Hem nominated for Drama Desk Award! We're thrilled to announce that Hem was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in the "Best Music in a Play" category, for their score to Twelfth Night. Stay tuned... Winners announced at the ceremony on May 23rd! Click here for more information and a complete list of nominees. Twelfth Night Interview on WNYC WNYC's Leonard Lopate will talk with Dan and Steve about Hem's role in the widely acclaimed production of Twelfth Night in Central Park this past summer. The interview will air live on Tuesday, December 22, at 1PM on 89.3 in NYC, or on wnyc.org , where you can also listen live, or come back and hear a podcast of the show later. Get to know the full show's music on the band's Twelfth Night album, available at iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon.com, among others. Twelfth Night Gift-ery As New Yorkers look back on things they loved about 2009, our Twelfth Night recording is making best-gift-lists for the holidays! Take a look at this from the New York Post , and this great writeup from the New York Times. Paste's "Best Voices in Indie Rock" Paste Magazine put together THIS "best" list and gave quite a nod to Hem's lead. We got MATRIXed New York Magazine's "Approval Matrix" is one of key ways that this insane city keeps its own pulse. To be included is a very rare distinction, indeed, if not always a great honor. Hem, however, made it to a pretty good quadrant. Take a look for yourself here. The Reviews are in: Twelfth Night and Hem a huge hit! "This exceptionally musical production has beautiful folky-Elizabethan-Irish-Scottish-doo-wop songs by a group called Hem. Someone, please, ask Hem to write a show." - Newsday "Music, as you may have gathered, is far from incidental to the production. The handsome score is written and performed by the “symphonic folk-rock” band Hem. In addition to the songs — most expertly led by the gifted comic actor David Pittu as a sour ragamuffin Feste — there is music to add color, wit, life to almost every scene, played on a mixture of strings, percussion and woodwinds, the sound evoking a distant era without straining for period authenticity." - NY Times " "The musical interludes, in fact, are among the high points of the show, with the score composed by the indie folk-rock group Hem filled with hauntingly memorable songs."- Hollywood Reporter ""Add in the soul-stirring music of neo-folk ensemble Hem and you have one magical night in Illyria." - Variety Musings about Better Days... Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a really kind piece about our song "Better Days" in today's Washington Times. You can read it here. She nicely puts into words thoughts that many of us have had this fall, and we're grateful to read them... What We Did On Our Summer Vacation This summer we were in the studio working on release to come out early in 2009... We also teamed up with Liberty Mutual on an ad that they ran for the Beijing Olympics - it features a new song called 'Better Days' and you can see it here. As for the rest of the summer: cookouts, wine, coney island, music, air conditioned multiplexes. On these five we all heartily agree, but that may about cover it.