It all goes back to the open mics for Little Hag. As Avery Mandeville was working her way through every restaurant in Red Bank by day, she spent her evenings from high school through early adulthood at coffee shop open mics across Monmouth County, NJ. Over many late nights she connected with other up and coming musicians and friends of friends became friends. Avery played solo exclusively at first, until a fateful open mic at the Chubby Pickle in Highland Park where Chris Russo backed her on the drums and a world of possibilities opened. She met Matt Fernicola at the late great coffee shop Espresso Joes and they hit it off so well they started a mic of their own at The Inkwell, another coffee spot gone before her time. They’d show up fashionably late and host till the wee hours of the morning, giving a chance for newbies to play in front of a loving crowd and seasoned vets to try something new.
After enough late nights of eating cheese fries and honing their skills, Avery and her friends had a decent collection of songs on their hands. Matt started playing lead guitar and recruited his buddy Owen Flanagan to back them on drums. The gang was still figuring things out and Avery was still technically a solo musician, calling her backing band the “Man Devils”, as the group put out first the Salty EP in 2017 and Happy Birthday, Avery Jane in 2018. The two projects felt a lot closer to fully fledged artistic statements than someone figuring things out at the open mic. The track “Facebook” shows its age just by being about Facebook stalking your ex’s new girl (remember 2015?) but from those earliest moments it was clear Avery had both a command of her dynamic voice and the indie rock sound the band was going for. While the band has played “Blood” so much that they need to take breaks from it from time to time, there is a reason that fans continue to scream for the track at shows. It starts off quiet and reserved before exploding a minute and a half in with the rage that’d been bubbling up under the track the whole time.
Avery and her cohort started to get local attention outside of their open mic scene, leading Bar/None Records to come knocking. The Hoboken label helped the band re-record and repackage a collection of tracks from their first two projects under the newly minted Little Hag moniker, which only came about because it just happened to be Avery’s Instagram handle when they were trying to solidify a band name. That record became Little Hag’s 2020 debut Whatever Happened to Avery Jane. The tracks sounded sharper and tighter in their new context and encouraged Avery and the gang to get right back to writing. While this was technically the group’s debut it didn’t really feel like it, and they wanted to approach their next project like it was their true Little Hag coming out party.
The group had a landmark year in 2021, first releasing the Breakfast EP before dropping their second LP Leash. Breakfast once again featured “Blood” which here was sandwiched by two other bodily fluid inspired tracks. Opener “Piss” charts Avery’s yearlong struggle with the incompetence of the medical system as she tried to get over a chronic UTI, and is without a doubt the catchiest and most fun track you’ll ever hear on the subject. Closer “Cum” meanwhile is a sea-shanty about giving a “veteran of the scene” whats coming to him (getting all his teeth knocked out). It’d be perfect for a raucous tavern based number in a musical about the Jersey Shore DIY scene.
Leash meanwhile felt like a culmination of the vision Little Hag had been building towards since Avery started hitting the open mic scene in high schools. She has a lot of Frances Quinlan in her, from her vibrato filled quiet moments that can turn into massive soaring highs on a dime, though Little Hag is much less frantic sounding a band than Hop Along. Avery has no issues sitting and dealing with her pain, as she does on album highlight “Schlub” where she wonders which loser she’ll be stuck with till she dies. It’s the kinda frank writing that sets Little Hag apart, as Avery has an acerbic sense of humor that can really cut to the core of an issue.
