Jason Hackner
Songwriter & Theatre Director

Jason Hackner does not write songs about feelings. He writes songs that create them — and then builds the room around them.

Based in Charlotte, NC, Jason Hackner is a writer, composer, director, and vocalist, founder of Jason Plus Productions, and leads the Big Ol Jason Hackner Band. His work refuses easy categorization. His music is theatrical without being precious, funky without being retro, and emotionally direct without being obvious. It is the sound of someone who has spent thirty years inside the mechanics of how a story moves a room — and has learned to encode that into a three-minute track.

His roots run deep in Charlotte's performing arts community, where he has worked as a vocal pedagogue, a director, and a builder of live experiences. That background is audible in everything he writes: melodies that demand to be sung, lyrics that earn their emotional payoffs, and arrangements that know exactly when to strip back and when to explode. His touchstones are artists who understood that pop could be devastating, that funk could be tender, and that the voice is the most honest instrument in any room. He brings to that tradition the structural rigor of musical theatre — the discipline that demands every lyric do double duty: move the character forward and make the audience feel it simultaneously.

His most ambitious project is Arrangements, an original interactive musical he created, composed, and directs. The show places narrative decision-making in the hands of the audience, transforming each performance into a different dramatic experience. The songs from Arrangements are built to survive that instability — sturdy enough to hold meaning no matter which story the audience chooses to tell. The production is currently postponed, with new dates to be announced.

His original catalog, now available on Spotify, Amazon Music, and beyond, is the first formal introduction of Jason Hackner to the wider music world — not a debut so much as a door finally opened on work that has been accumulating for years.

He is not building a discography.

He is building a universe.

And these songs are the score.