Premiere: Charlie Hickey, ‘Waiting Games’

Kevin Bronson on November 28th, 2018

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Charlie Hickey released his first EP when he was 14. In those days, the South Pasadena native was just beginning to play around town with other teenage wunderkinds at places like Room 5, Genghis Cohen and the Coffee Gallery Backstage, trying out solo material and dueting with artists such as Phoebe Bridgers (who used to cover one of his songs). The chatter that he was sophisticated beyond his years started then.

In between high school and, y’know, being a teenager, Hickey followed in 2016 with a second EP, “This Is Not Easy for Me,” playing the wizened kid in a staredown with impending adulthood with blunt emotions relatable for two generations of listeners. Some songs veered toward traditional folk; others were like puzzles begging to be solved, surprising in structure and/or wordplay.

Now 19, Hickey this week unveils the new single “Waiting Games,” a fairly straight-ahead (for him) guitar-pop song with a cascade of chords that belie the tune’s underlying tension, which is surviving the waiting game you play when a relationship is just blossoming. “It’s about the journey a feeling can take you on before anything comes of it at all,” Hickey says. “It’s just about the sweetness and anxiety of new infatuation and trying to live with both of them, a quest that is as relevant to me now as it was then.”

The song itself came to fruition after quite a wait. Hickey allows as how he actually wrote it when he was a sophomore in high school, and the final recording melds sessions from three different studios. Lending a hand were producer Tony Berg, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Jennifer Condos and keyboardists Ethan Gruska and Garret Lang.

||| Stream: “Waiting Games”