Indie-Folk Songstress Hana Bryanne on Forgiveness in ‘Dollface’
Rising indie-folk songstress Hana Bryanne is not afraid to explore chasmic depths as she chronicles heavy themes around misogyny, sexual violence and mental health in her upcoming EP Dollface. The title Dollface may sound pure and innocent, but it’s quite the opposite. Backed by bare-bones strummed guitar and a heart full of intimate confessionals and vulnerability, Bryanne reflects on her early years of navigating misogyny and men calling her “dollface.”
The songstress’ latest single “Visions” – a sneak peek into Dollface – is all about dealing with feelings of loneliness. The throughline that connects it all is being able to forgive and release, as it is oftentimes the most challenging aspect of any relationship. Ultimately, forgiveness for yourself and forgiveness for others serves as a powerful tool in Bryanne’s intimate storytelling and earnest reflections.
“It's about being in love with somebody who's really mean to you, and the kind of perpetual loneliness that mental illness is like a harbinger of,” Bryanne says. “Mental illness especially makes you a really good liar, which makes it really hard to connect with the people that you love and who love you because you're constantly trying to keep the story straight.”
Bryanne’s eloquent songwriting and scintillating vocals have drawn comparisons to indie-folk artists like Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Bridgers, with the singer/songwriter also citing Gillian Welch and Taylor Swift as responsible for the country lilt in her sound.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Thank you for sitting down talking to Unpublished Magazine. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any who aren't familiar, what inspires your artistic persona and creative style?
[HANA]: I grew up listening to a lot of country music. I'm a really big Gillian Welch fan, and I also really love indie-folk. I think that my artistic motivations are especially based in feminism. This album [Dollface] centers around sexual violence and misogyny and it feels empowering to talk about the things that have happened to me through making music.
[UNPUBLISHED]: how would you describe your music to someone who hasn't heard it before?
[HANA]: It's kind of like if Ethan Gruska produced Taylor Swift. Sort of indie-folk meets pop and country, but also at its most glittering moments, it's synthy and dancey and its most stripped.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your latest single “Visions” released. What is the inspiration behind the single?
[HANA]: That song is about loneliness. It's about being in love with somebody who's really mean to you, and the kind of perpetual loneliness that mental illness is like a harbinger of. Mental illness especially makes you a really good liar, which makes it really hard to connect with the people that you love and who love you because you're constantly trying to keep the story straight. Self isolation is really challenging and that's what I wrote the song about.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What message, emotions or story do you hope listeners can take away from “Visions?”
[HANA]: I think the song ultimately is really about forgiveness. I think that can be a really challenging thing to exercise when thinking about people who have hurt you, but also I've done a lot of things that I'm not proud of in the worst moments of my mental illness. I think that you have to be able to forgive yourself. If you expect other people to forgive you, I think that leading with grace and being really willing to forgive other people is super crucial. This is just an earnest reflection on this period of my life, and I think just for the listener to spend four minutes with me in that really earnest space means a lot to me.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your debut album Dollface is about to be released and a huge congratulations is in order. What is the inspiration behind the album?
[HANA]: I titled it Dollface because when I was in high school, I worked some service jobs. I worked at a bakery and then I answered the phones at a law firm. A lot of the time older men would call me pet names, and of course, that made my skin crawl and it made me feel so uncomfortable. But the one that really stuck with me is I got called a doll a couple of times, which made me laugh because not only am I super uncomfortable, but I also feel like I'm in an episode of Mad Men. Who still says doll, like what year is it? I wanted to write about like a lot of the sexual violence that I experienced on the internet as a young girl. Young women my age and were coming of age are talking about the experiences that were very specific to 2014 on Tumblr. I also went through a breakup and my relationships with my family changed a lot. My mom's been sick for the past couple of years. This album is really about my life over the past couple of years, and what it's like being a very sensitive girl in a world that is not always particularly equipped to handle that.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What did the creative process look like for Dollface?
[HANA]: I wrote the album mostly by myself. Usually, I would start songwriting on my bedroom floor with my acoustic guitar. Some of the record I wrote while I was in college in New York, and then I dropped out about a year ago. I worked with two of my best friends Carter Jahn, and Max Bienert and they produced the record at their studio in North Hollywood. We've been working on that for a little over a year now, and it's been really wonderful to have so much help bringing these stories to life.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What can listeners expect from this new era of music?
[HANA]: I'm really excited about the visuals of the album. We're working on a music video which will be really fun and my best friend and roommate Fiona has taken a lot of photos for the record, so they shot the single art and they shot the album art as well, which hasn't been released yet. We're also working on some merch which I'm really excited about. I just finished opening for my friend Eliza McLamb on the East Coast leg of a little tour that she did. I'm going to be opening for the West Coast shows this summer. I'm really in love with playing live right now. It feels like making the album necessitated this gremlin-like process where I was holed up in a little studio with no windows for hours on end, so getting to stand in front of real people who are excited about hearing live music is a lot of fun for me. I'm really excited about playing live right now.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What's your favorite song to play live and why?
