Bio
Alden Hedges says he’s a “puzzle guy.”
The Nashville-based singer-songwriter was born in Madison, Wisconsin and moved after high school to LaCrosse where he studied as a music major. It was there where he first started playing shows as a hired gun on upright bass for classical, jazz, and bluegrass bands. At the request of a friend in Texas, Hedges moved to Austin to take a gig with a touring country band. Eight years later he moved to Nashville, TN, where he has since been the full-time bass player for North Carolina-based country rock band American Aquarium. But through all that time, he was writing scraps of his own poetry, stories, and songs.
Much like the varied places he has lived and the differing musical styles he has lent his talents to, his music and writing have for years been like scattered puzzle pieces. It took slowing down to find the ways in which they all fit together. As the world came to a screeching halt in March of 2020, Hedges like everyone else found himself stuck at home. With nothing but time, he gathered years’ worth of notebooks and song ideas and started arranging and playing with the pieces.
Once the songs began coming together, he called his friends (and American Aquarium bandmates) Shane Boeker and Ryan van Fleet to see if they’d help him record demos for what he had written. They worked remotely over the course of several months, sending files back and forth, adding layers to the primary guitar and vocal tracks that Alden had recorded as a starting point. It became apparent as they built the recordings that these were more than just demos. And not only that, there was a recurring theme running through all the songs they had recorded.
“I was sitting in my parent’s house on Christmas of 2020, and it dawned on me that all three of the songs we had finished so far had references to birds. I’ve always been into folklore and mythology, and in general I am fascinated by the different states a bird may spend its life in—caged, migrating, in flight. So as I finished the rest of the songs, I continued to chase that metaphor for emphasis on how those phases related to the main character.”
The six songs from those remote recording sessions comprise Hedges’ debut EP, These Are Not Songs About Birds. The narrative throughout the EP follows its protagonist, Lorelei, as she is seen through the eyes of six different characters—a lover, a neighbor, a childhood friend, etc. Though Lorelei makes lasting impressions on everyone she comes in contact with, however briefly, it is apparent that nothing can really hold her. She is in a constant state of migration, in flight, but with no particular destination—seemingly caged in by her own inability to slow down.
Throughout the album Alden functions as an omniscient narrator, but there is a sense that it’s only possible to look in from the outside. He takes on the perspective of each of the characters and their interactions with Lorelei, but with a distance that allows him to tell the stories without being dragged into the fray. Much like the remoteness that informed the recording process and life during the pandemic, there’s a space between everyone and Lorelei… they never fully get to have her. At the moment at which anyone thinks they can hold her, she’s on her way out of the scene.
“The song ‘Mourning Dove’ is sort of the thesis statement of the album. There’s something lasting about having one unique short interaction or one powerful moment with someone that sticks in my mind. It’s about having one of those moments meeting Lorelei, and it’s the last time anyone sees her. In some folklore, mourning doves are seen as a visitation from a dead loved one. In the song, the narrator feels compelled to be her mourning dove… to travel the world telling her story.”
Sonically, These Are Not Songs About Birds is a puzzle in itself. It brings together little scraps of all the differing music that has informed Hedges’ life and pieces it together into a lush, cohesive sound. It carries on the narrative storytelling tradition of folk music, but is elevated by anthemic lifts and more sophisticated arrangements than one would expect.
And throughout the entire record, Hedges takes on the role of that mourning dove—flying alongside Lorelei, narrating the pattern of her migration, ever aware of what can’t be tamed, had, or held. He reminds us that life is pieced together in tiny fleeting moments, and how we tell the story is the only thing that lasts.
“Anyone can be a memory, but she should be a song.”
bio by Kirby Brown