Phoenix rocker filters his anxiety into very timely art
The first words out of Trevor Hedges’ mouth on the opening track of a Sundressed album called “Home Remedy” are “I need noise-canceling headphones to cancel the noise inside my head.”
His lyrics paint a vivid portrait of a young man overwhelmed by the anxiety of modern life, waking up sweaty from every dream, questioning symptoms, frustrated that friends just keep suggesting all the same home remedies.
And yet, he manages to find at least some semblance of the inner peace he’s after by the time the chorus ends “Any time I think that I’m dying, I’m usually fine,” effectively setting the tone for an album he says is “about getting better by any means necessary.”
It’s a timely concept — one that’s only gotten that much timelier, in fact, since Hedges and his bandmates left Phoenix to work with producer Mike Pepe at Barefoot Recording in Hollywood in the summer of 2019.
“I kind of look at it as hey, things sometimes get really messed up,” Hedges says. “But the best thing you can do is find happiness in those parts and don’t let the bad win. Don’t give up when things get hard, you know?”
How music has been therapeutic for Hedges
Hedges has been using music as a means of getting better since he started writing songs while getting sober in a Prescott treatment center.
How he got to that point in his life, Hedges says, is “a very typical story.”
Introduced to opiates after a car accident in high school, he went on to get hooked on heroin.
“I really (expletive) up a lot of my life in just a few short years before I finally got sick of it,” he says. “And when I ended up in treatment, getting sober, I had a guitar with me.”
Expressing himself through art is a release he always knew was in there,
Hedges says.
“But I was so focused on my addiction that I couldn’t be creative. So as soon as I wasn’t using, I kind of just really dove into songwriting, and it came natural to me.”
How Sundressed came to be
As Hedges recalls, once he’d gotten a little more than a year of sobriety under his belt, “I got encouraged by friends in the program to ‘go chase your dreams.’ Like, ‘Why don’t you move back to Phoenix, start a band and don’t be afraid anymore? You’re clean now.’ So that’s kind of what I did.”
Hedges launched Sundressed 2012.
Playing songs that got him through recovery in front of people, Hedges says, “was honestly a lot more freeing than I thought it would be at first because I’d never been a super social person. But I don’t have a problem singing in front of people for some reason.”
If anything, performing what he’d written only added to the therapeutic aspect of the process.
“They always talk about how important it is to be present,” he says. “And I don’t think I’m ever more present than when I’m performing.”
When Sundressed started taking a more punk direction
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It was right around the time he started changing up the Sundressed sound a bit, taking it more in a punkish direction, that he realized this could be more than a very therapeutic hobby.
“We put out this one song called ‘Hold Your Head up High,’ and it got around on the internet,” he says. “I woke up to having emails from industry people for the first time, that was when I like realized it was possible.”
It didn’t take long for those industry types to realize Sundressed “didn’t have our (expletive) together” yet, he says. “But I did make some connections through that first song that I still have and that was kind of when I started pursuing it as a potential career.”
The original Sundressed sound was more acoustic-based.
“Probably my biggest songwriting influence ever is Conor Oberst and Bright Eyes,” Hedges says.
“So when I first started, I was kind of just imitating my heroes. But I always had loved bands like Saves the Day and Jimmy Eat World. And over time, I kind
of married the singer-songwriter stuff and the more pop-punk emo stuff that I grew up on too.”
The band started to hit its stride in 2017
After testing the waters with a pair of promising EPs, Hedges really hit his stride on a full-length debut called “A Little Less Put Together” in 2017.
By the time he started working on “Home Remedy,” Sundressed had become a proper band, not just an outlet for his writing, having toured at length on “A Little Less Put Together.”
Prior to “Home Remedy,” Hedges had always been the primary songwriter.
This time, guitarist AJ Peacox was much more involved in the creative process.
“AJ was just such a big part of making the demos of these new songs,” Hedges says, “and I feel like he really pushed us into getting a musical identity as far as guitar work and stuff.”
All that touring they’d done on the previous album also helped him wrap his head around the connection his songs had made with Sundressed’s growing fan base.
“Getting to connect with people that may have gotten something out of one of our songs, I started being a little more open on stage about things that I’ve been through, which led to more connections and making the songs kind of feel like there was a community forming around them,” Hedges says.
How ‘Home Remedy’ came together
Sundressed went into the sessions for “Home Remedy” wanting the production “to match the raw emotional material of the songs a little more,” he says. “I feel like we really worked on representing who we are and what we sound like live a lot more on this record.”
The title track is actually the last song he wrote for the album, feeling he needed a track to tie the other songs together.
“I had referenced home remedies throughout,” he says.
“And I saw it as kind of a continuation of ‘A Little Less Put Together’ in the sense of finding solutions and figuring out ways to enjoy happiness in those little moments in life. Our generation is faced with all these things like not being able to have health care, being broke, working multiple jobs, you name it.”
Once he came up with the line about headphones to cancel the noise in his head, he says, “the rest just came right out just on my couch.”
The lyrics came from personal experience.
“I did actually get some professional help for my mental health for the first time since I’ve gotten sober,” Hedges says.
“So that was definitely something that was going on in my head when I was writing because I was working through a lot of stuff, being able to recognize those patterns and realizing that generally, when you’re panicking, it’s usually gonna be OK.”
Hedges misses being able to connect directly with fans
“Home Remedy” is the first Sundressed album released on Rude Records, an Italian punk imprint whose roster also features Saves the Day and Guttermouth.
The album was released on Sept. 18. In any other year, they would be on the road by now, connecting with their fans.
As Hedges says, it’s been a somewhat “bittersweet” experience.
“We’re watching our Spotify numbers go up and our socials and getting all this feedback, and it’s like, ‘Man, I can only imagine what kind of tour offers we might be getting right now.’ But it’s also made us really creative.”
In addition to a string of music videos, they filmed a concert at the Rebel Lounge and got into streaming on Twitch.
“So it’s been cool to figure out ways to keep the connection going when we can’t actually go see people face to face,” Hedges says.
They’re hoping to get back on the road and make their first trip overseas in 2021.
“Obviously, I’d love for it to be our main source of income that we focus all our time and energy on,” Hedges says.
“I think that’s always the goal, whatever that looks like. But we’re totally happy touring in a van with a trailer. We don’t have any big rock star ambitions. Not that we would be against that. We just want to keep doing it.”
It’s hard work, Hedges says, but fun work.
With a laugh, he adds, “Being broke on the road is better than, you know, making lattes in Scottsdale for mean people.”