Right about now feels like the right time to start collating a rough list of some of the best albums of 2023. While I’m still in the middle of that process (and it won’t be sorted until late December) there is no denying one album and its artist has one foot in the door to making my end of year list. Track by track, Nashville-based Hannah Aldridge has laid out a powerful record which is arguably unmatched among her dark-country peers. Her music drifts and intensifies on Dream of America and takes inspiration from books, movies and podcasts. There is still plenty of trademark soul searching and trauma across nine songs but maybe not as much as her previous releases. But if I am to say just one other thing about her songs and the stories she conveys to her listeners it is that you can almost really feel them. That said, I recently had the pleasure of catching Aldridge before she embarks on her UK tour. Here is some of what we talked about.
Hannah, one of my favourite American singer-songwriters is Portland based Anna Tivel. Like you her songs are lyrically driven but it’s fair to say you up the ante, especially when you’re in a confessional mood. Often it raw and jarring. How therapeutic is songwriting and how does it help you manage your inner demons?
Songwriting is certainly therapeutic to me but as opposed to it helping me manage my inner demons it often times helps me translate what they are saying. Sometimes I’m really not sure what emotion I am feeling and there’s just a lot of chaos in my head until I sit and write a song about it and try to get some clarity. Often times, that clarity changes with wisdom and time and I can look back on that song and see it in a different light with new wisdom as well.
You once said that people have forgotten what real drums and real voices sound like. There is no mistaking your dedication to recording music and live performance. Were you one of those kids rehearsing in garages (or something similar) and making a racket with friends?
Interestingly I had the absolute opposite experience of that. I was classically trained on piano and was very intimidated to play in front of anyone. I would play piano by myself when no one could hear me in our piano room in my house. Outside of that the only time I performed was in secret in my room or when I was performing for a talent show maybe once or twice a year. It would always really surprise people when I would walk up on stage and play piano and sing in school for the talent shows, because I never talked about liking music or wanting to pursue that as a career. I was always very scared of being shut down about it.
Hannah, I understand the new album was recorded during Covid lockdowns. One of the things I love about Dream of America is that it’s not your stereotypically inspired or recorded lockdown (Covid) album. Sure songs like The Great Divide were inspired by our separation from those most important to us, but tell us more about the some of the themes and inspiration behind tracks like Derero, Beautiful Oblivion and Portrait of the Artist as a Middle Aged Man?
For this record I did some thing that I had never done before – I turned to writing the songs from a character standpoint. I didn’t feel that I, myself as Hannah Aldridg, had anything to say or to add to the dialogue spinning around in the world so I decided to create this character, a Hollywood noir character if you will, that all of the songs are written from her standpoint. It made it so much more interesting for me and I could really pull from a lot of books and movies that I watch during lockdown and write those stories through her eyes. Of course my voice is coming through as well but it made it so much easier for me to write this record during a time that everything felt so confusing and I felt like I had no voice at all.
Dorero was written about a podcast called Root of Evil. It was written from the standpoint of the little girl in the podcast about her stepmother, but also written from this character standpoint that I discussed. Portrait of the Artist was an adaptation of a song that Lachlan Bryan had written previously. Again, I rewrote this song a bit and made it set in LA and gave it a bit of a Hollywood noir feel as well. Beautiful Oblivion was actually written with a cowriter of mine named Greg Barnhill. It was written about the fear of dying and what it would be like to die during the pandemic.
I understand you finished a film scoring degree. What was the first movie that you can remember in a theatre and thought that’s a killer score? What did you like about it?
Probably the very first movie that really moved me musically was Titanic. I remember learning those songs backwards and forwards on the piano and watching that movie at least 100 times. I watched every single behind the scenes about James Cameron and James Horner and how they did all of the scoring. Moving forward though, the very first horror film I can remember watching that really made me realize how much of an impact music can make on a movie scene was 28 Days Later.
At that point I started to have a real interest in how music affects dark imagery and how it can play on your mind that you have different music or even minimal music sometimes in certain scenes of movies which creates extreme horror and suspense and people.
Do you think you’ll bring that emotive element of film scoring even more to your music in the future. The title track Dream of America certainly has that climatic flair. What can you tell me about the track that is surprising?
That track was completely recorded on my iPhone as a last minute addition. The one and Catacombs came out of poems I wrote in my Poetry course in college. It is really just supposed to allude to the fact that everything felt like a dream during Covid. I felt like I just slept for a couple hours at a time and would wake up and walk around in circles or read some thing and then lay back down and go to sleep. I definitely think that I will be exploring more of the film and TV oriented writing.
