Michael Hearst

Michael Marcus Hearst (born December 27, 1972 in Virginia Beach, Virginia) is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and producer. He is best known as a founding member of the eclectic musical group One Ring Zero, and for his solo albums Songs For Ice Cream Trucks, Songs For Unusual Creatures, Songs For Fearful Flyers, and the children's books Unusual Creatures, Extraordinary People, and Curious Constructions. He has also composed the music for a number of films including The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, Chicken People, To Be Takei, Magic Camp, and House of Suh. In 2014, he co-produced and co-directed Unusual Creatures, a ten episode series for PBS Digital Studios. Founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1997, One Ring Zero moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 2001. The group's works are often programmatic and/or collaborative. They include As Smart As We Are, featuring lyrics by Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, A.M. Homes, Neil Gaiman, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers. The book/CD The Recipe Project is a collection of recipes set to music and sung word for word in the musical style suggested by the chefs, including Mario Batali, Chris Cosentino, Andrea Reusing, David Chang, John Besh, Mark Kurlansky, Michael Symon, and Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Planets is a collection of compositions representing the solar system and beyond. Hearst says of Planets, "It had been just about 100 years since Holst had composed his song cycle The Planets. It seemed like it was time to musically revisit our solar system and come up with our own song cycle." Hearst's solo work includes the albums Songs For Ice Cream Trucks, Songs For Unusual Creatures, and Songs For Fearful Flyers, as well as the audio website Songs For Newsworthy News, and soundtracks to several films, including Chicken People, The House of Suh, Magic Camp, To Be Takei, and The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, and Chicken People. His album, Songs For Unusual Creatures, is a collection of songs inspired by lesser-known animals. It includes works composed for Kronos Quartet, The Microscopic Septet, Margaret Leng Tan, and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. Songs For Fearful Flyers features seven compositions intended to calm nervous travelers. The album features a cameo from actress Whoopi Goldberg. Hearst established Urban Geek Studios and Urban Geek Records, where he has produced, recorded, and worked on post-production for Guided by Voices, Tanya Donelly, Kansas, The Holy Modal Rounders, and Robert Creeley. Hearst has performed and given lectures and workshops at universities, museums, and cultural centers around the world. He has also appeared on NPR's Fresh Air, A+E's Breakfast With The Arts, and NBC's The Today Show. As a writer, Hearst's stories have appeared in literary journals such as McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Post Road, Parenthetical Note, The Lifted Brow, and The Muse Apprentice Guild. He wrote the non-fiction children's books Unusual Creatures, Extraordinary People, and Curious Constructions. Hearst earned a degree in music composition from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1995, where he studied under Dika Newlin.