Shorter Bio

Musician and writer Dylan Hicks was born in Austin, Texas, in 1970, and has lived since 1983 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With his six-piece group Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, he plays exploratory pop with literary ambitions and far-flung musical influences including jazz, R&B, freely improvised music, and various song traditions. The group’s forthcoming album, Modern Flora, is centered on multi-part songs arranged for nonet. Other recent recordings include Accidental Birds, a largely electronic album recorded during the height of the pandemic, and Munson-Hicks Party Supplies, a collection of Hicks’s songs mostly sung by John Munson. Hicks is also the author of two novels, Amateurs and Boarded Windows, and has written journalism, criticism, essays, and word puzzles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, Slate, the New England Review, the Paris Review Daily, and many other publications.

Longer Bio

Musician and writer Dylan Hicks was born in Austin, Texas, in 1970, and has lived since 1983 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With his six-piece group Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, he plays exploratory pop with literary ambitions and far-flung musical influences including jazz, R&B, freely improvised music, and various song traditions.  The group’s forthcoming album, Modern Flora, is centered on inviting multi-part songs arranged for nonet. Other recent recordings include Accidental Birds, a largely electronic album recorded during the height of the pandemic, and Munson-Hicks Party Supplies, a collection of Hicks’s songs mostly sung by John Munson. Hicks is also the author of two novels, Amateurs and Boarded Windows, and has written journalism, criticism, essays, and word puzzles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, Slate, the New England Review, the Paris Review Daily, and many other publications.He has also published two novels with Coffee House Press and written journalism, essays, word puzzles, and fiction for the Village Voice, the New York Times, the New England Review, Slate, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review Daily, Mpls.-St. Paul, and other publications, many of them now defunct.

Hicks started putting out larkish cassettes and performing in clubs in his late teens. Over the nineties and early aughts he released three albums on No Alternative/TRG Records and built up a following in the Twin Cities along with coin pockets of support in other markets. These early musical endeavors were not profitable. In 2002, he shifted his focus to journalism, criticism, and, eventually, fiction and essays. His debut novel, Boarded Windows, was released in 2012. Its companion album, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene, was presented as a collection of songs written by one of the novel’s secondary characters. Hicks’s fiction was mostly praised. Reviewing Hicks’s 2016 novel, Amateurs, for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Schaub called Hicks a “wonderful, meticulous author,” while the Guardian called the book “sharply observed and very funny.”

Hicks’s wife, Nina Hale, is an entrepreneur, photographer, and birder whose creative projects often combine craft, conceptual art, and advocacy for the natural world. Their son, Jackson, is about to graduate from the University of Minnesota.