After several years of stability for the group the deck got jumbled when Avery broke up with her boyfriend Chris who’d been playing bass. That tumult led to Avery to decamp in lovely Durham, NC in January 2023, set on a mission to write a song a day. She did exactly that, writing close to thirty songs, eight of which made their way onto the band’s latest release That’s What I Call Little Hag. While the exercise was fruitful, the songs Avery harvested were quite sonically diverse. Avery looked into the vast CD collection of her youth and saw inspiration in the That’s What I Call Music! series, whose samplers helped mold her taste as a youngin. The title couldn’t have been better chosen in the end seeing as these tracks felt like a smörgåsbord of the different styles Little Hag could enhabit. The band plays with everything from pop to disco to their textbook heavy rocking, though all the tracks feature Avery’s biting wit and sardonic charm. The record features several of the very best tracks of the group’s career, as they’ve continued to become sharper performers and better songwriters. The soaring “1000 Birds” is the catchiest track you’ll ever hear about having to clean the toilets at a shitty music venue, and I’ll be thinking about those “Thousand birds shitting on my dreams” for the rest of my life, what an image. The band really shines however when Avery is at her most vulnerable. On “Would It Kill You” Avery details the shortcomings in her previous relationship, showing how even bringing your man to a Halloween party can feel like pulling teeth when your relationship is on a razor’s edge. She cuts through it all like a machete through the grass on the song’s chorus, “Something tells me if he loves me he wouldn’t make me suffer / Something tells me if I suffer at least I won’t be lonely.”
The record closes on the gargantuan “Suck Out the Pain”, a track about trying to surgically remove heartbreak from one’s body. Like “Blood” before it the track starts relatively quiet, as the band’s intensity grows slowly with the tension of the song. By the time the chorus comes around a second time it feels untamably huge, the kinda track that could close out an encore at MetLife, before Avery quickly buttons things up and ends the record with grace.
While Little Hag has had the opportunity to play abroad in Ireland and open for legends like Alex G and Spoon, it all still feels small and local for Avery and the gang. Though they’ve decamped from New Jersey to Philly they’re still firmly planted in their local DIY scene, as excited about growing the community around them as they would be about getting massive opportunities. The one major musical goal Avery shared with me is that one day she’d like to open a coffee shop and host open mics like the ones that raised her. If you gave Avery option of playing that MetLife Stadium set once or spending the rest of her days eating cheese fries and playing open mics, I think I know what she’d choose.
GSC: First off, I love your James Barrett hat!
LH: Nice eye!
GSC: I love that guy, need to see him soon.
LH: I just saw him a couple nights ago in Philly, he’s the best. I was texting him today because I’m trying to figure out a tour and I want to come through Scranton.
GSC: So hyped for his new record, and it’s been so impressive seeing what he’s building with the Good Things Are Happening music festival in Scranton.
LH: It’s just getting bigger and bigger, I’m stoked for him.
GSC: That’s some kismet. Now, what is your name and what do you do in the band Little Hag?
LH: My name is Avery! I write all the songs and sing them and play guitar sometimes.
GSC: You grew up in New Jersey, where specifically?
LH: I grew up in Lincroft in Monmouth County, right next to Red Bank. I worked at damn near every restaurant in Red Bank and spent a lot of my youth there.
GSC: What are your earliest music memories? Who was playing music around the house? What were they playing?
LH: My Mom was really into Elton John, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. My Dad was more into The Beatles and Van Morrison. My taste skewed a little bit older as a result, those are still artists that I love today. Ecept Van Morrison, he’s fucking cringe.
GSC: Did you have any siblings or people in the community who were helping you get into music then?
LH: I’m the oldest of three so I was kinda the taste maker. Watching MTV and VH1 was where I got a lot of music as I was developing my own tastes. Like I still ride or die for that first Maroon Five record. I don’t care if you think it’s corny, I think it’s fucking cool.
GSC: Songs About Jane rips!
LH: I got into Green Day and Fall Out Boy and Say Anything. I remember watching their music videos on MTV. American Idiot by Green Day was a very important album. It came out when I was in fourth or fifth grade and that was just the coolest shit ever. I would sit on the bus with my iPod rocking out.
GSC: I remember my brother getting a gift card to our local record store Scotti’s and him buying that CD and it being the biggest deal.
LH: I still have a huge CD collection from my youth. Pretty random stuff. When people come over, I’m like, please don’t judge me for Papa Roach and other stuff that I don’t necessarily vouch for anymore, but I love to have CDs.
