We're a band in the Kandiyohi County, MN area consisting of Jonah Nelson (guitar, keyboards, singing), Reagan Toedter (rhythm guitar, singing), Dalton Underland (lead guitar), Samuel Nelson (drums), and Christian McCarthy (bass), with Connor Kliber on sound. Currently our setlist is mostly made up of covers of classics and pop songs with some original material for good measure.

Official History

We all sort of knew of each other growing up, but mainly Samuel and I (Jonah) were good friends, and Reagan and Dalton were good friends. Samuel and I made music together under The Rushers for a while, and Reagan and Dalton were doing their own thing. Eventually in 2018 we all started playing music together under "The Rushers" informally, just doing some live shows, and Reagan and I did some duo acoustic sets in 2019. We took a break for a couple years until Samuel's wedding in 2021 where the band played a short set, and we're playing again now after wanting to come together again in 2022.

We hated the name "The Rushers", and we threw new names around for months. Even though we didn't think the name mattered much (the name's quality is kind of painted by the quality of the band), we still wanted to like it. The first one we half agreed on was "Trademen", but it felt uninspired, and Kristen Vlaminck notably said it sounded like we were ripping off "The Highwaymen", and so we stopped talking to her. Anna Nelson thought of "6 Foot North", which Samuel and I liked decently, but the others still thought we could do better, so Anna stopped talking to them. After trying for a while to "capture the metaphysics of living in Minnesota", Reagan suggested something including "Charlie". We all liked the "Charlie" thing and tried out a lot of things like "Charlie Trade", "6 Foot Charlie", "Three Inch Charlie", "Charlie Sunday", and eventually fell upon "Hardly Charlie". I liked it because it sounds pretty cool and is just true. We are hardly Charlie, in fact we're Jonah, Samuel, Dalton, Reagan, and Christian. We were all alright with it and now we're Hardly Charlie!

Christian, who we've all known a few years now, joined later in 2024 to offer some bass. This freed me up to be able to play guitar and piano, and now we have a pretty full sound.

Our setlist is mostly cover songs now, but we have some original material involved, which we're also releasing now, hoping to build up to a full album in 2025 or 2026. Charlie's songs will permeate the world!

-Jonah, the Hardly Charlie historian