“Less Important Things” Shows Eric Hirshberg Working Best in the Details
- Ignite
- 47 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The most convincing part of Eric Hirshberg’s new single “Less Important Things” is not its broad theme, even though that theme is relatable. It is the detail. A house built to “withstand a riot” that suddenly feels too quiet tells us plenty about parenthood without needing a grand explanation.
Hirshberg’s latest release, which previews his forthcoming album More Is Not The Answer, centers on the empty nest and the emotional recalibration that follows. It is a well-worn subject in life, but slightly less common in contemporary songwriting, at least with this level of directness. Hirshberg approaches it with the perspective of someone who has reached the moment and is still figuring out what to do with it.
The song opens up the strange contradiction of raising children: the goal is to help them leave, yet their leaving can feel like an emotional rupture. That contradiction is familiar, but Hirshberg does not flatten it into a simple lesson. The song leaves room for pride, loss, relief, and bewilderment to sit beside each other.
His quote about the song helps frame it: “It is a love song to the journey of parenthood and the bittersweetness of letting go,” he says. “You spend years building your life around the noise, chaos, and rhythm of raising kids, and then one day the house gets quiet in a way you were never really prepared for.” The track itself carries that same plainspoken quality. It is reflective without sounding overly polished.
Vocally, Hirshberg sounds best when he lets the lines unfold naturally. He has a songwriter’s instinct for emotional clarity, and on “Less Important Things,” that clarity is strongest when he resists the urge to underline the point. The performance feels intimate, as though he is speaking to someone who already understands the stakes.
The instrumentation is understated but not empty. There is enough musical movement to give the song shape, but the arrangement does not crowd the lyric. That balance has become a meaningful part of Hirshberg’s recent work: songs that reach for scale while staying rooted in direct human feeling.
The in-studio video makes the same argument visually. By placing Hirshberg and his band in a close performance setting, the video avoids the temptation to literalize the song with images of family life or staged nostalgia. It keeps the viewer in the room with the musicians, which feels right for a song that depends on presence and restraint.
“Less Important Things” also adds a useful new layer to the developing picture of More Is Not The Answer. The title track and other recent singles have suggested an album concerned with the cost of noise, excess, and disconnection. This song shifts that inquiry toward family, where the question of what matters is both simpler and harder.
Hirshberg’s unusual professional history gives that question additional texture. As a former CEO of Activision and former leader at Deutsch LA, he has lived inside industries built around attention, impact, and scale. His current songwriting often seems interested in what remains when those metrics fall away. “Less Important Things” answers that in personal terms: children, home, memory, love.
It is a quiet song, but it earns that quiet. Hirshberg does not present the empty nest as a crisis to solve. He presents it as a room one has to learn how to stand in.
