In San Diego, he followed his heart instead of his head and spent all his time painting and playing bass in as many bands as possible—as many as seven at once. But quietly, in his apartment he started to write songs on his acoustic guitar, something he’d never done before. It was a way to process his recent experiences and to learn about himself.
“The lyrics (on KILR) were me posing all these questions to myself and then singing hypothetical answers,” Heine says.
On the surface, a lot of what he was singing about was his relationships with girlfriends, because like everything, he was looking at this differently too, but underneath the skin, Heine realized he was actually writing about his time in Iraq. The song, “Hey hey, we’ll make it” is on one level about his girlfriend’s unwavering optimism in the face of their crumbling relationship, but it was also about the optimism he witnessed the Iraqi people had in the face of war.
“It’s the worst possible situation for the people that live there, but they maintain an encouraging sort of optimism. I think optimism is a universal necessity,” Heine says.
The most dramatic moment in Iraq came for Heine when a bullet whizzed by him, barely missing him by ten feet. One of the songs cut from KILR (and being reworked for their new album) expresses this profound experience. (“It’s amazing that I’m alive today/now let’s make it an event.”)
This brush with his mortality gave him the freedom to set restart on his life and live on his own terms.
