Brad Heller
Veteran troubadour Brad Heller’s new single "Incinerating Miles" is a well-worn road song, a hand-rolled hit of working-class Americana that draws as much from Dylan and Dire Straits as it does Son Volt & Springsteen. Burning like a cigarette ember out of a car window in the dark, it's about the American highway as a means for outrunning and temporarily escaping profound loss.
“I wrote ‘Incinerating Miles’ back during the pandemic,” says the Wilmington, North Carolina-based singer-songwriter, who in recent years, has shared bills with artists such as American Aquarium, Caleb Caudle and Sadler Vaden. “Like so many people during that time, I experienced loss, and I just found myself driving around for days on end, clearing my head. The song is about self alienation, uncertainty in a time of complete chaos, and basically just dealing with loss and using continual movement to try to avoid and defy that loss.”
“Incinerating Miles” is the first track to emerge from Heller’s forthcoming album, From What You’ve Built, recorded with Heller’s longtime collaborator, co-producer and engineer Patrick Ogelvie at Wilmington’s Flux Audio & Video. Having worked together on five of Heller’s six albums, over the years the pair has developed a close friendship, as well as a deep synergy in the studio.
“We've got a really symbiotic relationship,” Heller says. “Patrick has this great internalized music library. If I have an idea like, ‘Hey, why don’t we work in some Dick Dale surf guitar or some Mike Mills basslines and harmonies, he immediately gets what I’m saying. He's got a brilliant musical mind, and it's always great to bounce stuff off him.”
From What You’ve Built was made at a relaxed pace over several years, constructed track by track, with Heller laying down a core foundation of acoustic guitar, harmonica, percussion and, of course, lead vocals. Aiding in the album’s journey were drummer Ronn Pifer and keyboardist Phil Bevilacqua, as well as Paul Edelman (guitars, backing vocals), and another longtime Heller collaborator Ted Crenshaw (guitars, bass, lap steel guitar, backing vocals).
“Ted was the first guy I met on the music scene when I moved to Wilmington, and we've been playing together for 20 years,” Heller says. “Ted has a blues / jazz background, he's a super skilled player, and like Patrick he’s got a huge music library inside his head. I love how tasteful his playing is. We both believe in a lot of space—in letting the groove take over.”
A steady member of Heller’s touring lineup the last few years, Paul Edelman also made significant contributions to the new record, in particular his stellar guitar work and lush backing vocals on “Incinerating Miles.” “I saw Brian Wilson live a couple years ago, and I just love those layered harmonies,” Heller says. “When I brought Paul in, we had him do all these ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs,’ and when we stacked up the backing vocals, I got chills. And playing live with Paul, he’d come up with this incredible guitar part for the outro of ‘Incinerating Miles.’ Having him lay it down in the studio was one of my favorite moments making this record.”
Thematically, From What You’ve Built, deals with the sudden collapse of people’s lives due to an unforeseen crisis. As with many of Heller’s records, there are deep threads of self alienation, loss and reflection, though this one is also shot through with a healthy amount of anger over feelings of powerlessness and frustration.
“During the pandemic, I was writing a lot about people who were unable to transition from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age,” Heller says. “That's what the song ‘Resilient Storm’ is about; this guy who travels the country, and rides around town because he has no idea how to make the transition—he's worked his whole life in factories and labor jobs, and he has no idea how to navigate the Digital Age. Which I think can be a very difficult task, especially for Gen Xers and older generations who didn’t grow up with technology and were sort of forced into it.”
Despite being written several years prior, "Incinerating Miles" is dusted with subtle political undertones that speak to the present moment. "The nation is a powderkeg / And the cities are a fuse," Heller sings, though he has a knack for not getting bogged down in austere preachiness, always bringing his commentary back to human stories.
“There is a lot of social commentary in my songs, but I try not to get overly political,” he says. “I'd rather tell stories and have the listener decide for themselves what I'm trying to say. Springsteen does this so well—he can be pretty political, but him and Neil Young, they're just so empathetic. Even though Bruce has never worked a job in his life, he's able to talk about working class people because he has so much empathy. I think that's what makes a great songwriter—the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.”
Heller grew up in Tucson, Arizona. His first love wasn’t music like you might expect, but the game of baseball. Heller had a natural talent for the sport and spent years honing his abilities. After college, he was signed as a free agent by the Texas Rangers and played professional baseball for five years, putting in minor-league stints as a catcher, first baseman and outfielder with the Rangers as well as the Montreal Expos and Chicago White Sox organizations before playing independent pro baseball in Canada, New York and Reno, Nev..
“So I decided to pick the two of the most difficult professions to pursue—sports and music,” Heller says, brandishing a self-deprecating yet swagger-filled underdog grin.
The latter of these passions entered Heller’s life back in college when he became enamored with Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album and acquired his first guitar. “I learned by playing along to the title track,” he says. “It's just three chords, but it's such a great song. The whole record is just so beautifully stripped down. It really influenced my songwriting and aesthetic, though my own sound is a little more fleshed out with rock and roll than Nebraska.”
After his baseball career ended, Heller moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, and started playing open mics and small cafes. Things took off from there, with Heller releasing his self-recorded debut, It’s Only Your Life Anyway in 2002. Three years later, he worked with Ogelvie as co-producer / engineer for the first time, and together they wove together raw indie-folk tapestry The Conscience of Sins, an album music journalist Grayson Currin (NPR, Pitchfork, The New York Times) compared to masters Son Volt, Wille Nelson & Bob Dylan. The piano-and-organ-anchored Beyond This Life followed in 2009, blending pointed social commentary with a pop sensibility, before Heller hit his stride with American Burden, an album he toured heavily with his band The Fustics. And in 2019, Heller delivered an intimate, minimalist affair with The Sentence, IndiePulse praising Heller as a ‘“profound songsmith” with a “stripped-down, yet full-bodied sound steeped in social commentary and self-reflection.”
Now, Heller is gearing up to release his sixth full-length, From What You’ve Built, out this fall. While influenced by his decades living on the Carolina coastal plain, with its lush greenery, rivers and oceans, there’s still an undeniable space to the record—a wide-open, big-sky vastness that can only be attributed to Heller’s Southwestern roots.
“Arizona, as a place, has been a tremendous influence on my music. I think all that open space out West contributes to this cinematic openness in my songs. I was really going for a cinematic feel with this record—these big crescendos, and then you break everything down. And then you bring it up to a crescendo again. This is the first time I’ve ever used so many fadeouts on a record. Taking a page from Springsteen, we’ve got all these grandiose outros that just keep going and going. They grab you to listen longer once the lyrics are done. Eventually things fade out, but when they do it's still very much the apex of the song. Subliminally, you feel it, even if you don't have it cranked up.”
