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Park Slope Musician Devotes Debut Album Funds to Help Repair Local Church

 Hans Bilger wants proceeds from his first album to benefit Old First Reformed Church.
Park Slope Musician's Debut Album to Help Repair Local Church
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PARK SLOPE — An historic church in desperate need of repairs is getting some help from a ukulele-strumming college student.

Hans Bilger, a 20-year-old musician who grew up attending the Old First Reformed Church on Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, just recorded his first solo album and plans to donate any money he makes off the record to the house of worship.

The 10-track self-published album, titled "Old First" after the church, is for sale online for $5. That's just a tiny fraction of the $1 million needed to mend Old First's crumbling sanctuary ceiling, but Bilger wanted to do whatever he could to benefit the house of worship.

"I felt like I should pay it forward," Bilger said. "And also, what else was I going to spend it on, chicken shawarmas and microphones?"

Bilger, a 2012 graduate of Poly Prep Country Day School who's now a junior at Yale, said the church gave him some of his first experiences performing music for an audience.

Bilger also cut his performing teeth in his family's band, the Charismatic Megafauna, which played regularly at the now-closed Perch Cafe on Fifth Avenue. Bilger's sisters played trumpet and drums, his mother played accordion and violin and his dad — The New Yorker magazine writer Burkhard Bilger — played guitar.

Old First's pastor Daniel Meeter described the Bilgers as "a disciplined family with a high expectation of service and performance." He added that the gifted family sees music as "an occasion for enriching the life around you."

Bilger, whose mom is a trained classical singer and music teacher at Poly Prep, took up the piano as a little kid, quickly followed by the bass, double bass and ukulele. In sixth grade he started writing his own songs.

He described his debut album as folk music that's heavily influenced by The Brain Cloud, a Western swing jazz band that plays frequently at Park Slope's Barbès. He recorded the album inside Old First's Upper Hall, a Sunday school classroom that's blessed with great acoustics.

Though he doesn't consider himself a particularly religious person, Bilger said his experiences at Old First left him with lasting life lessons about helping the less fortunate. The church feeds and sometimes shelters the homeless and ran a relief kitchen that cooked thousands of meals for months after Hurricane Sandy.

"It's a great cross section of the community, not just white well-to-do families from Park Slope — it's all backgrounds," Bilger said. "It's cool to have that space to bring us together."

Unfortunately that space has been deteriorating in recent years. Pieces of the 62-foot high ceiling in Old First's sanctuary started breaking off in 2011 and, since then, services have been held in another room. Though the church's 1891 building is somewhat battered, Bilger said Old First gave him a solid foundation.

"I'm having this realization in college [that] you have this support system around you that nurtures and guides you for so long, and you're not always aware of it until you’re separated from it," Bilger said.

"This is a good opportunity to give back to that in some small way."