Article: INDEPENDENCE DAY FREAK-OUT

Heshy R
May 23
20 min read

Updated: May 26

Interview with Tom Aldora of Aldora Britain Records

Issue 348, Monday, May 19, 2025

An aspiring cult figure, an intuitive musical player, a songwriter of heartland rock anthems, and a self-proclaimed ‘beach enthusiast’. These are the many guises of New Jersey’s Heshy R, known for his brilliant creative projects under his The Hesh Inc. pseudonym. Triple Whammy!!! and The Definitive Soul in Exile are glistening examples of this, records that have a solid rock and roll backbone but also travel in a myriad of differing directions. It is a fantastic rootsy pop singer-songwriter cocktail that freewheels along vast sonic highways with intent and drive, and also an essential outlet for Heshy R’s exquisite and enduring songwriting, with a flexible cast of players that serve the songs when needed. Taking a break from these exceptional artistic adventures, Heshy R sat down for a chat with Aldora Britain Records about his musical journey to date. We discussed popular original compositions from his back-catalogue, The Hesh Inc.’s growth and evolution over time, current big influences and inspirations, and much, much more. That exclusive in-depth conversation is published here in full for the very first time.

Aldora Britain Records: Hello Heshy, how are you? I am excited to be talking with such a fantastic artist from over in New Jersey. It is amazing how music can bring us together from all around the world. Let’s start off by travelling back in time. What are some of your earliest musical memories and what was it that first pushed you towards pursuing this passion of yours?

Heshy R: Hi Tom, great, pleased to be talking with you! Some of my earliest musical memories, let’s see, I always loved listening to music. I don’t remember this myself but my mother says she knew I would be a musical baby when she felt me in utero, kicking in time to the music when she went to see Fiddler on the Roof with my father, in its original run on Broadway. Then, when I was about four years old, I remember sitting at the piano in the living room at the home of a friend of my family’s, banging out a four note melody I heard in my head, trying to get it right. To this day I am grateful to these friends for not telling me to stop!

I started taking piano lessons at around eight years old, but I didn’t have the patience to learn how to sight read notes and practice scales. I wanted to learn how to play songs and learn them fast! I ended up quitting lessons at age ten, but I never stopped noodling on the piano after that. Most of the time I’d stay in the same key signatures, C and G with their relative minors. I discovered rock and roll at age twelve, and like Janey in Lou Reed’s song, one fine day I put on a New York station and couldn’t believe what I heard at all. It was all downhill from there!

By the time I finished eighth grade, I was already scribbling stories about myself fronting a fictional rock band, and about midway through high school, I and one of my best friends, Izzy Kieffer, decided to form a band, with him on the drums and me on keys, after we had seen The Blues Brothers movie one too many times. Life did seem to imitate art when we tried to put the band together, minus the car chases though! Haha! You might say that I always imagined myself performing, being up onstage and playing music for appreciative audiences, and after so many years of just imagining it, I finally got to do it.

ABR: And now, let’s take a leap forward to the present day and a brilliant project of yours. The beginnings of The Hesh Inc. must have been an invigorating and exciting time. How did it all come to be? What was the initial spark? Is it an outlet for your solo musings or more of a collaborative kind of feel and approach?

HR: Well, when Izzy and I formed that first band in high school, it was called Reality Shock, after one of the instrumental tunes our saxophone player had composed. That was really a collaborative effort. He and I would select cover tunes we wanted to play, mostly soul and R&B, of course, with a generous selection of Bruce Springsteen tunes besides, because I had been a big Boss fan since I was twelve. I wasn’t so much of a songwriter then. I had begun taking a poke at songwriting when I was fourteen, but those were really half formed and juvenile efforts that I felt didn’t belong in a band. But then, when I was seventeen and approaching the end of high school, I wrote the first tune that I could rightfully call a capital S ‘Song’, with verses, choruses, bridge, and modulation, and lyrics that both my peers and appreciative adults who heard it thought were mature beyond my years. I still play that song in my live set, it’s called ‘I Don’t Mind’.

The Hesh Inc. really remained in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do as a vehicle for my own songwriting. I really didn’t get to give it a full shot until my later twenties, thanks mostly to all sorts of life’s twists and turns, like marriage, too young, to a woman who really did not want me to be in a band or pursue music in any way, and divorce, that kept music on the backburner. It was only after I moved from Boston, where I had been living during my first marriage, to the Jersey Shore, where I had wanted to be for a very long time, that I could begin to give it a serious effort.

“Most of my songs actually begin with the lyrics, I consider myself primarily a writer, and a composer only afterward, so the words mean a lot to me.”

