Photo: Jasmine Safaeian
Sometime last year, while at the top of a mountain in Boulder, Colorado with her mum and best friend, Hana broke down crying. The reason for the high-altitude breakdown? She’d just found out that her song, ‘Clay’, would be used in an episode of the HBO series Girls.
If that sounds like something of an overreaction, there’s two things you should know about Hana. The first is that she’s boundlessly enthusiastic. During our half hour conversation, she waxes lyrical about small venues (“People are really close and sweaty”), Christine & The Queens (“One night I spent like five hours watching live videos of her shows”), even the new Star Wars film (“It was everything that I hoped it would be”). The second is that, believe it or not, Girls kind of changed her life.
“It sounds silly, but Girls means a lot to me,” she explains. “I remember watching the first season when I was still in my really, really terrible relationship, and realising how much I'd missed out on.” I do a quick mental scan of the show’s five seasons – fall-outs, ill-advised hook-ups, a few spontaneous marriages, and one character accidentally smoking crack cocaine and running into the street in her underwear. “All of the characters are complete messes,” she adds quickly. “But at that point in my life I had been in this very long relationship and had barely… I'd just been touring and didn't really have many friends, I'd just been focussing on this one, not very good, relationship, and watching Girls, it really was kind of a turning point, because I was like, ‘I feel like I'm missing out on life in general’.”
Though she hasn’t quite followed the path of the women on Girls (thank goodness), one thing’s for sure - Hana isn’t missing out on life anymore. Last year, after several shows as a backing singer for Grimes - an impressive feat in its own right - Grimes asked her to perform one of her own songs during an opening slot for Lana Del Rey. She chose ‘Clay’ (the one that ended up soundtracking a scene on Girls), and pretty quickly, things escalated. When ‘Clay’ landed on SoundCloud, Lorde called the track “too shimmering and beautiful for words” on Twitter. Today, Hana’s just finished touring the world as Grimes’ bona fide support act.
Unsurprisingly, she has only positive things to say about Grimes. “She's just such a creative, artistic and beautiful person, inside and out,” she gushes. “She’s not got much of a musical background, which I think works in her advantage because she's able to make music from an outsider's perspective, and I think that's why her music is so amazing. Whereas I have been in choirs for a long time, so I kind of have a harder time stepping outside of the box a little bit. She treats music like it's a painting.”
Hana’s not just been in choirs for a long time though – she’s pretty long in the tooth in the music business too. It's been nearly a decade in fact. In her first incarnation, after moving to LA at the age of 17, she spent several years as an acoustic guitar-wielding singer-songwriter. “The songs that I was singing every night were songs I'd written when I was like 14,” she says, “so it's almost like listening back to a high school journal where you're just rolling your eyes at yourself. I would love singing those songs every night, but when I would listen to the recorded tracks I was kind of like, meh about it.”
It didn’t help that she found herself taking advice from a series of clueless businessmen. “[It was] kind of a parade of managers and agents - all of them men,” she says with a heavy sigh, “and people who were telling me what was right for my career, and I was young and gullible and a lot of times I took advice that I probably shouldn't have, and just didn't know better.
“Looking back on the experience, I realise how much I would have gained just from being assertive and putting my foot down. One of my first managers said that I was being too goofy on-stage, and then that made me feel really awkward. For a year, I was kind of in a funk after that, because he told me I needed to be more enigmatic, but that's just not my personality. I'm just a goofy person, I don't think there's really any way around that."
There probably isn’t. She’ll probably keep breaking down in tears of joy on the tops of mountains, and gushing about Star Wars, and making bloody beautiful music. Thank goodness.
Hana's self-titled debut EP is set for release this Friday (25 March).
