Country/Americana singer Chris Heers had been having a normal year as one of those fortunate artists who actually performs full-time for a living. Heers, who usually logs 250 days a year or more in venues in Las Vegas and throughout the Southwest, has seen success on the European and Australian charts, and has had placements in commercials, movie soundtracks, and in XBox and Wii Country Dance video games. Named the 2015 Las Vegas Performer of the Year, he was supposed to headline a March show in California with Jeff Bridges bandleader Chris Pelonis, and was honing new material for a trip to Muscle Shoals to record his next album. But that was all B.C. (Before Coronavirus).
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Now, like most performing musicians, Heers is temporarily out of a job. But he’s one of those artists whose charisma comes from the optimism he wears on his sleeve. His confidence in the future comes through in the lyrics of a song he wrote for his last Nashville album, The Road Ahead Shines, which featured A-list session guitarist Rob McNelley (Bob Seger, Lady Antebellum). That album included the track “Fannye Katrina,” a song about a fisherman stranded by Hurricane Katrina, who encounters an angelic mermaid-like creature that assures him that this, too, shall pass.
“I’ve heard from people who are posting it and referencing it relating to the current crisis,” Heers says. “’Fannye Katrina’ is about a guy whose world is ending, who loses everything he has, or so he thinks. But the message of the tune is that, even though it looks incredibly bleak, we should have faith, because, as the character Fannye says in the chorus, It’s gonna be better than it ever was. The residents of New Orleans thought their world was over when Katrina hit, but it wasn’t.”
The song is somewhat frivolous, maybe even silly, on its face, with an uptempo Warren Zevon vibe. But after Heers sings that main chorus line a few times, the song’s message of hope and faith begins to sink in. “On the anniversary of Katrina, I heard a man in New Orleans being interviewed on TV,” Heers recalls, “talking about how his restaurant was completely wiped out. He said something like, ‘We’ll be back there again though…I know it.’ I remember pumping my fist and saying out loud, ‘Yeah buddy – you will be back!’”
“Later I was noodling around with my old black Takamine and that song just came out. I have no idea where Fannye the angel, or whatever she was, came from, but I’m thankful that she rolled through my pen. She swims up to the fisherman with a glowing face, and an energy and love that can’t be put into words.”
It may be months before the demand for paid live music is the norm again. But Heers is confident he’ll soon resume work at several Vegas casinos, and at venues like the historic Pioneer Saloon in rural Nevada, where he’s sometimes accompanied by former Glenn Frey guitarist Duncan Cameron.
“When I wrote ‘Fannye Katrina,’” Heers says, “I was in a very low place. It was 2010 and we were in a depression. I was losing my home and rental house. I was losing my marriage. A rainstorm had flooded the back half of our little horse ranch. It was like, Well, what else could go wrong? But I got through it. If you look at 1918 and the Spanish flu, you also need to look at what came after it: The roaring ‘20s. The Jazz Age. The Greatest Generation. Frank Capra movies. Light beer. As Fannye says in the song, Just know that you don’t know and have faith/It’s gonna be better than it ever was.’”