ABR: With your output here, I am definitely drawn in by your dynamic songwriting and songcraft. How do you approach this part of your creative process? Are you drawn to specific themes or topics? Perhaps coming from more of a personal, observational, or even fictional perspective or point of view?

HR: Thanks, I’m glad you appreciate it! Most of my songs actually begin with the lyrics, I consider myself primarily a writer, and a composer only afterward, so the words mean a lot to me. At the same time though, I come up with a lot of my tunes by noodling on the piano without any specific aim toward writing music to go with those lyrics, most often that ‘marriage’ between music and lyrics will happen spontaneously.

I also have a way of ‘receiving’ tunes or melodies when I’m still in bed in the morning, in that semiconscious state halfway between asleep and awake. I keep a voice recorder on my night table and if I have the presence of mind to do so, I’ll reach for it and sing that tune that had been playing in my mind into the recorder. Sometimes it comes out good and it makes sense when I play it back later, but other times it really sounds like I was in another dimension when I recorded it and I can’t decipher it! But I keep them all, and some of them make it into my songs.

A lot of the songs I write are influenced by places I’ve lived, wanted to live, or visited. Sometimes they’re stories of things that happened in such and such a place, and other times they’re songs about the place itself. A lot of songs in my Soul in Exile albums actually use specific locations as metaphors for relationships. Many songs are semi-autobiographical, while others are about people I knew to some degree or another, friends, local characters, and the like. Others are outright fiction but could be loosely influenced by current events at the time of writing.

“My recording of the song was a gift to her, to let her know just how much she means to me. She’s in her twenties now, an adult woman in her own right, but the feeling never changes as we get older.”

ABR: Let’s get more specific with this now. I would like to focus on ‘I Can’t Wait to See My Baby’ and ‘Train Ride’. For each, what is the story behind the song, and can you remember the moment it came to be? Did anything in particular inspire them and what do they mean to you as the writer and performer of each?

HR: ‘I Can’t Wait to See My Baby’ is a song about divorced dads and their daughters, specifically me and my younger daughter. Dad and daughter relationships are both precious and fragile to begin with, even under ideal circumstances, exponentially more so when divorce is a factor and they live a continent apart from each other. Making the time and the effort to see each other can often be a superhuman effort and more often than not, the time and effort expended just to travel exceeds the time actually spent together, but every minute together is worth it and the separation anxiety afterwards can be shattering. I’m not ashamed to admit this, even as an adult male who’s supposed to be stoic about such things. I wrote the song in the summer of 2023, in the weeks leading up to such a visit. My recording of the song was a gift to her, to let her know just how much she means to me. She’s in her twenties now, an adult woman in her own right, but the feeling never changes as we get older.

‘Train Ride’ actually dates back, in its original form, to the 1980s! I was living in Israel at the time and I had written about a dozen ‘piano powerpop’ tunes that I would have loved to introduce to the band I was playing in, but the other musicians were more interested in playing Led Zeppelin and AC/DC covers than pop rock singer-songwriter stuff with intelligent lyrics! Haha! So these songs languished, and I hoped for a time that I’d be able to record and release them, which didn’t happen until now really. They came about as I would sit at the piano at home and I’d bang them out regularly, driving my family crazy in the process!

‘Riding the trains’ in the song is both a metaphor and a description of real life experiences. I loved riding trains as a kid, and that love lasted into adulthood. There is a certain sense of innocence and optimism in the music that I was writing in this and the other songs of that era of my life, before I got married and divorced and had to go out into the world and make my own living and all that adult stuff. But life did happen in the meantime, and the lyrics that I originally wrote didn’t quite cut it anymore. I went back and rewrote the words more recently, trying to keep the innocence in the first verse, but some cynicism sets in during the second verse where some of my working life experiences seep in. And in the third verse, I hope for a better time when I can recapture that sense of innocence, ideally with someone I love.

“I began writing the songs on a piano in an empty college auditorium, during a time when I felt my life spinning out of control and away from the direction that I wanted to go in.”

ABR: In 2024, you released a hard-hitting LP in the form of The Definitive Soul in Exile. I have just discovered this one over in Bandcamp, and it is making a strong impression already. What are your memories from writing, recording and releasing it, and how would you say you grew and evolved as an artist throughout this process?

HR: Soul in Exile is my magnum opus! What you discovered as the ‘definitive’ version is really the culmination of a long musical odyssey that began in 1989 when I was in college, and spanned several decades that included four CD releases, numerous gigs, and endless hours spent dreaming and scheming about it.