GSC: Where’d you get your discs from back in the day?
GSC: Are they still open?
LH: Yeah! They’ve been around since at least the 80s, maybe longer, and it still looks exactly the same there as it did then. There’s a scene in Chasing Amy where Ben Affleck and Jason Lee are in Jack’s and it looks just the same now as it does in the movie. We’re playing a stripped down small show there on Sunday. I’m so excited, it’s a major full circle moment for me.
GSC: What was your first connection to the local music scene in Jersey?
LH: I didn’t go to shows when I was young other than stuff I went to with my parents. I feel like a bit of a poser when it comes to the Red Bank music scene because I was just on the cusp. There used to be a bustling music scene with many venues in Red Bank that was a blip. If you blinked, you missed it, and I fuckin blinked. My real intro was when I started taking music lessons, voice and guitar, because my best friend was doing it when we were 14 or 15. Then I started playing the open mics at Espresso Joe’s in Keyport, which I think it’s now called Keyport Coffee Cafe.
GSC: They got Joe right out of there.
LH: Rest in peace to Espresso Joe’s, it was really cool. I am so grateful that cafes with open mics like that exist. A lot of the time it’s a ton of people who sound like absolute shit, who really have just begun to hone their talents, or are trying out something new, and having a place to do that is so important. I met my best friends at mics, I met so many people from that scene. Then a few years later, me and my guitar player, Matt Fernicola, started an open mic at The Inkwell in Long Branch, which also doesn’t exist anymore. Rest in peace to The Inkwell, it was such a special thing. I hold those memories so dearly. I hope to one day, maybe when I’m old, I’ll have a coffee shop and host an open mic for people like us.
GSC: What was a typical night of the Inkwell, like? When do you get in there, how long does it last, are people happy to be there? Stand up comedy open mics can be fun or depressing.
LH: I mean it’s hit or miss. Some people were definitely more talented than other people, but everyone was stoked to be there. The open mic would start at eight, so me and Fern would get there at like, 8:10, and start setting things up. We were always late, but we would go until like 2am. The Inkwell was a cool place because they were the only late night hang out spot that wasn’t a bar, so it was a lot of teenagers drinking coffee and eating cheese fries until the wee morning. It was poets and comedians, but mostly musicians. I hold those memories very dearly.
GSC: Did all the members of your band meet at those open mics?
LH: Fern and I met through mutual friends at the Espresso Joe’s open mic. Then our drummer, Owen, was a friend of Fern’s that came to the open mic and would back Fern up. When we started recording my first solo stuff that became the EP, Salty that I put out under Avery Mandeville in 2017 he was like my buddy Owen can play drums on this, and I was like, great! Owen and Fern are my day ones in Little Hag, and then joining us these past couple years is Kara Introcaso on vocals and keys and Mitchell Warren Devlin on bass. But yeah all roads do lead back to the open mic.
GSC: Is that why you think that you’ve been able to keep the core three of you together for so long, even with the newer additions to the band?
LH: I mean my bandmates are really lovely people. There’s just a lot of respect and love for each other that is not necessarily common amongst bandmates. We keep the vibe chill and have fun and listen to one another, not every band has that same energy. I don’t know why those guys want to stick around with me though, I feel lucky. I love them so much, and I’m never going to let them go, and I hope they don’t ever quit on me. I don’t think they will, though. I think they love me too.
GSC: As you were coming into yourself as a musician in those early years, were there any groups or individuals that you looked up to for inspiration, locally or not?
LH: The people that I was playing with around at that time, Cranston Dean, Emily Grove, Rick Barry, Frank Lombardi, all local singer songwriters I really admired. They made me want to be better, and inspired me to write more.
GSC: You guys signed to Bar/None Records in 2020 to release Whatever Happened To Avery Jane? What was life like at that time? How did you know that you were ready to make that jump?
