June 2026

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THESE GREEN THOUGHTS

June came in wet, green, and warm in Greenville. Not a clean thirty-day sun festival, more like summer arguing with itself: rain kept showing up, then the light came back hard. Good Swamp Rabbit weather if you time it right. Good Heath weather in the larger sense, because even a mixed June is still June, the trail is still the trail, and the sun is still the sun.

Inside the Hecojeni machinery, Trampoline Girl moved from workbench to release drawer. The masters are in place (thanks Harry Hess), the artwork is there, the canvas is there, and the lyric file got touched. That is usually the point where a song stops being a recording project and starts becoming a thing with feet and shoes.

Riding the Merry Go kept making its own small weather too. IndieShark wrote about it this month and called it "one of the better independent music pieces to come out this year." We will take that. Quietly, but we will take it.

Read the review here:

https://indieshark.com/music-reviews/hecojeni-riding-the-merry-go-single/

There is also a Riding the Merry Go shirt floating around now, which feels right for this month. Trampoline Girl gets July; let it have its own little runway. For June, the Merry Go can keep spinning a little longer.

Riding the Merry Go shirt:

https://www.bonfire.com/the-riding-the-merry-go-t-shirt9/

The quieter note is Alice. It showed up again in the Logic sessions and as a new MP3 mix near the end of the month. No announcement there. Just a song coming back into the room and seeing whether anyone still recognizes it.

And somewhere around the pond, Heath added a kayak to the story. This feels like useful evidence: shirtless, sun-fed, half-Egyptian in spirit, staring into the camera like the water has agreed to something. It belongs here.

Next up is Trampoline Girl stepping out in July. It has been inside the machine long enough. Time to see what kind of weather it makes.

Jeff + Heath

Hecojeni

MAY - OUT THE DOOR

Riding the Merry Go went out on May 8. The song left the basement and entered the world. After two years inside Logic - of arrangement and rearrangement, of the mix that kept changing its mind - the file became a release.

What came next was the steady work of post-release rotation. Ninety short-form Merry Go pieces moved through the social pipeline through May - visual cuts and clips made earlier now finding their audiences one Reel at a time. The song behaves a little differently once it's out: less precious, more discoverable. People hear it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the catalog kept rolling alongside. Only in My Mind, Human Race, and Summer's Calling all stayed in their own daily rotations. The body of work has reached the stage where any given month carries multiple songs at once, each in its own life.

Underneath all of that, Trampoline Girl took over as the song moving toward release. A fresh mix bounce came down. A dancer was filmed for the song - a model hired out of Eastern Europe, captured on video, currently being cut into a long-form piece. Real human movement around a song that's still finding its shape.

Trampoline Girl is the one. Targeting June.

If you like seeing behind the curtain:

- 6,630 file touches in May

- 90 short-form Riding the Merry Go videos in the post-release social rotation

- 21 song-specific buckets touched

Jeff + Heath

Hecojeni

APRIL — THE LONG WAY OUT

April was the month Riding the Merry Go finally left the room.

It took the long way there. What started back on June 19, 2024, as a riff through a “Johnny Marr” amp setting — not even really a song yet, just chords with a little swing in them — spent the better part of two years changing shape, resisting shape, losing pieces, gaining pieces, and generally refusing to become simple on command.

There were backup parts that didn’t fit. A bridge that didn’t survive. Arguments about structure. The usual problem of trying to decide whether something is unfinished or just built differently. At one point it seemed entirely possible this one might not make it through.

What finally cracked it open was subtraction.

A more straightforward bass line. A reduced mix: drums, one guitar, one bass. Once the song stopped wearing every possibility at once, it started to sound like itself. Heath heard it clearly. The hook held. The solo sat where it should. The harmony landed. It became coherent.

Then the mix went out. Harry Hess (Muse, Barenaked Ladies) mastered it, and in April the final was submitted to the streaming services for a May 8 release (about a month later than our goal for release frequency).

We’ve always liked the word release better than finished. Finished suggests perfection. Release suggests reality. There comes a point where you stop adjusting the thing and let it go be what it is. Movies do it. Records do it. Even the “perfect” ones have fingerprints and mistakes all over them. That’s not failure. That’s the work leaving your hands.

So April was not really about polishing Riding the Merry Go into some imaginary final state. It was about getting it across the line.

The visual side moved with it. A lot of April was spent building the smaller worlds around the song: short AI-generated clips, edits, fragments, lyric videos, little 15-second transmissions. Some of it came out of themes we prompted into existence. Some of it came from real footage Jeff shot in Ireland last year — lip-syncing the song on the Cliffs of Moher and in Temple Bar, then cutting those pieces together in Final Cut. We’re still learning what this side of the work wants to be. That’s part of it too. New tools. New instincts. 

Same old rule: make the art, release the art, move on.

And beyond May 8, something else is already leaning into view.

Trampoline Girl, which had been sitting in much the same state as Riding the Merry Go, got pulled back up and turned out to be better than remembered — tighter, more finished, closer than expected. A few vocal parts were added. A few timing fixes got made. 

Maybe Todd’s drums still come into it. Maybe not. But it feels alive now. June is the target.

That may be part of what April really was: a bottleneck breaking. Riding the Merry Go had become a kind of roadblock — a perfectly good song that nobody wanted to reject, but nobody wanted to move past unfinished either. Now that it has gone on, the next few may come faster.

And after that, maybe the pattern changes.

The first run of Hecojeni songs mostly came one way: Jeff starts with a riff or chord progression, Heath hears the melody inside it, and both of us push, refine, rewrite, record, and release. The next batch may come differently — songs arriving more fully formed from Heath, with Jeff stepping further into the producer role, trying to do less, not more. Fewer layers. Better choices. Maybe that’s where this thing is headed.

April, then, was not a countdown. It was a release in the truest sense. One long-gestating song finally stepping into the world, and the next one already waiting in the wings.

If you like seeing behind the curtain:

- 9,097 file touches in April

- 39 short-form videos for Riding the Merry Go 

- 1 final master delivered

— Jeff and Heath, Hecojeni

www.hecojeni.com