Collin Hegna
Collin Hegna is a Portland, Oregon-based musician, composer, and recording engineer. Hegna founded the Spaghetti Western–themed indie rock combo Federale and remains their principal songwriter. In addition, he has played bass with The Brian Jonestown Massacre since 2004.
As co-owner of SE Portland's Revolver Studios, Hegna has produced releases from Joel Gion, Matthew J. Tow, and David J. He has also served as engineer for artists and events ranging from acclaimed neo-psychedelia acts The Quarter After and The Richmond Sluts to exurban roots festival Pickathon.
His songs, both with and without instrumentation by Federale, have appeared on a variety of film and television soundtracks including The Bad Batch, The Lego Movie, and Breakthrough. He oversaw the music for the Emmy-nominated Super Bowl commercial "Halftime in America".
Early life
The native Oregonian spent much of his youth outdoors around the state's varied natural environments – the high desert, trout creeks, his grandfather's farm – and has said that upbringing helped instill an appreciation for the romanticism of the west. As a teenager, Hegna attended Beaverton High School, where he played bass in the jazz band. His father, Gailen Hegna, has owned and operated Rainbow Recording Studio for more than 30 years.Gailen served as mixer and engineer on recordings for a variety of Portland-area acts including jazz bassist David Jay White, Christian metallers Godspeed, Susan and the Surftones, and 90s Caleb Klauder/Jenny Conlee band Calobo. He also provided additional engineering on the third album of Collin's band Federale.
From 1996 to 2001, Hegna attended the University of Oregon's School of Music and Dance. His studies included Electronic Composition within the Future Music Oregon program, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Music Technology.
While still attending school, Hegna began playing bass for Cocaine Unicorn, a tambourine-spiked retro-chic combo formed by singer/songwriter Paul Burkhart whose membership included Carl Werner, Dasa Kalstrom, and Ryan Sumner. Willamette Week described their sound as "swagger-heavy Anglophile pop... ready to ride the garage wave straight to the Strokes' sex, drugs and rock-'n'-roll after-party."
After two years in Eugene, during which Burkhart complained the act was labeled "a fashion band", they relocated to Portland and attracted strong local buzz, though intra-band strife would eventually end the group before they could record a proper album. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart founder Kip Berman was a friend of Burkhart's and wrote the song "Hey Paul", off of their self-titled debut album, as an "homage" to Cocaine Unicorn.
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Since 2004, Hegna has played bass for critically acclaimed psych-rock act the Brian Jonestown Massacre. The band, which gained an unexpected mainstream notoriety following the release of Sundance-Grand-Jury-award-winning documentary Dig, endured regular changes of membership under the volatile leadership of founding singer-songwriter Anton Newcombe.Following the resignation of his band's drummer and bassist, Newcombe posted a note on then-popular social media site Friendster seeking replacements. Cocaine Unicorn drummer Ryan Sumner responded volunteering himself and Hegna for the positions, and the pair drove to Los Angeles for auditions. Though the original drummer ended up returning, Hegna soon became an integral member of their rotating "rogues' gallery of past lineups and psychedelic standard-bearers".
He would accompany the band across the globe and play a key role in their performances. Even at the height of BJM extravagance, when their live sets swelled to include four or five guitars, critics praised "Hegna's tight rhythm work" as an indispensable grounding element. Once the group scaled back their touring personnel, Hegna's presence served as an increasingly important component as the line-up became, in Newcombe's words, "much cleaner and defined".
Nevertheless, though he has longest continuous tenure with the band of any current BJM member, performances remains fraught with tension. On-stage strife between Newcombe and Hegna nearly ended a June 2018 concert in Brisbane Australia.
Other bands
While Federale and Brian Jonestown remained his primary groups, Hegna would occasionally lend his talents to high-profile side-projects launched by established artists. In 2010, when Dandy Warhols' founding member Peter Holmström first assembled his psych-rock quintet Pete International Airport, Hegna added "whistling" to the self-titled debut and bass on tour. Austinist thought "their straightforward '70s revivalist sound strikes comparisons to The Doors as... Collin Hegna's distorted bass lines float through the air."Hegna would also join a group formed by longtime BJM mainstay/The Out Crowd founder Matt Hollywood. Staffed by musicians with ties to Brian Jonestown or similarly celebrated NW-adjacent psych-garage sensations, Rebel Drones brought together bassist Hegna, guitarist Holmstrom, multi-instrumentalist William Slater, and drummer Jason Anchondo around frontman Hollywood.
Given the star-studded roster's pre-existing obligations, the supergroup proved short-lived. Members inevitably drifted back toward their own projects, and, as Hollywood would later explain, Rebel Drones "lost momentum. Everybody in the band had a lot of other things going on, and, eventually, it just... wasn't a priority."