LH: Oh my God, I didn’t! I was so scared and confused by it. Emmy Black, who does A&R for Bar/None, came to see us play at White Chapel Projects in Long Branch in 2019 and approached me and was like, “Hey! I’m Emmy from Bar/None. I love your music. I think you’re really fucking cool. If you want you should come by the office and we can talk about future possibilities.” And I was like, come by the office? What the hell? I don’t know how to do that. What do I wear? What should I say? I don’t know how to do any of this. So I went up to Hoboken and met with Emmy and Mark and Glenn.
GSC: I am assuming you went full pants suit right? I’d imagine they’d expect business attire.
LH: It’s funny, it was August and I was probably honestly trying to look a bit professional but sweating any professionalism off. They were like, we believe in your music, we think you’re cool, and we want to sign you. What do you think? And I was like, well currently I own 100% of $0 so why not? If you want to make some money for me and keep some money for you, that’s cool, that means I would have some money.
GSC: Do you remember your headspace when you were recording? Did you really feel like you had something to prove? Were you just having fun with it?
LH: The first record we put out with Bar/None, was Whatever Happened to Avery Jane, and it was re-releases of my first solo record with one new song called “Tetris”, so we were reintroducing these songs to a new audience. “Tetris” I wrote it in a day and recorded it the next day, and that was it. Then in early covid times, I wrote pretty much all of what would become Leash, so that really felt like the first Little Hag record honestly.
GSC: How do those first album songs sound listening back on them now?
LH: I think I’ve never been very good at advocating for what I’m feeling or hearing in the studio, I still get very overwhelmed by that. I feel like I’m watching the clock and I’ll go, I don’t care! Just record whatever. Play something so we can move on. It’s really hard when you have limited studio time.
GSC: And you’re paying for all of it.
LH: Yea! A lot of the stuff on that record is so corny to me. I’m still writing breakup songs, but some of those songs I wrote when I was 16. There’s a song about being hungover for the first time when I was like, this is the worst I’ll ever feel. I guess it’s cute, but they’re definitely not what I would consider the best.
GSC: Do you still play much of that material live?
LH: Sometimes there’s this one called, “No More Dick Pix” that we still play sometimes, and we still play “Blood” which I wrote in like, 2017. Every once in a while, I’m like “Blood” is retired. I’m over it. But of course, someone’s gonna be like, “play Blood! Play Blood!” And we’ll go allllllll right, we’ll play “Blood”.
GSC: Moving into the time when you’re writing a lot of Breakfast and Leash, or what percentage of those songs were brand spanking new versus things you were able to rework?
LH: The newest song on Breakfast was “Piss”. That song was the reason to make it Breakfast, because we had “Blood” and “Cum” as old songs. “Cum” we recorded for the Leash sessions, and then I felt like it didn’t fit on the album. It’s almost a country song.
GSC: It feels like a sea shanty.
LH: Yea, it really is. I feel like I gave it more purpose by putting it with “Blood” and “Piss”. “Piss” I wrote a couple months before that EP came out, because I had a chronic UTI for a year that eventually resolved itself, but not because of anything I was doing. Just after months and months of trying every fucking medication, every diet and everything that I could look up, it just went away on its own, magically, which was this extra little sucker punch. “Piss” is one of my favorite songs that I ever wrote, because I was so angry and desperate, and I had so many horrible interactions with doctors in that time who were beyond shitty, and it was great getting that all out.
GSC: Moving into Leash, a phenomenal record. How does it sound listening back?
LH: To me, these songs feel far away and old. I feel like I’ve been playing the same shit for for years but I still ride for those songs.
GSC: Do you have a favorite song on the record?
LH: “Schlub” is maybe my favorite song I’ve ever written. It is also one of my favorites to play live, because it has those quieter moments, it always gets everyone fucking juiced up. All the girls are up front at the stage, all my friends are singing it back to me.
GSC: So Leash drops. It’s September 2021 you probably didn’t have a lot of opportunities to play these songs live during that time but you were still building an audience. What was it like when you finally were able to get on the road? Did you feel like you’d gone from open mics to something different?
