Hedges

“I’m a puzzle guy.”

Nashville-based singer-songwriter Alden Hedges was born in Madison, Wisconsin and moved after high school to La Crosse, WI 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. July 2015 he moved to Austin to play for various Texas singer songwriters. Since July 2019 he has 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. With nothing but time during the pandemic, 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 American Aquarium bandmates for help recording demos for what he had written. They worked remotely over the course of several months, sending files back and forth. It became apparent as they built the recordings that these were more than just demos. The six songs from those remote recording sessions comprise Hedges’ debut Album, These Are Not Songs About Birds.