[HANA]: I love playing “Holy Ground.” That was the title track of my first EP, because people know the words. I love playing “Dollface” the title track because I get to scream.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Have you taken any creative risks or have experimented more lyrically or sonically with Dollface since your 2020 EP Holy Grounds and how so?
[HANA]: On “Clementine” I talk about my mother’s illness and it’s a dance song. I was in love with LCD Soundsystem and earlier The 1975 as a child. The song is split into two. There’s Clementine 1 – a glittering, pulsating dance track – and Clementine 2 – the outro of that song. We wanted it to sound like you’re changing the radio station. It's like an acoustic country ballad. We did the vocals and put them through machines and they sound really grainy and analog. There’s a banjo and some strings and it sounds like changing the radio station. I’m really excited about that track and I hope that people who love the demo of that song also fall in love with that song.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What’s your favorite song off of Dollface and why do you love this song? Is there a specific message or lyric that you gravitate towards the most that stands out to you?
[HANA]: I love “News,” which is the closer of the album. There's a lyrical motif that we use in the opener and then again in the closer. In the opener, it goes “I go to bed with the same old jokes / I go to bat for the strangest folks / If you'd have asked, you could spit in my throat / I was cold, you were older / You built me a fire.” In the end on the last song on the album, I say, “I go to bed with same old jokes / I go to bat for the strangest folks / Goes to my head when you kiss my throat / A stranger saying the words I wrote,” and that was a lot of fun to turn it on its head. I think that ultimately, Dollface I wrote out of such a challenging part of my life. There’s a song called “Valentine’s Day” where I talk about my experience of being institutionalized during a mental health crisis. I wanted to end the album on a note of optimism. So much of it is sad and I think that ultimately, Dollface is about resilience and surviving things. That repeated refrain in the course of “News,” “I’m betting the news is good / I’m betting the news is just fine,” felt super empowering for me.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is a song you would show to listeners off of Dollface that you feel encapsulates your creative growth or maturity the most out of all the tracks you've released so far?
[HANA]: “Dollface.” I think that sonically it lives in a similar world to my earlier stuff. It's an indie-folk song. It's acoustic guitars and a synthy literary presence, but the sound has matured so much. I’ve really grown as a lyricist and that song encapsulates what the album is really about to me. It's a love letter to my younger self. It's also about sexism and sexual violence. I think that being able to talk about ugly, terrible things like that and make them sound beautiful is what I've always hoped to do. I think that the people who enjoyed my previous stuff will like “Dollface” a lot.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Have you had any breakthroughs or lessons while creating Dollface, whether that's creatively or personally?
[HANA]: My whole life changed halfway through writing it. I was in college in New York. I was in a very beautiful and very challenging, long-term relationship with somebody I was really, really in love with. My family dynamics were a certain way. I was hospitalized and I dropped out of college and I moved back home to California and I came to LA. My relationship ended and my family life really changed. I think my music has always been about creating little vignettes of my life. I want to create permanent things, permanent products from my life, but that being said, not being afraid of change, really surrendering yourself to the push and pull of life as it's out of your control has been really beautiful and crucial for me. I think that Dollface is totally with that experience and that idea.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is some advice you have for listeners or anyone who's pursuing music and are struggling with mental health issues?
[HANA]: Don't fall in love too much with your own sadness. I think it's been really wonderful to see how we're having this conversation about how the notion of sad girl music is super reductionist. A lot of my music is sad. I'm not a sad girl, I'm a person. I don't want young people to feel like they have to cultivate sadness in their personal life in order to have something to write about. That being said, the best work you're gonna do is when you're incredibly honest. This album is not flattering all the time. There's a line on an interlude where I say, “I've got a good thing going / I've got a body / I've got a song / I've been the baby of the family / I've never done anything wrong.” I think that kind of tongue-in-cheek arrogance is great at capturing that the album is not a perfectly flattering portrait of me all the time. I wanted to be honest beyond cultivating an image of myself that I thought other people would want to see, and as challenging as that is, I make the best work when I just say what happened.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you'd like to share with Unpublished?
[HANA]: I'm feeling very lucky. I'm feeling really grateful for the opportunities I've had to play gorgeous shows with people. I'm so excited for the upcoming Eliza shows. Her audience is so lovely, and so warm and welcoming and so quiet during the opening act – which is sort of a rarity. Just feeling like a big sensitive baby who's peeled off her skin for everybody to look at the innermost parts of me. I'm really proud of the work that we've done. I am really excited for people to hear it.