LH: If I’m being honest, I don’t feel like I have noticed that much growth from the past five-ish years. That is not true because we are playing bigger shows and having way cooler opportunities, doing cool shit, but it doesn’t feel that way a lot of the time. It feels like super gradual barely perceptible progress.
GSC: When did you start writing the songs that became That’s What I Call Little Hag?
LH: I wrote the vast majority of them in January 2023. Me and my best friend Noah went down to Durham, North Carolina with the intention of writing a song every day, so that was what we did. Let me pull up the files… So I wrote “The Machine”, “Oops”, “The Suburbs”, “All Three”, “You Blew It!”, “Would It Kill You?”, “Hungry, Horny, Silly”, and “God, I’m So Annoying” in Durham. Wow, that’s eight of the 13 songs that were written in that month. That’s a lot! The rest of them were from the year or so before. A lot of it is about a breakup that I had, feeling those big feelings, which sounds totally boring when I say it like that.
GSC: Did you feel like being in North Carolina affected your songwriting at all, or was it more the process of writing songs every day?
LH: More the process. Songwriting is a muscle that you have to flex and work out. If you sit down to write songs more often, you’re going to write more songs. I used to be like, Oh, I have to be struck with inspiration which was a really shitty, lazy attitude for me. Like no, you write a song when you sit down to write a song, otherwise you’re not writing songs. The act of sitting down every day and finishing a song really got a lot out of me, even when I didn’t love the end results day of I always felt like we got something out of it.
GSC: I love the record’s That’s What I Call Music! theme, the name, the cover. I saw it and was shocked that someone didn’t beat you to the chase on that one.
LH: I was searching on Spotify like, how many people have done this? How overdone is this idea? I didn’t find anything that felt comparable honestly.
GSC: Were those CDs a big deal for you as a kid? Do you remember any specific number that was your shit?
LH: I still have a lot of them! My big ones were five, six and seven. I fuck with them heavy, they definitely informed my taste.
GSC: When did you know they were the inspiration for the record?
LH: We had the songs and we didn’t have an obvious title or art or anything. Earlier this year it was like, alright Avery, if you want to put this album out so badly you gotta get the album art made and name it. It seemed like a natural title because the songs were produced and recorded in a very random way with a lot of different people. There’s eight producers in nine different studios on these songs. There is a lot of variety too so it sounds like a compilation, or a Little Hag sampler.
GSC: You are still doing a lot of shredding on this record, but it’s a lot more pop forward than the previous two. What were your sonic inspirations? Anyone in particular you were listening to?
LH: There was a lot of inspiration. I love when a producer asks me to play the inspo track so I can tell them what it is that I like about it. I have a little playlist, it was a lot of just shit that I like, Nine Inch Nails, The Breeders, Granddaddy, The Cardigans, Weyes Blood.
GSC: You recorded some great music videos to go along with this record. How did you decide to make a video for every song?
LH: My initial plan was to do three videos for the 13 songs. I made a video for “Suck Out The Pain” myself. My friend Ali Nugent made one for “You Blew It” and my friend Kris Khunachak made one for “The Machine”. Towards the end of July, somebody at Bar/None called me and was like, “Hey, can you make a music video for every song?” I was like, “You mean 10 music videos in three weeks? That’s crazy!” And they’re like, “Well, they don’t have to be good. They could just be whatever. We just need a visual for each song because Vevo will list them and they’ll help give the album a push.” So I was stressed out as fuck. I was catatonic for a day.
GSC: That’s a next level homework assignment right there.
LH: So of the 10 songs that needed videos four of them were done by my friends, and then six of them I made. A lot of it was born out of having no budget or time or motivation to get off my ass, which is why one is a video of Google Maps clicking around, or a video of me screen recording myself on my desktop, because I could do that in a day. The “Would It Kill You?” video, I think is my favorite of the videos I made. It feels so intimate.
