On the Rise
Hank Heaven

Before we even sit down, we’re approached by friends of theirs, fellow musicians wanting to offer congratulations on the project rollout and swap stories of recent tours and gigs. The exchange is light and affable, immediately indicative not just of someone who is deservedly well liked and well respected as a creative and as a person, but also of someone who is fundamentally interested and interesting. Put simply, it’s hard not to want to be on Hank Heaven’s team.

Born in Cold Spring, NY and raised by a family of professional musicians, Heaven grew up steeped in art. Free to explore as they wished, they gravitated towards swing jazz guitar in high school after finding themselves at a gig featuring Stéphane Wrembel, one of the genre’s most prominent players. Enamored, they pursued guitar relentlessly, eventually earning a spot as one of Wrembel’s students. A transformative teacher-student relationship grew from there, and once Hank graduated high school, they moved straight to New York to play proper gigs with Wrembel and mingle in the New York Jazz scene.

“I was, like, not playing indie music,” they say with a laugh. The goal was never, they tell me, to turn themselves into any kind of popstar. Mostly, at the time, Heaven had the idea that they’d tour as long as possible, joining bands and playing the styles they knew best. The world of jazz guitar in New York was its own enclave, and Hank was along for the ride. “It took me to crazy places,” they tell me. “I went to India to play, and we did Carnegie Hall.”

Through music circles, Heaven eventually met a young Samia, who was quickly rising in the indie scene. At the time, they were 18 and she was only 21, but the friendship quickly led to an offer for Heaven to jump over to Samia’s touring band. “It all kind of led into everything else, basically,” Hank says. As part of Samia’s band, Heaven was exposed to another kind of musical life. On one tour, they opened for Hippo Campus, through which Heaven met their now-best friend and collaborator, Jake Luppen.

“I still wasn’t writing songs as much, but like we all knew each other, we went on tour, and I was playing with Samia up until COVID hit,” Heaven says. In that period of downtime – which, for Heaven, wasn’t really downtime at all – they began making the transition from guitarist to artist. It started working on a side hustle supergroup, Peach Fuzz, with Samia, Raffaela, and Ryann (Victoria Zaro). There, they began flexing their writing muscles and grew closer to Luppen, who produced their record.

“Jake was like, ‘You know, if you ever want to record your stuff, you should come to Minnesota,’” Heaven says.

It took Heaven a minute to take him up on it, but eventually, they did.

In time between tours – they were still working as a studio session player and tour musician – Heaven started making trips out to Minnesota to write with Jake and Raffaella, who live together. “They’re like my Mom and Dad best friends. They put my up in a room, and they’re always like, ‘Its your room.’ It’s always my room! Sometimes I bring little pictures of myself and put them around so they don’t forget me,” Hank jokes. Clearly it worked. Heaven tells me the pair got engaged this year and asked them to officiate, a request that they, of course, will oblige.

“I always wrote songs and love writing songs. But it wasn’t until I really went to Minnesota and hung out with Jake and Raffaella and sat down and we produced out that first EP [Call Me Hank] that I was like, ‘It’s fun to sing and to write and I want to write more,’” they explain. “There was also a crazy identity thing I struggled with of shifting to being a songwriter and not as much of a guitar player. That’s what I liked to be … So it was kind of an identity shift.”

The creation of Hank Heaven changed their identity in more ways than one. At the start of the project, when the trio first were messing around with the 2022 EP Call Me Hank, they went by a different name. Hank Heaven was just – and still, to a degree, is – a character through which they could explore parts of themselves that they had been shying away from before. One to hide their emotions behind humor, songwriting brought to the surface things that Heaven knew they couldn’t put aside any longer.

“I made up that character and would say: ‘I’m Hank. I’m just a guy trying to be this really secure kind of person.’ It was a way to show up and present this masculine side,” they said. “But showing up with that and living with that, you’re like: ‘Actually, I am that kind of person. I’m nonbinary. I’m trans.’”

Hank Heaven, then, is kind of meta in the truest sense. It was a character study turned into a study of the self, an experience that’s easy to resonate with both because it’s so niche and so universal at the same time. As anybody who’s grappled with their gender knows, there are those strange and clunky and euphoric feelings the first time you try on the clothes and the attitude you know you were meant to wear, a discomfort that, with time and acceptance, settles in like an old friend you’re welcoming home. Hank’s music speaks to all of that. But it also speaks to anyone who’s felt at odds in their own mind, who has shit to work through but isn’t sure where to start.

If Heaven's first EP was a trial run, their debut album, Loaded Dice, was the dive off the deep end. They legally changed their name to Hank Heaven and began building a whole world around the person who had emerged in the music.

Recording once again with Raffaella and Lupen, Heaven describes the process of making Loaded Dice as, ultimately, just having fun with their best friends. They trekked to Minnesota whenever they got a break in their touring schedule, their life changing drastically between each visit. This made their recording sessions not just thematically fruitful but also personally grounding.

“I’d go out there and I was dealing with stuff every time,” they tell me. “The last time, I wasn’t living anywhere in the city. I was on tour for, like, months, and I just needed to finish the record.”

Loaded Dice has – in spirit, and occasionally in content – the arc of a long night out on the town. Confidence turns to overconfidence, overconfidence morphs into overthinking, and finally, there’s the dreaded comedown. On this album, Heaven’s character is a gambling addict, someone they describe as betting on something, anything out of desperation. What starts as fun and games quickly turns somber.

The record is bookended by the highest high and lowest low. “Got the jackpot baby / I’m taking you out,” Heaven's voice soars in an irony-tinged falsetto on opener “Reno.” It’s a track about getting lucky in life and in love, about wanting to and knowing that you will hit it big. By the time Loaded Dice closes, Heaven hums to a melancholy acoustic strum, reflecting on messes of the character’s own making. “I just need you to tell me that I’m a good person,” they plead on “Wish It Were You.”

Sonically, Loaded Dice is an impressive melting pot, showcasing Heaven's musical aptitude and versatility. They pull from influences as disparate as dance music and country, at times all on one song. “Beloved,” a collaboration with Beach Bunny about the isolating limbo of anger, brings on Beach Bunny to layer a sparkly picking pattern over quirky autotune to create a sound that’s simultaneously heartbreaking and charmingly dorky. Reference points like Alex G, Bright Eyes, and, of course, Samia come to mind, but something about Heaven's sound feels a step beyond categorization.

The stories Heaven tells on Loaded Dice are fictionally embellished, but, as they tell me, it’s all mined from a well of personal experience. The character creates a buffer, of course, but the core vulnerabilities were still there. “It’s really interesting how, when I listened to the record, I realized that it’s about what it feels like when you’re in any throes of addiction and what it feels like when you’re just trying to hang on,” they say. “It can be like, dang! I was going through it!”

It's been just over a month now since the release of Loaded Dice, time Heaven says has been immensely satisfying and gratifying. At their release show last month, they played the record top to bottom to a room filled with their nearest and dearest, many of whom heard the album and its stories for the first time. “Afterwards, my mom came up to me at the merch table and was like: ‘You’re a good person.’” Heaven says, laughing and miming their mother giving them a good shoulder shake, answering the call of “Wish It Were You.” “I was like, ‘I know!’ She was so sad to hear me sing it like that, though. She just had to hear me say it.”

“I also had an ex-boyfriend there, and he was like, ‘Honestly, when you started playing the first one, I got emotional. It seems like you have really found yourself,’” they say with a smile. “It is kind of doxing yourself, but I find a lot of solace and serenity in having space to write a song where, if I saw a person, I could say what I wanted to say to them in that song.”