I’m really surprised by the inclusion of Talking Heads Psycho Killer. Tell us why you decided to cover it and maybe more importantly how you went about turning it on its head sonically?
We chose this song because I really had an interest in taking a song that was previously not spooky but had the bones to feel creepy. This particular song lended itself to that because it was so upbeat to begin with and really lended itself to a eerie beautiful version lyrically. I will say, it was the more difficult song on the record to record because I had not written it myself and I almost felt like I needed to rewrite the whole thing to be able to approach it and make it make sense for the record. It was honestly a bit intimidating but after a lot of trial and error I just walked into the studio one day and felt like I knew how to sing it. It started in my mind as a bit of a call and response like I was talking to my inner voices and I think that’s what help me navigate how to approach this song.
Still on the subject of other artists, which songs or albums have broadened your musical horizon and taught you something about musical textures?
I think every record that I listen to broadens my musical horizon and teaches me some thing. Maybe sometimes it’s what not to do but I think there is some thing to be learned from every record. The ones more recently that have really appealed to me texture wise are Nick Cave, Weyes Blood, Christian Kjellvander, and Phoebe Bridgers. All very different artists but exploring the darker side of songwriting or melancholy and how that can be beautiful and interesting.
Hannah, your songs all seemingly have dark stories attached to them, even when sonically they sound uplifting. Where does the darkness or melancholy in your beautiful, downbeat songs come from?
To be honest, it comes very naturally to me to write about that. I’m a very dark and melancholy person and it helps me to express those thoughts so that they don’t drive me nuts. I also find some sort of beauty in laying bare those dark thoughts and ideas and giving them less power somehow.
I guess some people take antidepressants, some people take anxiety medicine, some people do meditation and therapy, and for me I just write songs about it and try to deeply explore those feelings and thoughts that I’m having.
Can we talk about No Heart Left Behind, one of my favourite songs from your 2017 album Gold Rush. For those casual listeners not too familiar with it, what is it that you are defiantly staring down?
That song was written during a time when I went out and hung out in bars way too much in Nashville. I felt like I was burning the candle at both ends and trying to find some sort of meaning and silver lining in the whole thing. That’s a pretty frequent ebb and flow of daily life in Nashville for me. I kind of felt like if you’re gonna go out you might as well go out with a bang and I eventually burn out, hide out and write a record, and then start over again.
Guitar-wise, do you have a strong affinity with any one particular guitar (electric and or acoustic) when songwriting and playing live?
I always love to play Gibson J 45. There’s something that just resonates with me about a Gibson and how it feels in my hands and how it sounds as soon as I start playing it. Also enjoy playing SG’s for an electric as well and sometimes depending on what song I’m writing I prefer an electric but there’s something that just feels like an old friend when I pick up my J 45 and start playing.
Everyone always has very nice things to say about your incredible voice. When recording vocals, how high pressure is it to get (or gauge) the right mood for the song? Can you talk about the work that went into your vocals for any one of the songs from Dream of America?
I usually don’t feel any pressure at all about my vocals to be honest. It’s a weird thing because I feel very comfortable singing and therefore I don’t tend to put a lot of pressure on myself. What I really focus on when I’m recording vocals is expression and how can I get my point across. On Dream of America I really took the less is more approach and wanted to sing a lot less than I had on any of my other records. There are a few songs like Beautiful Oblivion that were very difficult vocally for me to sing and I really nitpicked over that quite a lot but outside of that I really tried to take a very laid-back and almost Leonard Cohen approach to my vocals. I feel like people have already heard me sing and they either like it or they don’t, so for this record it was really more about expressing the ideas and getting the story line across as opposed to singing all the notes.
Finally, fearlessness is something that can be easily associated with your music and lyricism. What do you believe your music says about you?
I think that my music says everything about me. To be honest if you really wanted to know much of anything about me you could just listen to my songs because they are really just a diary that I’m putting to music. I write all of my nitty-gritty thoughts out and put them in those songs. There’s a lot of things that I write in the songs that I would never say out loud to anyone else ever and there’s a lot of people that make appearances in those songs that maybe they don’t even know that they are written about in my songs. If I am hurt or if I am sad or if I am experiencing any kind of emotion, I lay it bare in my songs. I don’t know if it’s fearlessness as much as it is just needing to validate those thoughts and not feel so alone in the world with those thoughts, but I have to believe that someone somewhere out there also feels the same way that I do and can relate to the feelings. I guess that’s the point.
Rearview Mirror 
Hannah is a beautiful, talented and extremely charismatic artist! Another fine interview Robert.