Nervous At Night

Description

Born into a family of musicians, Charlie Hickey obsessively watched videos of his parents touring with their old band, Umade, as a child, learning all the lyrics he loved but didn't understand. This introduction to music and songwriting planted a seed, and he quickly wrote his own songs, playing on the guitars around him and singing about the small details of his school years. He continued this throughout his adolescence, and this mode of expression became an outlet for his growing anxieties, now identified as obsessive-compulsive disorder. His debut album, Nervous At Night, is being released on Phoebe Bridgers' Saddest Factory label. Where the 2021 EP Count The Stairs was an attempt to capture the rawness of his performance, Nervous At Night comes alive in its production, with Charlie Hickey and producer Marshall Vore leaning into their perfectionist tendencies to find the best version of each track. It's a pop record but one that moves in many sonic directions, an amalgamation of his love for old folk singers and his more contemporary peers, from Taylor Swift and The 1975 to Californian songwriter and producer Blake Mills. This shifting of styles – from crushing quiet ballads to glistening, head-nodding tracks – reflects its main theme: the graceless transition between adolescence and adulthood. So on "Planet With Water," a plaintive love song filled with nostalgia, he evokes after-school phone calls and hearing a neighbor's TV through the wall. "Mid Air" blossoms around his voice, delicately accompanied by Los Angeles musicians Harrison Whitford, Christian Lee Hutson, and Mason Stoops. Nervous At Night comes alive in its juxtapositions, chronicling life's constant pushes and pulls, both stagnant and in motion. However, it's primarily an album about connection, about how even through these struggles, we rely on the people around us to keep moving forward and feel less alone.