Charlie Hickey | Texas Review | Ralph Arvesen
Charlie Hickey performing during the North America Tour 2022 at Emo's Austin in Austin, Texas on April 14, 2022. (Photo: Ralph Arvesen)

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

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.”

Formed of eleven new songs and released in the early Summer of 2022 via Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, Nervous At Night is, of course, led by Hickey’s remarkable voice, a voice that, like the best pop artists, holds the brave balance of singing fearlessly about your fears. Across the album, he lays out those fears, frustrations, and faith in friendships in richly detailed ways. 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. Nowhere is that truer than on title track “Nervous at Night”, a pop anthem that instantly joins the canon of the great Unrequited Love Songs, with a hook that dances over the song’s anxieties, as Hickey sings how he “can’t keep throwing rocks up at your window.”

Setlist for the show at Emo's Austin
  • No Good At Lying
  • Ten Feet Tall
  • Dandelions
  • Count The Stairs
  • Seeing Things
  • Notre Dame
  • Nervous At Night

Charlie Hickey shared the stage with Wolf Alice at Emo's Austin. They continue across the United States with the last stop at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, California on May 21, 2022.

Charlie Hickey
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Photos by Ralph Arvesen
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