Offstage, up-and-coming singer, songwriter, and guitarist Zach Heckendorf appears to be an ordinary teenager: a hip-hop-loving, T-shirt and jeans-wearing, shaggy-haired kid with a shy smile and modest demeanor. But when Heckendorf grabs a guitar and jumps on a stage, the 19-year-old Denver native is transformed. During recent shows in New York and Los Angeles Heckendorf mesmerized crowds with original songs like “All The Right Places,” the first single from his debut album The Cool Down, and silenced the hold-outs chattering in the back with an astonishing cover of Dr. Dre’s “Forgot About Dre,” spitting every line with impressive intensity and speed. Heckendorf wraps his considered themes — the pursuit of freedom, the interconnectedness of human beings and nature, and a dismay for the environmental destruction that previous generations have wrought — in a rich, acoustic-driven sound, one that takes its cues more from hip-hop than from the traditional troubadours Heckendorf has already been compared to. Nothing is delivered with overt anger, but rather with a deliberate ambiguity that leaves the words open to interpretation. Heckendorf isn’t being cagey, he just appreciates the power of mystery.

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