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Going Deeper With Caleb Hearn

Going Deeper With Caleb Hearn

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Caleb Hearn is an open book. If you’re one of the North Carolina native’s 1.5 million TikTok followers or 2.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify, this isn’t a surprise. Hearn is refreshingly honest in his music.

Whether he’s singing about love, mental health, faith or everything in between, he’s got nothing to hide.

Vulnerability has always been his default, he explains, but there is something about writing music that pushes him to be more honest than he’s ever been before.

Your music is known for being honest and vulnerable. Have you always been so open about your life?

I’ve always been the kid that is a little more emotional. Even though the front I may give off when I meet someone might not make them think I’m just an open book and an emotional person. I wasn’t really raised that way, but there’s always been a part of me that really wants to be as genuine as I can be.

That starts back to when I was a kid, wanting to know the real side of people. A lot of people are just completely fine with meeting someone and whatever they give off is enough. For me, when I meet someone, I always feel empty if I didn’t get all sides of them. I wanted to bring that out because I wanted to bring that out in myself. I would only feel comfortable doing so if they did.

That was always a thing growing up. My closest friends to this day are the ones that I was able to drag that out of and learn everything about them and really know them. I think that goes along with the music now too, with just being honest and vulnerable. I want to be as straightforward with people as I can. Sometimes I find myself opening up to people I just met.

It’s just a part of me. I think it definitely can be a downfall, but it also is really nice because you sometimes give away too much off the bat, and on one hand, they know everything about me, but I would rather it be that way than being closed off and not sharing anything at all.

I feel like the connections you make with people are so much deeper when that’s your thing. And with music, I feel that same way with the music I’m putting out. I develop a more personal and real connection with fans and listeners, just from going to shows and people coming up to me and telling me about a song that I wrote that means something to them. That’s what makes it all worth it.

When did you start pursuing your music as a career?

It’s one of those things where I started, then I put it down and got back into it. I started making music technically, not professionally or releasing music, just writing songs when I was 11 or 12 after getting a guitar for Christmas.

I was looking up to these singer-songwriters, like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, and learning how to tell a story with music. I really enjoyed it. I did that as therapy for a few years.

When I went to high school, I started playing sports and went away from it a little. I met my roommate in high school — he actually moved to Nashville with me — and he was interested in music as well. We thought, if there’s somebody else doing it, maybe that’s a sign we should do it, too. We would do it after basketball practice, write songs and stay up late.

During COVID, I started releasing music, just seeing what I could throw out there and trying to get better. My friend and I made the jump a year after that and moved to Nashville. Ever since, I’ve been writing music and signed to a record label about two years ago, right when I moved to Nashville. It’s been a slow grind from there.

How do you feel like you’ve grown as an artist over the last few years?

When I moved to Nashville, I saw how many people were doing this and how many people were really good at it. That was eye-opening and hurt me in the beginning. I let it get to my head and struggled, but part of the growth was learning that this isn’t just a competition. It’s not about me trying to be better than the person beside me.

The great thing about Nashville is that everyone wants to grow together. It feels like people genuinely want to see you succeed. Surrounding myself with people who were working harder than me motivated me.

I saw how hard others were working and realized I needed to do the same. I care about it just as much and want to put myself in the same position. Seeing people succeed around me was a big growth point in my life. I was constantly watching people grow, and I had to make a choice: either stop and do something else or grow with them.

How does faith influence your music?

Well, I am a Christian. I was raised Baptist, and I don’t necessarily love putting a label on it anymore. I have a relationship with Jesus that is very important, and whether or not I come out and say that blatantly in my music, I don’t know if I ever will. I might. I’ve thought about it.

But I feel like I just want my life and my journey to display that as much as I can. So whether that’s in the lyrics and the music, I try my best to keep that image in my music.

Whether or not I’m saying it blatantly, my faith is the most important thing in my life. That’s a big thing that’s helped me in my own mental health—my faith and my relationship with God.

You have a few songs about your mental health struggle. What’s something you think people misunderstand about mental health?

I think a lot of misunderstanding comes from how we treat mental health. It’s why I wrote my song “Klonopin.”

A lot of people have never heard that word, but Klonopin is simply an as-needed anxiety medication that I was prescribed for my panic disorder. It got to the point with that drug that I could see myself relying on it too much.

I never felt like I was in a dangerous spot necessarily or taking it too much because you don’t really overdose on it. But anytime I was panicking or having any sort of anxiety, I could just take one pill, and it would make me feel normal. It was the only thing that I’ve ever been able to take or do that can make me feel normal in 15 minutes. Everything else I’d tried never really worked.

So Klonopin ­— this medication that was just so perfect —  became a crutch. I started feeling like my anxiety wasn’t getting better. I was taking this drug when I needed it. I started developing this toxic relationship with it where I felt like, “If I don’t have the Klonopin on this flight, it’s not going to be good.” I don’t think that’s the way to look at it. I think it can be a dangerous game if you start looking at things like that.

When I was writing the song, I wrote it with the idea of not saying anything about Klonopin. It kind of went right back to my old ways of all the other songs I’d done, not being fully open and not being fully transparent about everything. I was worried about it, and I still am sometimes. I feel like a lot of people don’t know what that is.

But I do find a lot of peace in the sense that it’s real to me and some people are going to find it real. I also kept the song somewhat general enough about my anxiety that it can relate in a lot of ways. Any sort of addiction or crutch that you have that is stopping you from fixing the underlying issue that you do have, whether that’s alcohol or anything. I really wanted to open up and be as vulnerable as I could.

Why was it important to make music about that?

I struggle with health anxiety. I don’t know where it stemmed from or why, but I have the physical symptoms that come with anxiety.

What I mean is, I notice myself spiraling from the physical symptoms instead of it stemming from something like, “I’m anxious because I have a flight tomorrow.” It’s more like I’ll feel a sensation that anxiety can cause in my body.

It’s just an interesting struggle. I’ve always thought, “How do I even explain that to someone else?” I don’t want to look weird or crazy in a song.

But I wanted it to show the darkest parts of struggling with mental health. Even in the music video, I wanted to show how my personal struggle gets dark for me.

I feel like when people talk about anxiety, I still think we do have quite a bit of ways to go because it’s still pretty sugar-coated. People talk about it, but they never open up like others need them to.

I think there’s people out there who would never think to share how actually dark things are for them because of their depression or anxiety or whatever mental health issue they’re dealing with.

And I was thinking about that as I was writing this music and realized I needed to go there. I needed to tell the whole story.

So that’s what I did. Even in the music video, the scenes got really dark because we wanted to address every vice people run to when they’re struggling. I just wanted it to be super real and honest about what mental health struggles really look like in our world. Honestly, I just felt like I had to do it.

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