Hearts of Animals is the Houston recording and performance project led by multi-instrumentalist Mlee Marie Mains. Emerging with Lemming Baby in 2007, the project combined intimate songwriting with inexpensive keyboards, guitar, and unconventional arrangements, followed by Cave Lights (2009) and Another Mutation (2014). Initially often performed solo, Hearts of Animals developed into a band that included Mains’s brother Joey. Collaborations with musicians from the Linus Pauling Quartet and Young Mammals, together with appearances at Rudyard’s, AvantGarden, and Walters, place the project within Houston’s interwoven communities of experimental pop and independent rock.
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Held artifact from Day for Night 2015, an edition the act played. Day for Night 2015 official lineup poster. Black sheet with the cyan Day for Night circular mark; the SOUND list opens Kendrick Lamar, New Order, Philip Glass Ensemble, Dillon Francis, and the LIGHT list opens Casey Reas and Zach Lieberman. Supplied to the archive by Omar Afra. Free Press Houston Archive holding.
2 appearances documented on Free Press Houston bills. Records are kept to the lineup sources the archive holds; nothing beyond them is stated.
The held hype deck for the first edition names Kendrick Lamar, New Order, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Janelle Monáe and Dillon Francis and counts 43 bands across three stages; it carries no full bill. The roster below is the announced lineup as recorded by JamBase, which sets out the two festival days and two acts whose day was still pending. It is a documented lineup, not a verified record of performance.
Documentary evidence
Portrait — not event-specific. Hearts of Animals, from the Free Press Houston article “Hearts of Animals”. Free Press Houston archive image (photographer not stated), 2007. Archive-held image; rights status not separately stated.. Free Press Houston Archive. Sourced from an existing Free Press Houston archive article; not asserted as event-specific evidence.
Free Press Summer Fest 2009Lineup row held for Free Press Summer Fest 2009, source fpsf-dev-2014-previous-lineups.
Day for Night 2015The held hype deck for the first edition names Kendrick Lamar, New Order, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Janelle Monáe and Dillon Francis and counts 43 bands across three stages; it carries no full bill. The roster below is the announced lineup as recorded by JamBase, which sets out the two festival days and two acts whose day was still pending. It is a documented lineup, not a verified record of performance.
Credits are recorded from each object’s own source. If a credit here is incomplete or wrong, see photo and video credits.
Related Free Press Houston coverage
Archive articles that name Hearts Of Animals. A mention is a sighting in the paper’s own pages, not a statement that the piece is about this performer.
