Hank Early's Rabbit Habitat
Mercury Lounge
July 17, 2024
When a musician could, ostensibly, play anything, then I think about their artistry as a matter of choice or taste. There’s at least a dozen-deep roster of shredders performing in Tulsa every night of the week, swapping configurations with ease and creating little pop-up conglomerates, shoulder to shoulder onstage with hours-long sets tossing solos to each other. This is its own kind of joyful, chaotic magic, much-beloved by a large base of listeners, and something this city is known for.
I expected Mercury Lounge’s current Wednesday happy hour residency, Hank Early’s Rabbit Habitat, to follow this pattern of operation as well—running on vibes as much as or more than a distinct plan, especially since the project debuted only in April. But according to my partner, who also plays Early’s instrument of choice, the pedal steel, “Steel players are weird.”
As such, I should have known better than to expect merely a tangent of Early’s primary gig as steel/auxiliary instrumentalist for Turnpike Troubadours. Advanced steel players can do things other musicians can’t do and hear things other musicians can’t hear. The pedal steel houses equal capacity for barroom twang, jazz, and atmospheric psych rock, and as such, Early’s full-fledged compositions touched on it all, with a sprinkling of pop hits, too. With Early as a minimalist frontman but airtight bandleader and the steel serving as vocalist, it was unlike any happy hour I’ve had in a while.
If you find this intriguing and can’t make it to the Merc at 5:00 on Wednesdays, I have some homework for you from aforementioned steel-playing partner, who says if I listened to Buddy Emmons and Speedy West I would have known what I was in for. I would add to that a few YouTube videos of Barbara Mandrell playing steel, for fun.
Anyway, the band’s precision didn’t feel rehearsed, but instead prepared to tackle complexity as a unit, something all the more fascinating since two members of the advertised Rabbit lineup, piano player Andrew Bair and drummer Jake Lynn, were M.I.A. this week. For this particular Wednesday, Early was backed by Matt Magerkurth on bass (a Rabbit Habitat regular), Nicholas Foster on drums, Chris Combs on guitar, and Wyatt Sanders on keys. (Sanders, though a Tulsa native, is the one I’d never seen perform locally before. A cursory search of his resume yielded production and writing credits for the likes of Diplo and K-Pop megastars NCT Dream.) Props to this backing crew, whose other exploits span genre on the daily, for understanding the assignment, reading Early’s counts with laser precision.
As a person who never operates on vibes alone, this assemblage gave me a new perspective on what this formula can look like in practice—an exercise in service to a composition, with players who could play pretty much anything listening to each other as much as they performed. While Early’s originals felt intricate and precise, as a listener who was previously unfamiliar with his work, the cover songs best illustrated this balance in selection and execution.
Track three of the band’s first set was (incidentally my favorite song of all time) Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” her formidable vocals tackled note for note by the steel. In concert, she plays the dulcimer during this song, adding a similarly ethereal, pitch-bending effect. Other tracks included Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” and an appropriately heartbreaking take on Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” What other instrument could possibly invoke sadness as deeply as Raitt’s voice does?
Whatever Hank Early’s Rabbit Habitat is, it exists in a niche rabbit hole within the larger context of these bar residencies—a profoundly weird and enjoyable addition and a left turn all at once.
The Pickup's reviews are published with support from The Online Journalism Project.