I began writing the songs on a piano in an empty college auditorium, during a time when I felt my life spinning out of control and away from the direction that I wanted to go in. I was living in a city I didn’t like, in a relationship that was not good for me, and I began to question a lot of the things that I took for granted as well as the things that everyone expected of me. Writing the songs was a way to express the sense of dislocation that I was feeling and as I started imagining how they would fit together in an album, they also gave me the encouragement I needed to make those changes in my life and take responsibility for any of the consequences they may cause, and there were plenty, some of which I still live with today.

It took several years from those initial songwriting spells until I could begin to get them on tape. Yes, tape! Haha! Digital was still the province of the major label studios and was really still in its infancy. By that time I had relocated from Boston to the Jersey Shore and I was becoming part of the local music scene, something I had wanted to do since I first got into Bruce Springsteen’s music as a teenager. I was playing in all sorts of cover and tribute bands, rock, blues, disco, reggae, you name it, but my passion was for playing my original music.

Unfortunately the original music market was a tough one, clubs put the responsibility for bringing audiences on the bands, which was very difficult to do if you didn’t have your old high school gang nearby, and if you didn’t bring your own people, and/or if they didn’t buy drinks, club owners and bookers would give you a sidelong glance if you approached them about booking you for another gig. So I found it easier to be a solo singer-songwriter and play small coffeehouses, bookstores, and art galleries, and attend open mics and jams all over the area. Between the cover bands, solo gigs, and jam sessions, this is how I made connections and friendships amongst the local musicians. And when it came time to record the songs in Soul in Exile with a full band, I had a whole cast of characters to draw from.

As I mentioned, there were four CDs in the Soul in Exile opus. The first one was just called Soul in Exile, and I recorded it in my basement studio in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, with just keyboards and vocals. I took it to Shore Fire Studio in Long Branch, the studio started by E Street bassist Garry Tallent, and had it mixed professionally there. I put it out as an indie through a New York based company called Nova Music in late 1999.

“I imagined a Born to Run meets The Wall type of sound … the whole vaunted Jersey Shore rock and roll sound combined with Pink Floyd esque production values and special effects.”

The second CD was called Soul in Exile 2: Jersey Shore Baby, and the recording of it marked the beginning of my long relationship with Retromedia Sound Studio in Red Bank, New Jersey. This was where I called in all the goodwill I had generated over my years on the cover band and coffeehouse and bookstore circuits, with over twenty musicians in the lineup. For this CD, I imagined a Born to Run meets The Wall type of sound, where Bruce might have gone had he not gotten embroiled in that lawsuit with his first manager in the mid-1970s, the whole vaunted Jersey Shore rock and roll sound combined with Pink Floyd esque production values and special effects. And all on an indie budget!

I did the tracking at Retromedia but then, shortly after I finished those sessions, in the spring of 2003, I moved out to California, where I had the mixing done by a sympathetic engineer named Steve Goodie at a place called Punch Sound in Santa Monica, which had the same hard to find recording machinery that Retromedia had but at a fraction of the astronomical rates that the Hollywood studios were charging. I moved back to New Jersey in 2006, and that’s where the album was released by local label AERIA Records in the summer of 2007.

The third CD was called Soul in Exile 3: Love Runs Aground, and it was essentially the songs from the first Soul in Exile but with a full band, as opposed to just keys and voice. This time I didn’t go quite as overboard with the production, there were only seven musicians instead of two dozen, and I cut back on the Floydian bells and whistles. By this time though, the AERIA label had folded, and I put this out as an indie in March 2017. Yes, a decade between releases, such is the way of the self-financed singer-songwriter.

The fourth CD was called Soul in Exile Redux, and it was a remix of the first five songs from SIE2 as its figurative ‘Side A’ and the first five songs from SIE3 as its ‘Side B’, the way I imagined putting it out on vinyl when I was first writing the songs back in Boston. The funny thing is, I didn’t put it out on vinyl, as the song sequences were actually too long to fit on a regular LP, and I wasn’t about to re-sequence them into a double album. So it came out as a CD in January 2022, but it ended up being my least favourite and the least successful of the four.

By this time I had gotten remarried again, and I had reached a place in life where I decided I wanted to shift gears musically, from massive ‘big statement’ kind of albums with epic, poignant songs and large scale production values to something faster, shorter, and more to the point, but before I did that, I wanted to compile all the songs from my Soul in Exile releases into one comprehensive release that told the whole story. I chose the songs and mixes I wanted to use and had them remastered and re-sequenced specifically for streaming, and that’s what you heard on The Definitive Soul in Exile. It stands as my magnum opus for the ages and hopefully it’ll live on after, well, no need to go there, because I still have a whole lot left to give! Haha!