During Drones' brief mid-2000s tenure, the act did enter Hegna's Revolver studio to lay down material for a potential album. Writing of the "nearly forgotten recordings" almost a decade later, the Phoenix New Times found "its drone... delicious and mind-expanding."
Although never officially put out, the tracks slowly gathered an online following among the BJM faithful and fans of Hollywood's solo work. One song entitled "Drugs" has received more than 100K plays on YouTube since it was first uploaded seven years ago. Finally, in the summer of 2018, former members announced that Cardinal Fuzz Records would release both digital and vinyl editions of the Rebel Drones sessions entitled Abusing The System.
Federale
Along with former Cocaine Unicorn members Werner, Kalstrom, and Sumner, Hegna formed Federale in 2005. The band became known for creating evocative, almost-entirely instrumental tunes similar to cinematic scores, which the Seattle Weekly found deserving of comparison to "Goblin, Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti for a sweeping nod to soundtracks of the past". The AV Club noted that "Federale specializes in making soundtrack music for films that don't exist yet, using pedal steel, trumpets, whistling, and all the other orchestral flourishes associated with Italian cinema of the '60s and '70s."Sumner, the drummer credited with originating their cinematic approach, died from a blood clot to the heart during the band's first year. Werner and Kalstrom eventually moved on to other projects as various Portland-area musicians joined the rotating line-up around Hegna. Due to the number of people who contributed to the album, Hegna said at the time that he considered the endeavor "primarily a studio project" and that he had no ambitions of touring the band.
Federale's current line-up includes Rick Pedrosa, Nalin Silva, classical soprano Maria Karlin, orchestral percussionist Brian Gardiner, Colin Sheridan, and Sebastian Bibb-Barrett.
La Rayar: A Tale of Revenge
After playing together for three years, Federale recorded their debut LP La Rayar: A Tale of Revenge, a song-cycle based around the story of an ordinary man spurred toward acts of violence following the slaughter of his family by a Native American tribe. To help convey the underlying storyline, bits of narration were inserted within the otherwise instrumental album. "We'll come up with a story line and a cast of characters write a theme for each character," Hegna explained. "The different themes and songs tell the story."Marveling at the seriousness with which Federale embraced Spaghetti Western soundscapes, the Portland Mercury advised listeners to "let the whistled melodies, wooden flutes, rattling snare drums, twangy guitars, and trumpets pour in."
"It's the music to a movie we conceptualized," Hegna said about the record. "The movie doesn't actually exist, each character in ‘the movie’ has a theme and the various themes... are developed and recur through various permutations as the events change and as the characters are affected by what happens in the story."
''Devil in a Boot''
In 2009, Federale put out their second album, Devil in a Boot. The band recorded half of the tracks in Hegna's Revolver Studios while utilizing the organic reverb of a vacant Masonic temple for the remainder. As with their debut, the LP's overarching concept focuses upon an average man driven by horrific tragedy to wreak vengeance against the railroad baron who stole his home, murdered his loved ones, and left the protagonist entombed in a shallow grave."The themes of classic westerns are all there in the totalities and timbres," wrote Josiah Mankovsky for The Dropout, "solitude and pain, shootouts and feuds, long dusty rides and revenge." Acknowledging the band's debt to Morricone, the Portland Mercury further noted that Federale were "respectful in their path, crafting a graceful and stylistic sound that sprawls out as a soundtrack to some hidden western cinematic gem."
In 2011, a promotional EP featuring three songs from the album alongside the unreleased track "Sarcophagus" was sent out with deliveries by Portland's Lonesome Pizza.
''The Blood Flowed Like Wine''
By the release of their third full-length, The Blood Flowed Like Wine, Federale songs had already been licensed by various television shows and commercials broadcast nationwide, but opportunities for scoring a nationally released motion picture had thus far eluded them.To that end, though an interior plot does link much of The Blood Flowed Like Wine, the storyline is not highlighted with the prominence of their earlier works, and there is no explanatory libretto or narration. As well, the music expands the Federale sound beyond the Spaghetti Western-replicating tropes of past albums. Most notably, the group invited KP Thomas and Alex Maas to contribute vocals to tracks that formerly would have been instrumental.
In contrast with the more collaborative process of past recordings, Hegna largely composed the songs himself by crafting a digital simulation of each part before arranging full orchestration with the Federale regulars, augmented by members of the 45th Parallel chamber ensemble, pedal steel guitarist Paul Brainard, and members of the Oregon Symphony. The Portland Mercury noted approvingly that "Federale has expanded to include strings, horns, and a much richer, more orchestral foundation."
Writing for the Oregonian, Jason Simms found that the band's familiar backdrops were now laced with Middle Eastern-tinged accents, and praised the "mystical, desert feel that ties it all together."