Hear Me Now

A year before their breakout cover of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop," Framing Hanley released "Hear Me Now" on their first album, The Moment. The song finds lead singer Kenneth Nixon questioning why God allows bad things to happen to good people. "That song was at a point in my life when I lost a friend very close to me and the rest of the band," he said in our 2014 interview. "I just had a lot of questions. Growing up, my mom was raised in a Baptist church, so I was taught to believe these certain things, this certain mindset about things. I reached an age where I was like, 'Well, it probably is better sometimes to question some things' - and not just always about religion. That song thematically was about that. After losing someone, I think a lot of people go through that. Even the most religious of people, when someone in their life passes away, it's like, 'How can you take that person if you're such a loving god?' And that's what that song is about: just being frustrated and angry with some divine power, if you will. And just wondering why that happened. You have questions: 'If you're really there, answer me.' That kind of thing."

In the Mason Dixon-directed video, actor Jeremy Childs (The Last Castle, Nashville) plays a pastor who indulges in a secret sinful life until his guilt forces him to confess in front of his congregation. In a 2017 Songfacts interview, Dixon recalled working with Childs in the meltdown scene: "I broke it down into two parts. I said, 'The first part, I want you to recite the lyrics to the song,' just to get in that headspace. I liked the idea of having some of those moments synched up to the lyrics, so you see him speaking a couple of the lines that are in there. Then I said, 'I'm just going to keep rolling and on your own time I want you to drift into that confessional and do whatever feels natural to you and we're just going to keep shooting until you collapse down on the podium.'" "And he went there. The stuff he's saying is directly related to what his confession would have been. So, he's, in essence, as an actor, confessing all those things and it was real easy for the woman playing his wife to bounce off that. She was there in the scene watching him do that part and it started to get to her so we turned the camera right around on her. Once we were done with his stuff, she was primed for her emotional reactions, so we just turned the camera around and kept going."