GSC: Have you seen the movie DiDi? It’s a coming of age movie about a kid who is in middle school in 2008 and it spends a lot of time on the computer from his perspective, going through Facebook and whatnot. The way that you recorded that video really reminded me of that movie, using it in a playful way.
LH: I gotta check it out. I feel like I would like that.
GSC: “1000 Birds” is another track that clicked with me, a hilarious video. How did that song come about?
LH: I’ve worked in restaurants all my life, though not the past few years. That was inspired by a particularly nasty toilet that I had to clean one time at this venue that doesn’t exist anymore. The owner would sometimes make you mop twice, but it was like a complete grody shit hole dive covered top to bottom in Sharpie and gum, that second mopping didnt do shit. The song isn’t about that specific place though. It’s about any place where you work in a service industry type of job taking a beating, and how hopeless it can feel when you are cleaning a toilet and wondering what you’re doing with your life. All my love and respect to everybody who has ever cleaned a toilet and everybody who ever will clean a toilet.
GSC: I love “You Blew It”. You absolutely belt that one, that must have been a fun track to record. How do you write for your voice? Are you typing the words you belt in all caps? Is it felt in the studio or in demoing?
LH: That one I sent the demo to my buddy Joe Zorzi from Modern Chemistry. The demo was just the three different vocal parts and it was very soft. I truly did not know that that take was inside of me until we were doing it. Joe was just like, louder, LOUDER! Do it again BIGGER! And I’m sweating and I’m jumping. It’s crazy what comes out of you. I scream some songs on the road where I couldn’t get like that in the studio. I legit needed to run around and get the juices flowing to get that take. “You Blew It” was one of those vocal takes where I was like “Woah! I didn’t know I could do that” but that’s what working with a good producer like Joe will do for you, he’ll get you there.
GSC: And goddamn, did you get there. I understand that the lyrics are something that was texted to you in the midst of a break up with your ex who was in the band.
LH: When I kicked him out of the band, he was the bass player for a little bit there, I told him listen, I can’t. I was very fucking nice too. I was like, I just think at this time it doesn’t make sense for us to continue in this capacity. I’m not counting it out for the future, but right now it doesn’t make sense to me for you to be in the band, and I hope you understand. And he said, “I know that you’re making a huge mistake, but it’s your mistake to make.” And I was like, you fucking prick! What an ego! You’re so fucking high and mighty, meanwhile you’re the one who blew it! It was so iconic though at the same time I was like, I gotta use that line, the hubris of it.
GSC: “Would It Kill You” is another one where you’re so dynamic with your voice, you’re almost undersea deep at points. Is that one where you wrote it for your voice or did that also come out in the performance?
LH: In recent years, I’ve tried to write a little bit more for my voice. Capos exist after all, I can just change the key of anything. That one is super low, but again, I don’t really know how I got a good vocal take out of that one. I tried to sing it the other day and I was like, uh oh. Maybe once that becomes part of the regular set then I’ll get in a rhythm, but it was tough. I also have no vocal hygiene whatsoever. I don’t really warm up, I don’t really do any of the stuff that you’re supposed to do. I’m sure if I warmed up, I would be able to sing “Would It Kill You” well, and I guess that’s what I must have done that day.
GSC: “Suck Out The Pain” again, phenomenal video, and the track is one of my favorite tracks you’ve ever done. That is just a real ripper. How did that song come about? How did you know that it was both going to be a single and an album closer?
LH: I wanted it to be the album closer but I didn’t want it to get lost in the mix. If you look at most album streams things trickle off unless there is a single deep down there. It did feel like giving away the ending in the movie trailer kinda, but I knew it had the weight of a closer so we let it do double duty. That one I had a sexy nap dream about this girl that I was briefly seeing, and then woke up on the couch with my boyfriend that I didn’t really like. I was like my life used to be so much better! I got in my head with this terminal nostalgia, looking at pictures of us, missing the good times. Really though the good times were just pre covid times. That one wrote itself pretty quickly. I took it to Eric Romero who did four of the bigger rockin songs on the record. I played him “Torn” by Ednaswap, the original version, not the Natalie Imbruglia version, because it’s so fucking powerful and dark. I was like, let’s just rip this off, and I think we really did.
