s the Jordan Peterson line in “Dandelions.” And that’s someone who represents a return to traditional masculinity for young men. Is that something you think a lot about in your life. Like how to be a young man?
Charlie: It absolutely is something I think about a lot. I haven’t thought about that as a throughline but it’s a really interesting one. “Thirteen” is about the earliest exposure in my life to a narrow definition of what it means to be a boy. I recall at that point in my life thinking that was the correct way to be. I think in general masculinity is a very touchy subject because there is such toxic — and I hate that word — but there are such destructive, harmful ideas about what it means to be a man. But there are also not really many good ideals for what it means to be a man in this world. And that’s something I think about a lot. There’s not a lot of direction for men. Like how to be a good person or occupy any sort of masculine identity in a way that isn’t destructive to yourself and others. That’s part of the reason I was interested in namedropping Jordan Peterson in “Dandelions.” People turn to those sort of figures. People like Jordan Peterson are all that young boys have. But there definitely has to be something better, because boys are very lost creatures.
Tobias: It seems like that’s something you’re trying to figure out on the record, like what that version of masculinity is. There’s a lot of songs about feeling your feelings or wanting to feel your feelings, which is very opposed to traditional masculinity. I feel like “Springbreaker” is wanting to feel all the feelings with another person.
Charlie: Right. It depends, because everyone has a very different definition of what masculinity is. I’ve been lucky to have been raised in an environment where feeling your feelings is very encouraged and in my life I’m not hesitant to feel and share what I’m feeling. And obviously a lot of boys don't have that, so that’s a privilege in a lot of ways.
Tobias: Switching gears now, something that I’ve explored in my newsletter is mood and vibe as the central framework for music today. You’re signed to Phoebe Bridgers’s label Saddest Factory and Phoebe represents the ultimate “indie sad girl” meme, at least that’s how a lot of her fans treat her music. “It’s time to cry, let me put on this music,” which is of course a really narrow, problematic framework. I’m curious to hear how you feel about your music being a mood. If you were to follow a similar trajectory as Phoebe with your music being so connected to mood in the minds of listeners, is that something you would be excited by or would you feel boxed in?
Charlie: Yeah it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. I personally don’t like the idea of my music being distilled down to a vibe. I know it’s sort of essential in this current musical economy that I’m entering into, but I do think it’s really reductive. I think it’s reductive when people do it to Phoebe or Mitski, or even when they try to lump them together. They’re both incredible artists, but they’re really quite different. Apart from that they’re both amazing writers, they don’t have that much in common, except maybe that the same people are drawn to their music. And you’ve talked about how algorithms predict, “if you like this, then you’ll also like this,” and that really discourages people from really listening to things, because they’re already sort of plugged-in. If you like one artist, the algorithm plugs you into a whole so-called genre or vibe of music you should probably like. And that’s not the most organic way of consuming music.
Tobias: How would you feel if someone came up to you and said, “I listen to your music to cry. When I want to cry, I play your music.” It sounds silly, but that’s how people are with your contemporaries.
Charlie: I mean as an artist you can’t be too picky with how people respond to your music. But I’ll just say that that’s not how I relate to the music that I love. I don’t have music that I put on for different moods. I like to listen to music, but it’s not dependent on my mood. I actually like to listen to music that has nothing to do with my mood. I’m not the type of person to listen to Taylor Swift if I'm going through a break up. It feels too close to home. I actually like music to be separate from my life. Maybe that’s because I'm a songwriter and music is already so intertwined with my life, so maybe that’s different for someone who’s purely a listener. But it is a little puzzling to me to hear people talk about music in that way. Like “Oh this is the music that I cry to.”
Tobias: Yeah, it’s definitely the taught form of listening from Spotify, TikTok and platforms. As musicians, we think of making music as a thing we’re making with its own world. We’re not thinking about it in service of a situation.
Charlie: Right, there is this very — for lack of a better word — neoliberal individualistic thing of like “how can music serve me and further my own identity and self-conception.” Rather than how can I use this music as a way of experiencing something bigger than myself?
Tobias: Okay, to wrap things up, what are you excited about? If this is the first step, what do you want to do on the next album?
Charlie: I really have no idea. I would just really like it to be a progression of some kind. I would like it to be maybe even better. I don’t come at things conceptually. I just would like to make the best thing I can and make things that feel relevant to me.
Charlie Hickey Vibes
super cool to read this after having reviewed the record for line of best fit--i was actually thinking about how to include the relevant details of how the internet conceptualizes music while avoiding the reductive framework you mention of “this is sad music to cry to.” also interesting to think about how press gets conflated with the artistic statement and then actually becomes the verbiage used by the artist as time goes on. good interview !! i fucking love this record