Today we’d like to introduce you to Harry Hochman.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
For thirty years, I was a lawyer who did some music on the side. Now I’m a musician releasing songs off a new album, with another in the works, who occasionally does some law on the side. I came to California in 1982 as a late-blooming hippie kid from Michigan with a degree and no clue what I wanted. I only knew that after working dozens of dead-end jobs in Ann Arbor and Lansing and other Michigan hotspots, I’d exhausted my possibilities there. I’d done everything from packing pickles to pouring castings to cooking to janitorial and countless others.
For a while, it was more of the same in the Bay Area, but with so much more beauty and much better weather. But after nearly getting blown off a ladder painting houses in San Francisco, I finally figured law school might be a better option. That brought me to UCLA, and I never left Los Angeles. This is where I found love and parenting, and a good career in corporate insolvency law. But it never scratched the creative itch. Eventually, inevitably, the old hippie reemerged, and off I went to Burning Man and other shining points of light. I hit a wall with law, and music was my escape route. Law makes people angry, and music makes them happy. I prefer it this way.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I got my musical bearings only through dumb luck. I had no clue where to start. But when my wife Sam was checking out who’d been hanging out in a van in front of our house, she discovered not a vagrant but Chris Murphy, a New England Conservatory grad who was teaching lessons out of his van. Chris is a master of violin and other stringed instruments and agreed to instruct me on guitar only if I was serious enough to shoot for writing songs and recording an album. His agenda worked for me. He’s been instrumental throughout the writing and recording process and in getting me started with shared gigs.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve only cut one album so far, called “Inside Out.” A few of the singles from Inside Out are out now on Spotify, etc., with a few more singles still to be dropped before the entire album is released, which probably won’t be until early Spring. It fits broadly within the Americana genre, at times more folk and at times more folk-rock, depending on the track. To shamelessly plug myself, one journalist to whom I sent the album, James Rotondi, called me “a seasoned, authentic, and articulate voice that evokes shades of Laurel Canyon-era Jackson Browne and other bookish bohemian country-rock legendz…” Lyrics are tremendously important to me, an outgrowth of a career spent writing very carefully.
We recorded the album at The Sonic Boom Room in Venice, engineered by Kevin Jarvis. We had a bunch of top-notch musicians, including Chan Kinchla of Blues Traveler who does lead guitar on three tracks, and legends Herb Pedersen doing harmonies and Brian Auger on keyboards. Others included guitarist Nate LaPointe [Cubensis, Bobby Womack], drummer Michael Jerome [Richard Thompson, John Cale]; bassist Alex Balderston, who’s worked with Beyonce and Selena Gomez; and Kim Fox on keyboard and vocals.
Contact Info:
- Website: harryhochmanmusic.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/harryhochmanmusic
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/harryhochmanmusic
Image Credits
Harmony Gerber
