3 weeks ago
18
The process has lasted a couple of years but the solo project from Hannah Brown is consistent in mood and style, with Brown's delicate songwriting coming to the fore throughout: “It feels like a big relief for one! It takes such a long time for these things to come to any fruition, and so I’m feeling really proud. You never really know what people are going to think about it, I'm so overwhelmed with the positive response.”
“SFS”, a standout track from a sudden hankering, was the final part of the project to come together. “It really bugged me that song actually,” says Brown. “I had this idea but I hadn’t really played piano that much even though it was my first instrument. But I’d fallen out of the habit of it because I didn’t have one.” But a new flat and a piano from Facebook Marketplace later meant that writing started to happen, on the piano. Finally, the initial idea for the song could be realised. “SFS” is a track that demonstrates the direction Hank Bee is going in: “it’s weirdly become my favourite track of them all, I think it’s quite an indicator of the different songs that I want to release at some point.”
The folk routes from which songs like “Corner” and “This Time Around” indulge remain, but Brown is keen to explore the new direction that “SFS” has opened to her. “There’s a lot of songs in the pipeline that are very stripped back and very ballady.” The songwriting of Joanna Sternberg and Joanna Newsom were large influences on the EP, but the piano-songwriting of Paul McCartney and Billy Joel crept in too during the writing process.
The rekindling of the relationship with the piano is the dynamic at play behind the development of “SFS”: “Taking to the piano was a new thing for me. It takes you back to that beginner outlook, I think that has had a big impact.” For Brown, there was inspiration to be found in going back to basics and to learning the fundamentals again. That reconnection breathes a beautiful simplicity into the track. It begins with simple piano lines, over which the first lines were sung. The original idea begins to be prized open until it finally reveals the finished song, which ends with the concise and wound up acquiescence, “Time won’t heal but babe you know I wish it would.”
Brown describes “SFS” as: “a bitter sweet song, a song about acceptance and the fact that there are so many things you can’t control. When I listen back to it now, I feel like I’m in that room, and I think of the piano and of being in a fixed space and of that stage in my life.” Despite the certainty of image evoked in Brown's mind, the song took a couple of years to come together, beginning life as a piano part before initial vocal melodies were developed over the top. “I had basic melody ideas. I keep a lot of notebooks and a lot of lyrics ideas, but a lot of the time I’m mumbling and just trying to work out what will come from there.”
From these mumblings, a well-crafted reflection on the assessment of ending was developed: “It’s interesting now I’ve got all the voice memos of all these different iterations of it, but then I’d leave it for months before adding a bit more.” During this time, rather than wait for the song to arrive, Brown was disciplined: “I ended up just forcing myself to finish it. It made me realise that that’s a good thing to do sometimes because there are lots of ideas that slip through the net otherwise. I think songwriters are quite used to waiting for that magic moment.” Adhering to a structured pattern, Hank Bee has proved that the magic moment doesn’t need to be relied on to create something beautiful.
English (US) · 