“I want to be known for my voice, my personality and my world view.”

Rich Hennessy spent years learning how to use his voice before he fully understood what he wanted to say with it.

He found his literal voice early. Growing up in New Jersey, Hennessy was the kid belting pop songs from the back of his mother’s Dodge Caravan long before performing or songwriting felt like something that could become a life.

As he got older, finding his voice took on a different meaning.

Hennessy became outspoken at a young age, learning to advocate for himself and the people around him while privately navigating parts of his own identity he wasn’t yet ready to share. Coming out eventually became part of a much larger process: letting go of expectations, choosing authenticity and building a life that actually felt like his own.

“I want to be seen.”

After time spent performing in New York City, a formative trip to Nashville introduced him to a community of writers, musicians and artists who treated songwriting as something deeper than entertainment: a way of articulating the feelings people often struggle to say themselves.

Eventually, Nashville became home.

There, Hennessy began developing the sound that defines his music today: contemporary dance-pop driven by emotionally direct songwriting, live-band energy and polished electronic production.

Across songs including “Haven’t Found You Yet,” “Sidelines,” “One Night” and “Electric Melodies,” Hennessy has increasingly turned the lens inward, writing about attraction, confidence, disappointment, timing, self-worth and the complicated ways people find and lose one another.

The songs are built to move, but rarely without something underneath them.

Big melodies and soaring vocals sit alongside live drums, bass, guitars and electronic production, often beginning with a much quieter thought: the thing you almost said, the person you still think about or the feeling you can’t completely explain.

Visually, Hennessy describes the world surrounding the music as “modern ’90s in HD.”

That idea comes into sharp focus on “Something Between Us,” a romantic dance-pop record built around a connection that feels bigger than timing.

What if meeting someone for the first time could somehow feel like remembering them? What if circumstances changed, lives changed, everything changed and somehow you still found your way back to each other?

For Hennessy, that kind of emotional specificity is what makes pop music powerful.

His identity as a gay artist shapes the perspective he writes from, but it doesn’t define the limits of the stories he wants to tell. The details may be personal; the emotions are intentionally universal.

Love. Loneliness. Recognition. Confidence. Rejection. Nostalgia. The desire to belong.

Hennessy wants listeners to hear pieces of his life and recognize something from their own.

“If I can empower others to find their voices through my music, that is on a scale so much bigger than personal satisfaction.”

That belief has been part of Hennessy’s story from the beginning. What has evolved is his understanding of what using his voice can look like.

Sometimes it means saying something loudly.

Sometimes it means making someone dance.

And sometimes it means putting words to a feeling another person thought belonged only to them.

“For Rich Hennessy, finding his voice was never the end of the story. It was what allowed him to start telling it.”