The Heavy Guilt
The Heavy Guilt are returning to the stage. After a three-year hiatus, the band will be performing at The Casbah on Friday, June 23. The core songwriting duo of Al Howard and Erik Canzona never stopped working together and collaborated on Canzona’s solo record The Narrows, but their band of eight years slowed down when other projects came up in 2014.
“We had been the same six-piece for a pretty long time,” says Howard during an interview conducted while being tattooed at Allegory in City Heights. “When we were recording our third record, our guitar player up and moved. We did it as, like, a five-piece, and we worked pretty hard on that last album and did a pretty big push. So then we kind of slowed down and got busy with other projects.”
Because Canzona and Howard continued to work together, they ended up writing material for a new Heavy Guilt record in the meantime. Titled Spectral Hearts, the new album will be released in August, and Canzona says working on material in the meantime also gave the duo a new appreciation for their old songs.
“I just kind of missed being in a full band,” Canzona says. “Al and I never really stopped writing stuff, so we had this group of songs where we weren’t really sure what it was going to be. It felt right. Enough time had passed where revisiting some of those songs we were playing constantly, we could see doing that again.”
The new live incarnation of the Heavy Guilt includes Canzona, Howard, bassist Willis Farnsworth, guitarist Austin Burns and Pete Williams. However, past members Josh Rice, Jenny Merullo and Jason Littlefield also contributed to the record, which Howard says is their most political to date, citing influences such as Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and, more unexpectedly, Run the Jewels.
“We had been writing a lot more political and social songs than we had in the past,” Howard says. “We were working on these songs, and we wanted to get this album out soon. But Erik said, ‘nah, don’t worry about it.’ These songs are going to be topical for a while.”
“Certain things...we both felt strongly about a lot of stuff that’s been going on,” Canzona adds. “It would have almost felt dishonest if we were singing love songs right now.”