Culture
Darrin Hacquard – 2025 Nelsonville Music Festival Sycamore Session
By: Emily Votaw
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NELSONVILLE, Ohio (WOUB) – Huntington, WV–based musician Darrin Hacquard writes songs that offer smart—sometimes psychedelic in their clarity—depictions of life in modern Appalachia without being precious. His writing is emotionally direct yet expansive, resonant in small but sincere details, like describing how hard John R. Miller can rock The Burl—so hard, in fact, that one might be able to hear him all the way from the Fayette Jail.
Or is the case for Hacquard’s high-energy Sycamore Session opener, Walls of the Fayette Jail, featuring instrumentation spanning upright bass, guitar, fiddle, and mandolin.
From there, Hacquard shifts into more introspective terrain with Never Again, drawn from Signs & Wonders (2017), before moving into material from his recently released album Weights & Measures (October 2025).
Toe the Line balances restraint with resolve, while Inaugurating Meltdown unfolds with a spacious melancholy. Its straightforward lyrics weigh defiantly held truth—“art is valuable, and it should be paid for”—against a disconsolate vision (“Americans aren’t supposed to be happy—they just work real hard, pay their bills, take their pills, and pray to God”), bound together by a palpable emotional gravity that recalls the deliberate, matter-of-fact delivery of Jason Molina.
The session closes with Places I Went, another Weights & Measures selection that exemplifies Hacquard’s ability to craft songs that are as emotionally true as they are enjoyable to hear.
Setlist
0:12 – Walls of the Fayette Jail
3:40 – Never Again
8:03 – Toe the Line
11:35 – Inaugurating Meltdown
15:50 – Places I Went
Director – Andie Walla
Technical Director – Parker Phillips
Editors – Julian Fahl Matlack and Ian Groom
Camera Operators
Martin Bradesca
Wes Pai
Matt Quinn
Chase Strebel
Gigi Twatchtman
Audio Production Team
Gavin Buchanan
Ben Stewart
Mairin Fitzpatrick
Artist Relations Team
Luka Martin
Jillian Schatzley
Mia Voice
The Sycamore Sessions are presented by the Nelsonville Music Festival in collaboration with WOUB Public Media and the Ohio University Scripps College of Communication’s School of Media Arts and Studies. The videos are created by Media Arts and Studies students under the guidance of Producer and Host Josh Antonuccio, Audio Supervisor Adam Rich, WOUB Arts and Culture Editor Emily Votaw, and Director of Photography Andie Walla. All performances were filmed during the 2025 Nelsonville Music Festival, a production of Stuart’s Opera House.