HIRTLE has had a year. The country-rock band, working out of Halifax and Nova Scotia’s South Shore, has four singles out, played its biggest set at the Cavendish Beach Music Festival in July, and is planning to release three more songs by September or October before its first EP drops.
Not bad for a group that came together in 2023 and named itself after a guy who, a decade ago, had never written a song.
That guy is Connor Hirtle, 32, from Dublin Shore—frontman, main lyricist, and the last person to tell you these are his songs alone.
“It’s not just me that is writing the songs; it’s the band,” says Connor, noting the HIRTLE catalogue draws from its members’ experiences. “So you’re getting a story of everybody and not just one single person.”
Connor began writing in 2015, the year a swimming accident on Prince Edward Island left him paralyzed. He’s careful about what that did and didn’t do to him as a songwriter, mostly because there wasn’t a before to compare it to.
“I didn’t necessarily write before my injury, so to say it has changed because of what I have experienced isn’t necessarily true,” he says. “But now that I’ve started actually writing, I’m more open and honest with what I’m writing.”
Singing came first, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with a couple of friends who played guitar. By 2023, HIRTLE had formed and was picking up gigs around the South Shore and Halifax, then wherever would have them.
Four singles into this year, Connor and his band are still having fun trying new things.
“Sun Will Rise” was the first single HIRTLE pushed to release, a song penned by Connor. He wrote it about his own injury before it got away from him and turned into something for anybody having a bad stretch. Another standout is “Back Again,” a heavier, rockier song co-written with a bandmate about wanting a second chance with someone. “These first couple songs were testing the waters on what people enjoy hearing from us more,” he says.
Then there’s “It’s Ok Mama,” which HIRTLE released on Mother’s Day with cover art featuring baby pictures of each band member with his mother. Connor wrote the lyrics for his own mom, about the two of them getting older, and set a condition before they cut it: the song had to say exactly what he meant, or it wasn’t going out at all.
Last month, they played a 45-minute set on the Tailgate Stage at Cavendish Beach Music Festival, the biggest crowd they’d stood in front of. Hirtle had been in that crowd himself for 13 years, and P.E.I. is also where he got hurt, which made the whole thing, in his words, exciting and emotional at the same time—so we’ll see how it goes, he added, before it went.
In addition to writing songs, Connor writes the band’s own promotional material, too, and he doesn’t leave the obvious to anyone else: HIRTLE, in his own words, is a country-rock band known for gritty, emotionally driven storytelling, fronted by a quadriplegic lead singer the crowd probably hasn’t seen before. He pitches it. Then he gets back to the songs, which is roughly how the whole band handles it.
For now, the band’s singles are online wherever you stream (“Sun Will Rise” is the place to start), and HIRTLE’s socials are where fans can find show dates and EP news first.
Needless to say, it’s been a long time coming. Ten years ago, Connor wasn’t a songwriter, and there was no HIRTLE. Now, three more singles are scheduled for the fall, then the EP, then—if he gets his way—a run at being the next country band to make it big out of Canada—just some modest goals.
