This singer and songwriter has come a long way from the days when he started performing his combination folk/rock tunes for his fellow college students at Penn State. In 2000, he launched his own label, Thumbcrown Records, and released his first self-titled album. In September he offered fans his fifth studio album, Everywhere All at Once. Because of "everywhere he's been and everywhere he's going," Blogcritics is proud to tag Eric Himan as one of our Featured Artists for October.
"Don't ask me where I'm from; ask me where I'm going," is not only a song lyric ("Where I'm From"), it's a motto Himan lives by. He can most often be found in his mini-van on his way to his next gig or on a stage performing. A quick glance at the tour dates he has scheduled for this month alone shows the dedication he has to personally delivering the music to his ever-growing legion of fans.
The constant traveling is nothing new, as he grew up in a military family and spent his youth living in South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, and then Florida, only to have his family lose everything in Hurricane Andrew just days after moving to that state.
To listen to an Eric Himan song is to get a glimpse inside the artist; the songs come from a personal place and no topic seems to be off limits. Everywhere All At Once covers everything from romantic and familial relationships to homophobia to breast cancer to hurricane survival. And it's these emotional constants the listener can identify and relate to. It's not a phenomenon new to this most recent album, though. Deep and identifiable music has always been present, even from that first self-titled release.
Eric Himan was self-produced as an experiment, something for those who attended his live performances to purchase, should they so desire, and purchase they did. Those who took the CD home shared this new talent with their friends, and a real grass-roots campaign was under way. Like those early performances, many of the recordings are simply Eric's voice and his guitar. Simply produced, lyrically masterful, and wrought with those folk music roots, "After Today" and "Last Night" are the recognizable ancestry of the songs available on Everywhere All at Once.
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