♡Michael Hedges🤍 A Day in the Life (Lennon/McCartney) ♡8April,1982♡Aurora Theatre, Baltimore, MD

♡Michael Hedges🤍 A Day in the Life (Lennon/McCartney) ♡8April,1982♡Aurora Theatre, Baltimore, MD 🖤Closing Song. “Thank you very much. Thank you Aurora Theatre.”

Set List:April 8, 1982, Aurora Theatre, Baltimore, MD
A Song for Alex (Baal T'shuvah)
The Happy Couple
Hot Type
Baby Toes
Silent Anticipations
Watching My Life Go By
I Want You
Bensusan
Eleven Small Roaches
A Day in the Life (Lennon/McCartney)
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Chicago Tribune - October 9, 1987 🗞️When Michael Hedges was a student at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, the young guitarist led a double life. By day, he studied classical guitar and composition in the rarefied conservatory atmosphere. By night, he pounded out Neil Young and the Beatles in ”crowded, smoky, Class-B bars.” ”I learned to hold a crowd,” he recalls. ”It was noisy in those places.”

Hedges has since graduated to better music clubs. But he continues to inhabit seemingly opposite worlds.

His guitar solos have the spacious, lyric quality commonly associated with the Windham Hill label on which they appear. In the manner of Chopin`s nocturnes, they conjure faraway places and late- night hours. ”Aerial Boundaries,” his second and most successful album, seems almost to have come to Earth from another place.

Yet these pieces are complex and technically demanding, inspiring critics to marvel at his ”prodigious technique.” In performance, Hedges glides effortlessly from the sublimity of ”Aerial Boundaries,” the title track on that album, to a raucous version of the Beatles` ”Come Together.”

”Inside him a rock-and-roller wrestled with a conservatory-trained musician,” observed Down Beat magazine, ”and out came a strong, innovative music.”

While critics grope for labels (”new acoustic” ), Hedges` fans just plain like the music.

In person, Hedges is much the way he is on stage: open and a bit laconic, with a gentle drawl from being raised in Enid, OK. He is candid regarding his musical ambitions, some of which (making the Top 40, for example) may surprise his intense following.

”I`m the guy who grew up in the Midwest, and all I knew was pop music,” he says, with only a little exaggeration. He was playing the piano at age 4, and took up the cello, clarinet and flute later on, inspired in the latter case by Ian Anderson. It was the Beatles` ”I Want to Hold Your Hand” that led him to the guitar. In junior high school, he says, ”I just locked myself in my room with my guitar.”

After classical training at Peabody, he studied electronic music at Stanford. In Palo Alto, he began playing at the New Varsity, where he was discovered by Will Ackerman, a guitarist and a co-founder of Windham Hill Records.

When he comes bounding out on stage, Hedges hardly seems the man of the otherworldly ”Aerial Boundaries.” He has the face of a scruffy cherub, with corn-row braids and a sunny Midwest nature. His compositions push the instrument and himself to the limit. He picks and strums with both hands, beats on the guitar face like a drum, uses the strings in unusual ways-there`s so much going on, it can sound like two or three people.

”The next tune in the set is `Aerial Boundaries,` ” he explains. ”I want to make sure people have gotten a little bit loose so they can concentrate.”

Increasingly, Hedges has been moving toward songwriting and singing; his last album, ”Watching My Life Go By,” was vocal, with his own guitar and minimal accompaniment. His singing does not equal his guitar work, especially when he`s in his jazzy Joni Mitchell mode. Yet Hedges also can be genuinely evocative, as in ”Dancing in the Back Seat,” which is addressed to his younger brother. And what he may lack in vocal ability, he makes up in sincerity and conviction.

”It`s all in whether you mean what you are playing,” he says. ”That`s what soul is.

”I`m not working on my guitar with my fingers,” he adds. ”I`m working on my being, trying to expand it through music.”

In just a few years, ”Aerial Boundaries” has become a Hedges standard. Snippets appear as filler on National Public Radio`s ”All Things Considered” and on TV ads. Hedges also has recorded the sound track for a Japanese movie on mountain climber hero.

One of his goals is to form a rock band and do what the Beatles did: give his music ”enough hook, enough soul, enough commercial potential” to make the Top 40. To his fans, this may be like Dylan going electric.

Yet a new live album, ”Live on the Double Planet,” seems to capture his urgency. And Michael Hedges is convinced that he doesn`t have to sell out to sell.

”Hey, if the Beatles can make the Top 40 playlist and communicate something good to the world, man, I`m all for it,” he says.”Maybe if the Beatles hadn`t come along, I wouldn`t be so headstrong.”https://www.chicagotribune.com/1987/1...
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🎬Oracle: The Life and Music of Michael Hedges
https://michaelhedges.com/documentary/ (to support the 2026 film) Thank you !!

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