About Me
"The Official-Sounding Bio"
“What’s music, but a way to glimpse what is greater than ourselves?” So asks Wendy Hearl in her song “What’s This Music For?”, and this question captures the introspective, thoughtful, yet outward-reaching spirit of her work. The veteran musician and prolific songwriter offers an eclectic smorgasbord of styles, including tender acoustic ballads, folk-rock, blues, power pop, funk, and hard rock.
Music has been a strong and persistent force in Wendy’s life. “Thanks to my Dad, I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Queen, Kansas, Styx, and the like, so there’s a persistent love of hard rock mixed in with a bit of flash,” she says. “Later I got into the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, and other melodic and often introspective music. Round it off with a dash of 50’s rock and roll, 60’s psychedelia, 80’s hair bands, and 90’s grunge, and you’ve got a pretty good sense of where I’m coming from.” She continues, “I started out playing an old organ my grandmother gave me, and trying to plunk on my Dad’s electric guitar. It wasn’t until high school that I finally began learning how to play properly.” Through the years she has picked up some additional instruments, including bass, mandolin, harmonica, African drums, and the bowed psaltery.
In a sense, Wendy has followed two parallel musical paths. One path is live performances, and leads from her first high school band, Fantasy, through a colorful and varied succession of other bands, including Culture Shock, Unfrozen Cavemen, Chameleon Red, and Mother Zephyr, as well as the occasional gig as a solo artist. The other path is that of do-it-yourself recording artist, in which she has produced eight full-length albums as a one-woman-band, beginning with Anti-Gravity (1990), and with Chameleon Red, one double album/rock opera, Transposition (2007), and one regular album, Skeleton Crew (2013).
Wendy's newest creation is her eighth solo album, Postcards From the Whirlwind. Written during a turbulent period both in her personal life and the world at large, and recorded almost entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, Postcards portrays an artist searching for hope and humor in the midst of darkness.