Big Heaven recently released their latest EP, the long-running indie-pop band’s third such recording in their seven-year history, and from the Eddie Van Halen-worshiping guitar licks of opening track “’80s Ohio Dream,” Threads indicates the folks in Big Heaven had made an exciting veer in their stylistic journey. It wasn’t that I thought their synth-forward, ’60s girl group-inspired rock had grown stale, only that an approximation of EVH’s fabled, high-gain, flange-and-phaser “brown sound” in a Big Heaven song right off the bat was refreshing. I thought it was a fun, bold move for a band that has been around for a while leaning into a new direction.
Unfortunately, that new direction ran out of road a couple of weeks later, when Big Heaven announced their breakup on social media not long after the EP came out.
I asked founder and frontwoman Mandy Hand what had happened, and as she sketched the band’s history leading up to the sad announcement, I was struck by how many people had crewed Big Heaven over the years — in terms of member turnover, they’re practically a local music analog to Yes (which, I suppose, makes Hand Big Heaven’s Chris Squire). Hand, a multi-instrumentalist and music teacher, told me Big Heaven was conceived in 2017 as a “Kinks cover project” that eventually became an original outfit. Over the ensuing years and a lineup that seemed perpetually in flux, Hand moved from guitar and vocals to just vocals to vocals and synth and, finally, to vocals and bass. The core lineup eventually became Hand on synths, Sam Dobbin on drums, Brock Miller on guitar, and Peter Marsh on bass.
In 2021, Hand invited Marsh’s then-girlfriend Stephanie Benjamin to sing backup and perform auxiliary percussion. Yet this lineup wouldn’t hold either, as Miller moved away at the end of that year. Guitarist Kevin Wellendorf stepped in, and for two years, Big Heaven had what Hand called their “most cohesive core five” until they parted ways with Marsh in 2023.
Hand declined to elaborate on Marsh’s departure, but when he left, she moved from playing keyboards to bass. Benjamin was new to piano, but she took over the keyboard spot. She adapted and learned to play in a relatively short amount of time, but Hand felt like the band she started in 2017 was becoming something different.
“When [Marsh] left,” Hand said, “it started to feel like everything that had happened before 2021 didn’t matter. Or not as much.”
Here was a band that she’d started seven years ago and for which (at least until the past year or so) she’d written and recorded most of the lyrics, melodies, and arrangements, and now that band, due to a lot of unintentional personnel changes, was now her and Dobbin from the old days and Wellendorf and Benjamin, who were contributing new material.
“I was grateful for the amount of buy-in,” Hand said of Wellendorf’s and Benjamin’s roles. And she did want to move forward — or thought she did.
“There was talk of rebranding, like keep the same name, but …,” Hand paused again. “I had all this history and heartache with this band. And what do I do with all that if we’re rebranding and going forward?”
As Hand described it, the new iteration of the band would be a co-fronted “Fleetwood Mac” approach, where she and Benjamin would both sing lead and everyone would contribute to new songs. As it happened, Benjamin wrote, sang lead, and played keys on Threads’ second song, “You Know,” and did the EP’s cover art. Hand said she liked the new music but that the de facto shelving of Big Heaven’s history bothered her.
Still, she and the rest of the band kept going. Benjamin wrote “You Know” in March, and the band recorded it in April at Wellendorf’s Low Hound Studios, where they’d recorded “Ohio” before Marsh’s departure and the EP’s third track, “Connections.” Wellendorf, who tracked, mixed, and mastered the EP, played guitar on the songs. All drums were by Dobbin. Marsh played bass on “Ohio,” while Hand covered the bottom end on “You Know” and “Connections,” as well as singing lead and playing synth on “Ohio” and “Connections.”
Threads’ three songs deal with themes of stagnation and self-destruction, toxic relationships and false friends, and the powerful potential in momentary interactions. It’s thoughtful and funny and has some really big emotional moments, as well as some riffs and synth parts that sound like an ’80s beer commercial in the best way possible.
But before they could release Threads, Dobbin, who had just gotten married and wanted to focus on some other media projects, made the decision to leave the band in May, though he stayed for the remaining shows Big Heaven had on their calendar.
“We had to make a decision,” Hand said. “Do we try to find a new drummer? I didn’t want to do that. Do we try to go with a stable of drummers to call on? I didn’t really want to do that, either.”
Ultimately, Hand, Wellendorf, and Benjamin thought their best course would be “to release Threads, dial down Big Heaven, and reform as a three-piece under a new name.”
They released Threads and played The Cicada on September 13. Unbeknownst to Hand, that would end up being Big Heaven’s final show.
Wellendorf and Benjamin had both decided to move on from the band altogether. They broke the news to Hand at a meeting on a Sunday at the Chat Room. I ran into Benjamin a couple of days after the goodbye post, and while she was disappointed the band was over, she said it was really hard trying to “reboot Big Heaven,” pointing out that Hand had had to do it several times already.
For Hand, the part of Big Heaven’s dissolution that hit her the hardest was that they didn’t get a formal farewell show. “Looking back on the decision, to post [the next day] about breaking up, I maybe should’ve waited a little bit, but at the same time, I didn’t have a chance to say at our show it was the last one. … I was afraid to let go when it initially happened because it was so sudden.”
Hand said she plans to return to open-mics and solo shows. For now, the more intimate setting inherent to those types of performances is better suited to her music. “The older I get, the more important lyrics are to me. It’s nice when people can hear them.”
She mentioned collaborating with three other songwriters, as well. “We don’t have a name, but it’s with Sarah Savage, Lauren Hoffman, and Lisa Smith.”
Hand said they met at regular songwriting meetups organized by local singer-songwriter Simone Nicole.
“The broad genre is rock,” Hand said. “It’s been nice not being in charge of something, and I’m playing guitar instead of bass, which is fun. I haven’t played guitar in a band since Big Heaven started.”