ABR: Previously, if we travel back a little further to 2015, you unveiled another stellar collection entitled Boardwalk Mystic. Thank you so much for the music! Let’s explore it in more depth. How do you reflect on this set as a whole now, and is there anything that you would edit or change when looking back with the benefit of hindsight?

HR: Wait, is that ten years already? Unbelievable! Boardwalk Mystic was at once a ‘best of’ compilation of previous recordings and demos and a preview of what I was doing in the studio with Soul in Exile. It was also intended to serve as a ‘musical business card’ that I could hand to any assorted big shots in the music business that I’d have the good fortune to meet, as well as something for audiences whenever I’d play my singer-songwriter shows. It wasn’t so much an artistic statement as much as something with which I could show the world what I was capable of. I don’t think I’d change anything about it, I think it’s an effective document of where I was at the time.

“Bruce Springsteen was a major influence, and a large part of my style came about because I wanted to emulate my hero, as a lot of younger artists tend to do when they start out … But there was and is much more to me than that.”

ABR: As you well know by now, I love The Hesh Inc. sound and your approach to making and creating music. That strong alternative rock and roll foundation. How would you say this style of yours came about, what goes into it for you, and who are some of your biggest influences and inspirations as an artist currently?

HR: Well, as I mentioned previously, Bruce Springsteen was a major influence, and a large part of my style came about because I wanted to emulate my hero, as a lot of younger artists tend to do when they start out, wearing their influences on their sleeves. But there was and is much more to me than that. I loved the old-school rhythm and blues, mostly because I had been a fan of The Blues Brothers, movie and music, since they first appeared in 1978. Those records made me want to seek out the original artists, like Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and John Lee Hooker, as well as other greats like B.B. King, who I managed to see in concert several times, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, and the legendary Booker T. and the M.G.’s. The J. Geils Band, the ‘new-wavey’ version of the band was popular when I was in high school, but I also dug deeper into their history and got into their rock and roll and R&B material.

But there were also some influences that may seem to contradict each other. I loved the music of Kansas, in a large part because in the days before I discovered rock and roll I was very much into classical music, so once I got into rock I totally got the extended suites Kansas used to perform in the rock idiom. And lyrically, they made me realise there was a whole larger world out there besides the one I had grown up in. Later on, though, I discovered punk rock via bands like the Ramones and Social Distortion, which were totally opposite the prog, roots, rock that bands like Kansas were about. It might not make sense, because the conventional wisdom has it that prog rock and punk rock and their fans are totally at odds with each other, but I loved all of it. I never quite got the tribalism that insisted that if you liked one, you couldn’t like the other.

And other influences still, I liked singer-songwriters, not the mellow folk-like variety, but the edgier, more rocking artists like Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, even Elton John. I’m not the biggest Elton fan but his early 70s rock period, with songs like ‘Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding’, spoke to me. And parallel to all this, there was the influence of Jewish and Israeli music I heard a lot as a kid and in my teens, growing up in the Jewish communities in places like Long Island and in Israel. Even those found their way into my music, and if you know what to listen for, you’ll find it. Chief among these was Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who became known as ‘the singing rabbi’ in the 1960s when he sang to the hippies in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. My father used to play his music on the eight-track tape deck in his 1973 Cadillac! Haha! And I saw him perform several times over the years, even joining him onstage in New York once when I was ten years old.

Years later I became friends with a band in Los Angeles called Moshav, whose members grew up in the village that Rabbi Carlebach founded in Israel. Moshav’s sound is very earthy and rootsy, influenced by the Grateful Dead, Santana, and reggae and ska music. I sat in with them on several occasions, which was a lot of fun. They’d be as close to anything I’d call a current influence. More recent than current, really. I listen to a lot of music, and while I like a lot of the newer stuff that’s out there, there’s little as yet that has risen to the level of influence.

“I do recognise that for me to let my creativity be affected as much as I have is, in a sense, letting the terrorists succeed in terrorising me, and I don’t want to give them that satisfaction.”

ABR: A broad question to finish. There have been a lot of changes in the world in the post-COVID era, both throughout society, with political turmoil and even bloodshed in Ukraine and Palestine, and within the music industry too, AI for example. How would you say these several years have impacted you, both personally and as an artist? How do you think this time has changed the music industry, both for the good and the bad?

