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, as Hickey explores life’s graceless passage between teenage years and adulthood, and all of the noise that permeates. Formed of eleven new songs and released via Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, Nervous At Night is led by Hickey’s remarkable voice, a voice that, like the best pop artists, holds the brave balance of singing fearlessly about your fears. 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. 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. “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.”
