Riverman is the moniker of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Steve Hedrick. He writes, performs, records, and produces all of his music himself. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC with his wife and two children. He has recorded a total 8 full-length albums, of which 5 are currently available for streaming.
Steve grew up in a musical house. His mom was a classically trained pianist and his dad played guitar and had excellent taste in music- eventually turning Steve onto all of his favorite artists including Brian Wilson, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Prefab Sprout, Stephen Sondheim, João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and many others. Right from the start Steve wanted to play guitar and by the time he started formal lessons around the age of eight, he had already been playing for several years. He studied under Mike Walker, a well-renowned instructor in Orlando, for about 10 years until he departed for college. It was this instruction that gave Steve the tools to create all of the songs he has written since and he is forever grateful to Mike for those years of study.
In high school he played in a band called Stratus. He was not a lyricist at this time, but his dad had penned a number of poems previously and together, with his dad as the lyricist and Steve writing the music, they wrote ten original songs which the band performed. They won the Battle of the Bands at Dr. Phillips High two years in a row and performed at venues in Orlando while recording their album Confession. The songs on that album are strong and it does not really feel like a freshman work. It reaches a high point with the song, “She Walks Away” which is filled with lyrical and musical hooks that are truly exceptional.
It was also during this time that Steve learned about home recording software. He took a course called “Electronic Music” with Keith Galasso, a teacher at Dr. Phillips, who taught his students the art of home recording and who assigned his students projects where they needed to write and record original music. The knowledge and skills that Steve learned in this class helped shape the first two solo Riverman albums which were recorded on an identical setup to the high school recording studio- just recreated in Steve’s bedroom.
While Steve had applied for the jazz program at the University of North Florida, he was not accepted and this changed the trajectory of his musical career. He was disappointed to have been rejected from the jazz program, but he enrolled in courses in philosophy and literature and it was through those influences that he really grew as a songwriter and lyricist. After two years at UNF, he returned home to focus on writing and recording his own music and in one year he produced One Hand Clapping, and The Slow Demise of the Pathetic Fallacy. These albums, while unpolished in their production, are filled with confident, mature, and finely crafted songs, and one final song that Steve composed with the lyrics his dad wrote titled “Today.” Though they are not available for streaming at this time except on SoundCloud, Steve hopes to release them on other platforms before too long.
After The Slow Demise, Steve began working at Starbucks and after only a few months, Starbucks announced a competition that was open to all baristas. Musicians and songwriters employed by the company could submit their original songs for a chance to appear on a compilation CD that would be sold at stores nationwide titled Off the Clock. Steve submitted his song, “Light of the Moon,” and it was selected to appear on the disc. After the competition, Starbucks also purchased the rights to the song for a year-long ad campaign on the radio. He used the proceeds from that sale to fund his next album, Vagabonding.
Vagabonding was a concept album about travel. It is filled with references to places real and imagined that Steve had visited and he continued to grow as a lyricist, songwriter, and producer. This album is available on all streaming services and it remains a shining example of what one can accomplish with a low budget, a creative mind, and an incredible amount of hours in a home recording studio.
After Vagabonding, Steve took a hiatus from writing and recording. He met his future wife, got married, had two children, finished his degree in English Literature, started teaching middle and high school English, before attempting another full length album. He returned in fine form with Beatrice and the Nine Muses- a sprawling work that is loosely inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. These songs were the first time Steve ventured into narrative songwriting and he drew on both real and imagined characters for his subject matter. Songs like “The Ballad of Lena Baker,” “The Unholy Baptism of Jean-Paul Marat,” and “Abelard and Heloïse” were about historical figures, while “A Pure Thyonian,” “Angelina,” and others were not. The figure of “Beatrice” looms large in this work and the album reaches paradise with the poetic and haunting, “The Holy Ghost Ascending.”
Several years passed, and then a global pandemic descended upon the world which allowed Steve time to sit and write again. Ideas flowed out and almost weekly he was developing new songs and bringing them to completion. In one year he wrote sixteen songs and then took around another year to record them all. These became the double album Quarantine Songs Volumes I and II. This album was mixed and mastered at Pulp Arts in Gainesville with the help of Danny Clifton and Winston Goertz-Giffen.
This project spans so much creative territory with songs that are introspective, funny, dark, sincere, and which probe complex ideas about religion, life and death, relationships, the aging process, and the global pandemic.
After finishing up an intense two years of writing, recording, and production, Steve took another shorter respite from producing new material. He also moved with his family from Orlando, Fl to Winston-Salem, NC. In this new environment he decided to take a new direction on his next album and to produce an upbeat “Summer” album which became Summer Up / Summer Down.
The songs on this album are on the whole significantly shorter than those on Quarantine Songs. They maintain a witty sense of a humor and occasionally ask probing questions, but they just have a lighter energy to them. This was a fun album to produce. Some of these songs date back 20 years or more- “Somnambulism” is a holdover from the days of Stratus when Steve was still in high school. And “Temporary Like Aeneas,” “21st Century Businessman,” and “Blue Moon” had been around for more than a decade but had never been fleshed out and recorded properly for an album. New songs blended with the old and this album came to fruition. The first half is purposefully more upbeat, like a summer’s morning and midday, followed by the second half which is more like a summer’s evening. It also features the one cover song that Steve has released- “Say You Don’t Mind” by Denny Laine and performed by Colin Blunstone. The album reaches its philosophical high point on “All the Summers in a Life,” which is an ode to the decades Steve and his dad spent as classic longboard surfers on the East Coast of Florida.
Steve likes to think ahead so the next two albums are already sketched out. There will be an acoustic album titled The Fall, followed by a return to a more orchestrated and lush production with Beatrice II. Until then, Steve hopes you will enjoy the albums that are currently available for streaming, and that you find Summer Up / Summer Down an enjoyable companion for this summer season.