GSC: That has gotta be a fun one to play live too.
LH: I love to play that one live. The harmonies on that one are just so good, Kara always knocks them out of the park. If we’re running over time a little bit, because lately it’s been towards the end of the set, when we get to the very end of the song that’s just a repetition of the first verse I’ll just act like I’m going to do it regular, and do it fast as hell to wake up anybody who was asleep.
GSC: Do you have a favorite song from the record right now?
LH: I think that “Oops” is my favorite song on the record.
GSC: Great track!
LH: It’s probably the punkiest track on the record. I love playing it live. I think it’s… bitchy. It’s one of the bitchiest songs I’ve written.
GSC: Do you have a venue that feels like your home base?
LH: My favorite place to play was The Saint in Asbury Park. Rest in peace to a great space. I guess my favorite place now is The Wonder Bar. I love to play there. Actually Low Dive in Asbury Park, which used to be the Yacht Club, is my fave just because you don’t have to sell tickets, it’s always got a huge crowd from the boardwalk, you always get paid, and you always get drunk.
GSC: You’ve had the chance to play with some legends. Do you have a favorite show you ever played?
LH: New Year’s Eve 2018 at The Stone Pony. We would do 90s New Year’s Eve cover shows and we worked for months on a Neutral Milk Hotel cover set. The booker wasn’t sure it’d play but I told her we’d have a 10 piece band with a four piece horn section, we fucking did it right. It was me and my old bass player, Chris that had rallied together the band, he’s a big Neutral Milk Hotel cat. I have never ever worked so hard on a show in my life. Learning a whole cover set was such an undertaking but everybody worked so hard on it and it was so fun. I’ve never felt cooler.
GSC: I love how you knew immediately. I know that you’ve recently decamped from your native New Jersey to Philadelphia. How has that been? Are you missing Jersey? Do you feel at home in Philly?
LH: I feel a little bit of both. I feel like a bit of a poser in Philly, because I’m just one of many recent transplants that are here that are gentrifying the joint, but I love my friends in the area and the neighborhood and being in Philly. Philly is fucking cool. People are weirdly nice. I don’t know if that’s a common take, but people walking down the street say hi and talk. I love it, but I’m like that’s weird. I’m a Jersey girl at heart, and I’ll always be coming back for some reason or another. When I first moved to Philly I felt like I was going back to Jersey literally every single weekend for something. It came to the point where I was like, I don’t live in Jersey. I gotta make the choice to live in Philly. But I do love it here.
GSC: Are you a Philly sports fan?
LH: I’m not really a sports fan in general but I am leaning into Philly sports. Last year I was living really close to the stadiums so we would go for Eagles tailgates. I love the culture. I think being a sports fan is super fun and cool, but I don’t really know what’s happening. My girlfriend has to explain football to me.
GSC: I love Philly so much but I’m a big Mets fan and the Phillies are our mortal enemies, so they aren’t always the nicest to me in your town.
LH: They can be brutal, that is true. Someone told me a story that they got a cup of piss port on them because they were wearing a Mets jersey at a Phillies game. A whole cup!
GSC: That sounds about right, honestly. One last question, what is something that brings you joy that people might not know about you?
LH: Something that has been bringing me joy lately is soy marinated soft boiled eggs. You make soft boiled eggs, you put ’em in a marinade of soy sauce and rice vinegar and sesame oil and a bunch of spices and garlic, and you let him sit in the fridge for a few days. Oh my god! You can put that shit on anything. I’ll have it with ramen or on avocado toast. Any type of vegetable situation that I’m eating, put a fucking egg on it. They’re so good I’m scared that I’m going to overdo it. I’m going to get burnt out on them. But for now we’re in heaven.
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