CHICAGO -- When the world was isolating in pandemic bubbles, Alex Hardaway was channeling his inner Bob McGrath — the late “Sesame Street” character who sang the “People in Your Neighborhood” song.
Hardaway began a marathon music project — his first solo album, called “Be My Neighborhood,” where he wrote a song for each of his neighbors in his 15-unit Andersonville apartment building. The album debuted Thursday.
During the height of the pandemic, Hardaway, a longtime employee at Oiistar Japanese restaurant, had started doing maintenance work around the building to chip some money off his rent. That led him to meet all his fellow tenants. The 33-year-old graduate of The Theatre School at DePaul University said a lot of his musical material comes from real life interactions.
“All the songs are kind of about me and my relationship with these people and my own psyche,” Hardaway said. “If you listen ... you’ll hear that it’s a lot of second guessing and chewing on what interactions took place, or just a script of exact conversations that I just had with these people.”
It took the better part of three years for the Arlington, Texas, native to compose the music, write the lyrics, find professional orchestral musicians willing to play instruments on the album (for a modest fee) that matched the personality of each neighbor and get his work mastered by Adam Selzer, who has done audio production work for bands like the Lumineers, the Decemberists and She & Him. Hardaway played guitar, mandolin, bass, the ukulele and some percussion instruments while his girlfriend, Tuckie White, an actor, playwright and writer, sang backup vocals in a coat closet turned studio.
The result is a folksy album with 13 songs with names like: “Kasey and the Girl She Lives With,” “Keva and Miranda,” “Shea and Sheena” and “Seamus.”
Seamus is a neighbor who tends to nod his head in greeting to Hardaway without engaging in a traditional sense. His song’s lyrics include:
“What you do is like a magic trick
slipping away in the blink of an eye
waving hands while looking confused
Has got to work for you most of the time.”
Hardaway said the “Leanne and Anthony” song centers on how people can be socially awkward and how they can send mixed signals. “We both had young dogs that would play together and I just could not keep the ball in the air conversationally with them,” he said. “It was dead silence most of the time and I chewed about that for a long time. We’re fine now, but when I was writing these songs, I was feeling like I would see them four blocks down the street, and we would make eye contact and they would just take a bold right. Like they thought there’s no way we’re gonna walk into that dude.’”
The musical interludes entail many of the things people who share walls endure — everything from noise created when your ceiling is someone else’s floor and convincing those we live by to give us a chance to show we’re good people.
Neighbor Tim Dean’s song tells of the day his cat didn’t survive a tussle with a neighbor’s dog. Hardaway described the moment when he had to tell Dean about the incident and why calling out to his late cat was futile.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I know you’re Tim and I’m Alex. I have some awful news, my friend,’” Hardaway said. “He just sat down and was like, ‘I cannot believe that happened.’ I wanted to write a song about that moment, because it’s so hard when you have to deliver news like that to someone you don’t know.”
Dean, a clinical psychologist, said he’s honored to be included in the project. His two favorite tracks are “Shea and Sheena” and “Larry.”
“Larry’s a very sweet man,” Dean said. “He worked for the CTA for like 30 years. His song is about him retiring. Larry is the one that helped my cat the most, took my cat to the vet. ... Larry’s the other protagonist in my song.”
Sheena Roque knew about Hardaway’s album but has since moved to Evanston with her fiance, Shea. She admits to being a “keeping to herself” kind of person, but when she met Hardaway, it was refreshing.
“He’s the most neighborly neighbor we’ve ever had,” she said. “My fiance and I are planning on getting married sometime this year. I would love to play the song at the wedding because it’s a song about us.”
“I got really lucky because I met some really great humans making this thing,” Hardaway said. “This project snowballed into something I never imagined and the cherry on top came when Adam Selzer stepped in for the finishing touches.”
Hardaway reached out to Selzer on a jobs website with a long email about his project. Selzer, a producer from Portland, Oregon, responded. He said it’s not common to get a project as interesting as what Hardaway put together. Hardaway and Selzer said Andy Shauf’s 2016 album, “The Party,” which describes the people seen at a party, is the only album they’re aware of that takes a similar bent. Hardaway said it got him thinking about how the mundane could be musical.
“I’ve always been really drawn to albums that have some sort of common thread and his idea of using his apartment and creating all these worlds for these characters just sounded really interesting to me,” Selzer said. “Each song had a different featured orchestral instrument. And I thought that was so cool because it had this whole separate identity with an instrument that was unique to that song compared to the rest of the album.”
“Be My Neighborhood” was an uphill climb for Hardaway. He would create four or five songs for each person and he would then have to choose which best represented them.
“It started out as a big exercise, but it became way bigger than I thought it could be,” he said. “I’m just a chatty Texas boy and I like to find out what’s going on with people. I don’t know why I’m very curious, but if more than my mom hears this record, I’ll be thrilled.”
Hardaway says we can afford a bit more “Hello, neighbor! How was your day?” in our lives.
“It’s good to reach out to people,” he said. “When I pass people on the street, I try to smile and say ‘Howdy’ or something like that. Over the pandemic, I started talking to this older man who lives down the street, a retired flight attendant and a wonderful piano player. I told him I heard him through the window. Two days later, I’m in his apartment and he’s playing piano for me, feeding me wine and we’re getting into a deep conversation about where we’re from. It’s so interesting what can happen if you just look up, look someone in the eyes and say hello. It can take you a lot of places.”
“Be My Neighborhood” is available on platforms like Bandcamp . Follow @cowboy_shoes for more information.
