hush hush sweet charlotte

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte has a history of shocking and awing audiences here in the area over the last two years. Having their band name come from a forgotten 1960s horror film, and collectively citing other horror flicks, alongside hardcore and classical music, as direct influences on their sound, the six-piece strives to stick out from the crowd of copycat acts out there. Their track, "Just Like The Gravedigger Always Trying To Get Beneath The Surface," features an intro inspired by The Shining and its title comes ripped from The Nightmare on Elm Street, so it makes for a good place to start telling the story of the band.

Guitarist Ricky Kendall first met fellow guitarist Justin Ferguson at a day job he had a couple years back mowing cemeteries. Ferguson then introduced Kendall to his friend, vocalist Royal Laraway, and the three hit it off right away.

"We all had the same ideas of what we wanted to create musically so we started writing music and auditioning people for drums and bass," Kendall told Recoil. "We found a drummer, Andrew Gronau, and a bassist that I knew from high school. After a couple months that bassist quit and Andrew moved to bass. We replaced Andrew on drums with Lucas [Daly], a drummer that we knew through friends and from high school. We added an additional singer for a few months, but that didn't work out. Andrew recently quit the band for personal reasons and he was replaced by Matt [Bloomfield], one of my best friends that I've always played music with. We recently added a keyboardist to our lineup to add to our sound; he's Matt's brother [Jesse Bloomfield] and one of Luke's best friends. We all feel like this is a solid lineup made up of great musicians and better friends."

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte's specific influences range from hardcore bands like The Devil Wears Prada, Underoath and Chiodos for their energetic live shows, to classical composers like Chopin, Mozart and Debussy for their raw emotion and musical arrangement. They've played plenty of all-ages gigs around West Michigan, particularly playing the Portage and Richland Community Centers regularly. Somewhat surprisingly, the Paw Paw Wine Festival put them in front of 300 diverse people, making for a show the band says they'll never forget.

For their upcoming tour, the band turned to their new manager, Vincent Trierweiler, owner of the local music management group The M Agency, who put the whole tour together.

"We're most excited about getting our music out to a wider audience and meeting new people and bands, and also just being in a different city everyday," Kendall said about the upcoming tour. "The things we're most nervous about are our van breaking down and having to cancel shows, getting lost and ripping each others' heads off since we're stuck in the same space for a month."

In addition to the tour, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte hopes to have an EP, tentatively titled "Words Lost in a Lavish Opera," out sometime this month before the tour starts on May 13 in Chicago.

"We felt it was time to get professional recordings done," Laraway said about the EP. "So we spent a couple of months gathering up any money we could so we could record and we went down to Chin Music Studios in Cleveland, Ohio, for five days and recorded it."
- RECOIL