HR: COVID was not a good time for anybody, especially not in the music scene. Venues were closing all over the place, especially the smaller, independently owned ones, so there were fewer places to play. There was a singer-songwriter festival convention called Singer-Songwriter of Cape May, at the southern tip of the Jersey Shore, which took place the last weekend of March in the years 2008 to 2019, and I was a participant from 2013 on. It was scheduled for 2020, but although its producer, John Harris, tried hard to put it on that year, he couldn’t because of the pandemic and had to cancel it. He tried again in 2021, but again there was no way he could do it, and he had to cease operations completely. That was a big blow to the scene, especially in the New Jersey, Middle Atlantic region.

But people loved it so much that there was talk of artists who had performed there wanting to have reunion shows. Full disclosure, I was one of those! So after fielding enough inquiries, John decided to revive it for this year, and people came. There was a real hunger for it after all those years without. I was honoured to have played it again, in my usual end of Saturday night slot. So at least that had a happy ending.

Regarding political and social turmoil, well, you may not like what I have to say about it, but it needs to be said, and your audience probably needs to hear it. As I mentioned, I lived in Israel when I was younger. I went to high school there, I studied for a about a year in a religious seminary after that, although, truth be told, I was more interested in putting bands together during that time, and I did serve for three years in the military. My family still lives there, and I have many friends who do too. So I am very much in tune with what goes on there, and although I may live in New Jersey at the moment, the people and land of Israel are my people and land as well, and what happens to them over there affects me here too.

So the events of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas terrorists and supposed civilians invaded Southern Israel, murdered 1200 Israelis and took over 300 hostages, really affected me on a visceral level, to the point where any efforts at songwriting slowed down to a stop. I’ve actually written very little since then, although recently I’ve started again, tentatively. Also, I used to be very active on social media, posting mainly about music but about other things I liked, such as photography, local travel, and things like that, but in the aftermath of October 7, none of that felt appropriate. It still doesn’t, really, although I do recognise that for me to let my creativity be affected as much as I have is, in a sense, letting the terrorists succeed in terrorising me, and I don’t want to give them that satisfaction.

“I began to have an acute sense of my own mortality, and it was like a fire was lit underneath me. I had unfinished lyrics to … and I realised I did not want to take them all with me when my inevitable time would come.”

On the personal front, my father passed away, not of COVID thankfully, in April 2022, and in the aftermath of that, I began to have an acute sense of my own mortality, and it was like a fire was lit underneath me. I had unfinished lyrics to, like, maybe a hundred songs populating my various notebooks, and I realised I did not want to take them all with me when my inevitable time would come. So I set about the business of finishing those, plus rewriting no small amount of songs whose music was great but whose lyrics were middling. Among those were the three songs on Triple Whammy!!!, two of which we discussed earlier. The whole revisiting and rewriting process lasted a little over a year, and that’s when I got busy with The Definitive Soul in Exile and everything I planned for after that. So this is still an ongoing phase of the journey, and it’s where we’re at now.

Quickfire Round

ABR: Favourite artist or band?

HR: Artist, Bruce Springsteen. Band, Kansas.

ABR: Favourite album?

HR: Brian Wilson Presents Smile.

ABR: First album you bought with your own money?

HR: A New World Record by ELO.

ABR: Last album you listened to from start to finish?

HR: Wow, that’s a surprisingly tough question! I know that Spotify is supposed to be the bane of all artists because of the way it rips artists off financially, but for the listener, the ability to create customised playlists can’t be beat! So I’ve been listening mostly to the playlists I’ve created, and it has actually been awhile since I really listened to an album from beginning to end. I’d have to say it was probably one of Tom Waits’ records, The Heart of Saturday Night, or maybe it was Foreign Affairs. I have those on the HDD player in my wife’s car so that’s where I’m likeliest to play whole albums.

ABR: First gig as an audience member? HR: Billy Joel at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, April 1980, Glass Houses tour.

ABR: Loudest gig as an audience member?

HR: Peter Wolf at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, 1992 or so. I’ve seen a lot of hard rock bands, which are reputedly the most punishing in terms of sheer decibels, but Peter and his R&B band blasted them all away. I saw the Ramones several times, but not even they were as loud as Peter was!

ABR: Style icon?

HR: Bruce Springsteen in his Born to Run and Darkness eras of the 1970s. And also The Fonz on the Happy Days TV series. Can’t beat that leather jacket look!

ABR: Favourite film?

HR: The Blues Brothers, hands down.

ABR: Favourite TV show?

HR: Cobra Kai! Too bad it had to end. Incidentally, I believe Martin Kove, who played Sensei Kreese in that show and in the Karate Kid movies, is somehow related to me.

ABR: Favourite up and coming artist or band?

HR: That honour goes to a young man named Sam MacPherson, also from Asbury Park. I saw him play at the Stone Pony with his band several months ago and it renewed my faith in the younger generation, the future of rock and roll is safe in their hands.