Starting Something New

Welcome to the Haerts Newsletter

Hello everyone,

We’re starting the newsletter because we wanted a simpler, more direct way to stay in touch with you, no algorithms, no filters. Just us, Benny and me, sharing what’s going on from time to time.

The past few years have been a time of transition, some of it planned, most of it not, but all of it necessary. It was a sunny, but also messy, deeply defining stretch of time, and our upcoming album Laguna Road came out of it.

This newsletter is a continuation of that. A place to share news, ideas, and parts of our process we haven’t shown. Not everything will be polished and that’s part of the point.

To begin, I’m sharing the first "recording" of the first single from the album, Woman on the Line, which is a voice memo from my phone that we found again recently.

I started writing the song on the piano in our living room at Laguna Road, not long after we moved in. The room was mostly empty, the yellow sofa, the table, and a lot of light coming in through the windows. Because of the bare walls, the sound carried. It felt good to sing in there and the room gave something back.

In all honesty I don’t love to share voice memos, especially when I’m playing piano. I’m not trained, and you can hear it, the hesitations, the wrong notes, the process of trying to find the song. I’d rather show something finished, something that showcases the craft, but I also think that seeing how something started can be of value and can add dimension to the finished version.

During the process of making this song, and the album, Benny and I often went back to the early voice memos because despite all their flaws, they hold the spirit of the songs, the feeling out of which they came, something that can be so hard to preserve through the process of recording and production.

So here you have the shaky voice memo of Woman on the Line. Please bear with me as I bear with myself.;)

And lastly a video by our friend and longtime collaborator Julian Klincewicz, capturing us playing the song at the same piano it was written on, just a few days before we moved out of the house.

Nini