Stream: Annie Hardy, ‘Want’

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anniehardy
Annie Hardy (photo by Asia Whitney)

Eleven years ago, Giant Drag was playing big festivals, touring with Scissor Sisters, Pretty Girls Make Graves and the Jesus and Mary Chain, to name a few, and riding that grunge rock train to success propelled by Annie Hardy‘s sassy charisma as frontwoman. But the band fell apart. Micah Calabrese quit and Hardy attempted to keep the torch burning for a while. Then she decided to stop making music and start a family. She gave birth to a boy, Silvio, in 2015, but he died 17 days into his life from SIDS. Ten months later, the father of her child, Robert Paulson, aka rapper Cadalak, died from an overdose. To deal with these tragic events, Hardy put her feelings into songs, which come together on her debut solo album, “Rules,” out April 7 on Full Psycho/American Primitive Records.

The first single, “Want,” features drummer Don Bolles of The Germs and Stephen McBean from Pink Mountaintops and Black Mountain on guitar. At almost 5 minutes in length, “Want” is emotional. She leads off with the lyric, “I want my baby back …” Her voice is scratchy and pleading, and the song spirals out in a two-minute instrumental jam that will make your palms sweat. While this, and many of the other songs on “Rules” deal with loss, there is some lighter material scattered around, and there are several funny side projects Hardy puts her time into, such as Band Car, where she drives around and makes up songs based on texts from strangers, Spirit Anniemalz , a video series documenting creatures in her yard, and King Trammell C’s Kingdom, a show about her cat.

||| Stream: “Want”