Listen Up: Eric Hilboldt

Photo by Michael Donahue // Buy this photo

Eric Hilboldt

Learning to play a musical instrument was a requirement in Eric Hilboldt’s household.

“I started playing drums when I was 4 because my parents made me play an instrument and my dad gave me a pair of drumsticks,” said Hilboldt, 20.

His sister played organ. “My family had a (tradition) of, ‘You have to play an instrument until you’re 13.’”

Photo by Michael Donahue

Eric Hilboldt

The music lessons paid off; Hilboldt, whose stage name is “Eric Hill,” now sings and plays “The Resonator,” or one of the other guitars he built, at his gigs at Bangkok Alley in Collierville.

As a child, Hilboldt hated playing drums. “It was like school. My dad would make me sit there and read percussion music until I got it down.”

Things changed when Hilboldt turned 12; his drum teacher invited him to play a gig with him in the Charlie Wood Trio at King’s Palace Cafe on Beale Street. That’s when Hilboldt realized he “really wanted to do something that had to do with music.”

He joined a couple of bands, including Rustic Ruckus. “We played battle of the bands at Christ United Methodist Church. We got second.”

The idea of learning an instrument was “doing music supposedly encourages work within the classroom.”

That wasn’t the case with Hilboldt. “I actually went down kind of a wrong path in high school. I went to Christian Brothers for my freshman year; then I got shipped off to boarding school because I was wild.”

He wasn’t happy at St. Paul’s Preparatory School in Phoenix. He had to wear khaki pants with a woven blue belt and a short-sleeved blue denim button-down shirt with a collar dotted with pins he’d won for his school achievements. “They wouldn’t let me get away with my Birkenstocks, and I was furious.”

But, he said, “I look back on it and it was probably the best thing that ever happened because I got my life straight.”

It also was where Hilboldt learned to play guitar. His mother gave him one before he left home. “I think my mom was like, ‘Bring this because you’re gonna have a lot of down time.’”

Hilboldt began writing music at the school. “I’m writing these lovey love-letter kind of songs. It was more like poetry that I just scribbled.”

He wrote them for a Memphis girl he was smitten with at the time. “We didn’t have a radio and we had no TV. So, I could either write letters to my parents or to my sister, but I could never write letters to the girl. So, I figured, ‘Well, I’ll write this stuff and think that one day she might get it.’”

Hilboldt returned to CBHS his junior year. He asked the manager of the Sekisui restaurant near the school if he could play there. That lead to gigs at Bangkok Alley. He and a friend began playing there as a duo called “Jahkoostic.” “I listened to a lot of Bob Marley and he always said ‘jah.’ It (their music) was this laid-back mellow Sublime-y kind of feel.”

Hilboldt tried a year of college at the University of Alabama, but he hated it. On Google, he discovered the Summit School of Guitar Building and Repair on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. “Canada is just great. I probably wrote some of the best lines that we’ve mixed in some of my songs just sitting on the beach or going surfing.”

To date, Hilboldt has written about 60 songs and built five guitars. He and his buddy/manager/producer J.M. Byrd, 23, are working on a CD.

Expressing his thoughts through lyrics is “almost like an exorcism,” Hilboldt said. “You’re trying to get it out and sometimes it doesn’t want to come out. So, you keep writing these things until it fits.”

Some of his songs, including “Hang Me Up to Dry,” are about past relationships. “I really hate drama. It just finds me. So then I find the songs.”

Follow Hilboldt on MySpace at myspace.com/musicerichill.

Listen Up spotlights area performers. Michael Donahue can be reached at 529-2797.

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