Wednesday November 11th Hank Heaven - The Heaven on Earth Tour \*\*\* When Hank Heaven first met the producer Phil Weinrobe, in late October 2024, the songwriter ended the conversation with an offhand bit of small talk about the music they would soon make together. “I hope,” Hank said casually, “it sounds good.” Weinrobe had a reply at the ready: “If the songs are good, it will sound good.” Five months later, in March 2025, they reconvened at Sugar Mountain, the studio in Brooklyn where Weinrobe has made records for the likes of Big Thief, Billie Marten, and Tomberlin. He’d built a band of young New York ringers specifically for this session—drummer Sean Mullins, multi-instrumentalist Núria Graham, bassist El Kempner (of Palehound), guitarists Mike Helderman and Adam Brisbin among them. Days later, Welterweight, Hank’s third EP and debut for Nice Life Recording Company, was done. It doesn’t just sound good; it sounds like a breakthrough. Hank didn’t always consider themselves a songwriter. Only five years ago, they were a guitarist, so swept up as a kid in the sounds of Django Reinhardt that they toured the world with swing bands while still a teen. Hank soon became a guitarist for hire, with sessions and tours alongside pals like Samia and Del Water Gap. But those songwriters are now Hank’s peers: In late 2022, they released Call Me Hank, an endearing and infectious five-song EP about questions of identity they were then exploring. Two years later, Loaded Dice asked more questions about who Hank Heaven was—no, not just a young trans songwriter and guitarist, but a person confronting issues of obsession and addiction, of maybe being an asshole when they knew better. Welterweight, though, feels like Hank Heaven’s proper arrival, not only as a songwriter of uncommon candor but also as a person learning what it means to navigate love and life. This is Hank, landing in their late 20s and sober and having fully changed their name and transitioned, slowly discovering what it means to build a sustainable relationship, what it means to long for someone, what it means to be longed for by someone. To wit, Hank is currently in the longest continual relationship of their life and is already deep into the next record, its songs about exactly that.