My name is Nick Benson, AKA Nicky B. Hannas. This is a website for my musical and other endeavors. Primarily I create content, both music and talk-oriented. 

I create music under Nicky B Hannas, as well as concurrent projects The Shady Marksmen and Agonentos. I also have more instrumental music available on my YouTube Channel "Nicky B Hannas Music".

I create talk content on my YouTube channel "BS With B Hannas", available on audio in podcast form as well on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts). 

I would describe my music as Nicky B Hannas with the B Hannas Band as "Heavy Blues Metal" - influenced by any and everything from Albert King and Buddy Guy, to Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top, to Metallica and Motorhead, to Pantera and Death.

Maybe that's not such a wide variety - but I have equal love and respect for the GREAT traditions of heavy metal and the blues, from death and thrash metal to delta and Chicago blues.  

"Heavy Blues Metal", to me, is also a philosophical framework for life. I advocate sobriety, fitness, and promote a personal-development lifestyle - I aim use my art as a vehicle to share what I have to offer with the world. I hope you find value in what I may have to offer. 

The world is continuing to get harder, and it seems that people are continuing to get softer. The cost of that softness is paid in the “quiet desperation” of renown, by people who never got told the truth.

I learned what I know of that truth the hard way. I earned what I know in the dark, when nobody was watching and nothing was guaranteed. Somewhere in all of it I found something most people seem to never articulate — that the weight of it all was never the enemy; that hardship isn’t a problem to be solved forever. That a life with more resistance is a fuller life - not a harder one.

That’s why I create what I create, and do what I do. 

I don't do it to sell shirts or to hit a download number. I don't do it to optimize a funnel. 

I do it because somewhere out there is a man at any age that I may never even meet, who is carrying something heavy — and every screen, algorithm, and cultural spirit around him is telling him to put it down. To be comfortable. To be validated. To be managed.

Not enough of us are telling him that bearing that weight is the point.

I'm just one voice. Not an authority. Not the answer. I’m someone who lived it, came out the other side still standing, and is willing to say it plainly - while still living it. That’s the blues tradition. I’m someone who, while standing on the other side, burns to continue the march forward despite all obstacles and difficulty. That’s the metal tradition. 

It's not performance. I consider it testimony.

The podcast says it weekly; the books will say it permanently. The clothing means you get it, and live it too; the coaching will put someone in your corner who has actually been through it.

All of it serves that one person — the man carrying something real, who hasn’t been told yet that carrying it is exactly what he’s supposed to be doing.

That’s the mission. Everything else is the vehicle.

"If we cross paths in this helter-skelter, then holla at your boy- give me a hell yeah"

B. Hannas

(Pictured: preachin' and screechin' at Kung Fu Necktie in Philly)