Ari Hest
Someone To Tell

"Every dollar I have saved
Every winter I have braved
Every road that I have paved
Leads to somewhere"
Ari Hest's "Aberdeen"

   As Columbia Records prepares to release Someone To Tell, his major label debut album, the emerging young singer-songwriter Ari Hest stands at a crossroads: looking back down the long road he's paved to get to this point, and looking ahead to the promise of where that path will now take him. Blessed with a rich, weathered baritone voice and a soaring falsetto, Ari is developing into an artist with an exceptional ability to connect to listeners and live audiences in a way that few singer-songwriters can.

   "It's a really great feeling to drive into a new city and find that people are coming to my shows and identifying with my music," Ari explains. "I've poured my heart into these songs, so I'm thrilled that they can relate. I'm hoping this album will help me do that on a wider scale."

   Like many a young songwriting musician before him, Ari Hest grew up shy and introverted, but discovered in music a means to communicate with the world at large. On Someone To Tell, Ari's combination of heart, soul, strong sense of melody, and a gimmick-free approach to classic pop songcraft, has resulted in an album that promises great times, and delivers great tunes, for once and future fans of this 21st century troubadour.

   Over the past half decade, Ari's been building his fan-base through a savvy combination of old-school essentials: hook-filled, classically structured pop-rock songs, charismatic presence, natural talent, musical chops and determination, and a blue-collar work ethic that has kept him touring the country constantly for the past three years. New-school innovations, including well-designed internet promotional tools, encouragement of live show tape-trading and sharing, and the development of a promotional street team called the "A-Team", have also helped spread his music to a devoted legion of fans.

   A sterling exemplar of the indie DIY ethos, Ari began his career by booking and promoting his own concerts and tours, and by releasing an EP, Incomplete, and two full-length albums, Come Home (2001) and Story After Story (2003), on his own Project 4 label.

   With his new album, Ari comes into his own as an artist with a collection of songs that is emotionally mature and honest, musically sophisticated, and diverse in range, yet consistent in tone and quality. "I wanted to convey what's in my live show on tape," Ari says of the album, which was recorded with producer David Rolfe (who first worked with Ari on Story After Story) and mixing engineer Bruce Witkin at Bruce's Garage Studio in Los Angeles. "I definitely can change from a rock song to a jazz ballad in my sets. I really envy that kind of diversity in my musical heroes."

   Stylistic diversity is among the hallmarks of Someone To Tell. From the album's opener--the moody, pulsing ode to paranoia, "They're On To Me" -- to the elegiac, lullaby-like shimmer of the title track that closes the album, Someone To Tell covers a multitude of lyrical and musical moods and observations, ranging from the wry and the witty to the achingly honest. "Everything I write is personal," Ari confesses. "I used to internalize everything, and the songs on this record were and still are my way of working things out of my system - actually speaking up about what I believe in, what I think about myself, and what I think about my environment. I've always found my words and music come out a lot easier when I've actually been through whatever it is I'm writing about."

   Born in the Bronx, Ari Hest grew up in a musical family: his father, a college music professor, is fluid on a variety of horns and wrote "jingles" when he was Ari's age; Ari's mother is a professional singer. As a child, Ari took piano lessons, even though he preferred the world of sports (particularly baseball, which he played through high school). At the age of 16, he was introduced to The Beatles and first picked up his mother's nylon string guitar. "I started by learning to play all the Beatles' songs by ear, which was a helpful place to start," he recalls. "If it hadn't been for that kind of chord complexity, I don't think I'd be trying to incorporate all these variations on the basics in my own music."

   Young Ari Hest also began listening to the songs of Paul Simon, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, U2, the Police, Tears For Fears, Nirvana, and others. "I was into Dave Matthews too," he says. "The way he was playing guitar was particularly cool to me -- the fragments of chords he would play and the use of the guitar as a percussive instrument. All of these bands contributed to my self-education on the guitar."

   Music became a much bigger deal once Ari went off to college. During his freshman year at school, he recorded Incomplete, a collection of six songs. At first the compilation was intended to help secure gigs, but it soon became an item Ari sold at his performances. On weekends he'd travel to different colleges to perform his repertoire, coupled with songs he'd learned from the radio. "The best thing about those gigs is that they got me the stage experience that I desperately needed," Ari admits. "I loved to play and sing, but at first I was so frightened to be on stage that I didn't enjoy performing in front of people at all. It was just an important experience."

   At the end of 2001, Ari released his first full-length album, Come Home. Following his graduation from NYU in 2002, he recorded Story After Story, "which was the first record that was thought out before I went into the studio: the parts, the arrangements, everything was done on a more professional level," he recalls. "I took out all the money in my savings account and recorded what we thought was a good independent record."

   So good, in fact, that it brought Ari the attention of the major record labels. After a particularly spectacular sold-out gig at New York's Bowery Ballroom in August 2003, Ari Hest found himself courted by Columbia Records. Going back into the studio with producer David Rolfe and his touring band, Ari began work on Someone To Tell.

   Comprised of new songs like "Anne Marie" and "A Fond Farewell" as well as reworkings of some of the strongest material from Story After Story, Someone To Tell is a revelation for his fans, and the perfect introduction to the music and artistry of Ari Hest..