Kevin Herig

“Singer-songwriter, Kevin Herig has a sound that musically makes you want to dance as often as they lyrically make you want to lounge in a velvet rocking chair and simply listen.”- Humbird

Kevin has been deeply rooted in the Albuquerque music scene since his debut in 2006 with his first band, Asper Kourt. With Kevin as the frontman, the band was chosen by and featured on MTVMusic.com as their, “The Needle in the Haystack," and was featured on The Food Network’s, “What Would Brian Boitano Make?” Kevin released his debut solo album, “Give It All Away,” in early 2014, an EP, “All You Can’t Control” in March of 2016, and most recently his second full-length LP, "Stubborn Heart" in December of 2018. 

 

Kevin is also the Founder and Director of Rock 101 New Mexico, a music program in his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico that aims to educate and empower youth.

 

From Musically Speaking by Mel Minter (All You Can't Control):

 

Now that singer/songwriter/guitarist Kevin Herig’s good friend (and backing vocalist on this album) Meredith Wilder has headed north to Colorado, Herig can quite reasonably lay claim to the mantle of the area’s sweetest voice—warm, intimate, and soothing—reminiscent of early Paul Simon. That’s not the only influence you’ll hear on All You Can’t Control. There are echoes of CSN, ’50s Memphis, and the Beatles, too—but it’s all Herig.

 

The six original songs are so well and tightly crafted, with such fine details so perfectly placed—a bell here, a brief harmony there, a slide up the guitar’s neck to carry you to the next verse—that you might want to take them in your hands and turn them over and over for the sheer tactile pleasure of it. The music is never hurried, and the musicians—Wilder, Kyle Ruggles (bass), Jeff Bell (drums), Brendan Brejcha (piano and organ), Chris Tenerowicz (slide)—play with a restrained laconic fervor that deepens the emotional content. Herig explores relationships—good ones, bad ones, equivocal ones, impossible ones—and memory through the lens of singular details.

 

In “Honey Jar,” he grapples with uncertainty: “These lines we hook and throw, I follow through the air, into the water/But from there, I do not see where they will go.” In “Contrails,” he can’t escape what he cannot have: “It shows on my face like a breath in cold air./I fall through the fog, and I’ll stay suspended there./I brood in the truth,/I can never have you./How long must you hold on to me?” In “Aptos,” then and now simultaneously inhabit a special place: “I go and stand there all the time,/my toes up to the edge, my hands clenched to a rusty fence./I look down from the cliff and see some kids are playing with/A baseball bat washed in with old debris./One of those kids was me.” The crisp production, shared between Herig and Tenerowicz, finds an airy spaciousness that allows the material to breathe and invites the listener in.