One year ago, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter/producer HANA (rhymes with Donna) released her shimmering electro-pop track, “Clay,” to SoundCloud. Highlighted by her tranquil vocals, and boosted by endorsements from Grimes and Lorde via Twitter, the song created instant buzz and incited inquiring music outlets to investigate who HANA was. It turned out that “Clay” had marked an artistic rebirth for the musician, who previously recorded under her full name, Hana Pestle. She had spent six years of her late teens and early 20s singing in coffee houses and touring college campuses as an acoustic-based singer/songwriter/guitarist.
Last month, under a violet hue of stage lights inside Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre, HANA found a pure moment of bliss while performing “Clay” during an opening set for Christine and the Queens. At the tail end of the song, HANA closed her eyes, flashed a serene smile, and swayed to the synthetic beat as a prerecorded loop of backing vocals repeated the chorus: “Now I’m going away/ And you’ll never find me…Now I can find happy/ Nothing to show but my name.” HANA, who plays solo while operating an electronic rig, describes those last seconds of “Clay” as meditative joy.
“Every time I perform it, it’s almost like I’m singing it for the first time, just because it is about so many raw emotions and this relationship that happened,” she explains. “I think once I get through it, and I’m at that point of the song, I’m just relieved and reminded that I have gotten through a lot.”
“Clay,” the opening track on HANA’s eponymous EP released in March, was co-produced with Mike Tucker, a collaborator and longtime friend of Grimes. Tucker also has produced for Madonna and Justin Bieber, formerly under the moniker Blood Diamonds and now BloodPop. HANA met Tucker through her roommate three years ago, at a time when she was feeling creatively stagnant after six years of driving herself campus to campus with her acoustic guitar.
There were positives to the touring: she was doing what she loved, the campus gigs paid well, and she enjoyed interacting with students. But she wasn’t playing for many people, the florescent lights of cafeterias and student centers were aesthetically uninspiring, and the hours on the road got in the way of writing new songs. When she did find the time to write, the material wasn’t exciting her. For a year, she experimented with Ableton and Pro Tools workstations, hoping to approximate the more exotic sounds of artists such as Bjork and Fever Ray, but she hadn’t broken any ground prior to meeting Tucker.
“I was explaining to him what I do,” HANA recounts, “and he asked me point blank, ‘Are you proud of your art? Are you feeling fulfilled?’ And I was like, ‘No. I’m really not.’ So it was that meeting that sparked me to take a break and fully dive into learning how to produce and make art that I was proud of.”
The EP’s spectral third track, “Underwater,” is the first computer-composed song where HANA felt she had something special. She wanted to write a soothing song about encouraging someone to persevere during uncertainty. The lyrics project a maternal sensibility, with the song’s narrator guiding a child through the depths of adversity.
“I’ve always been kind of a maternal person,” HANA says. “I’m a Cancer. I don’t know if I really believe in that kind of stuff, but it is one of the main attributes of a Cancer, and I identify with that. With ‘Underwater,’ it was kind of a mixture between thinking about my little sister and then also thinking about me at the age of my little sister. She’s five years younger than me.”
Born in Atlanta, HANA moved with her family to Salt Lake City when she was six, and then to Billings, Montana at eight years old. The moves were prompted by her mother’s pursuits in the medical field after earning a master’s degree in nutrition. HANA’s father teaches English and drama. Her memories of Atlanta revolve around music, living in the Five Points district, which she remembers as grungy, and blasting songs by R.E.M. and Alanis Morissette in the car. Her parents listened to a wide variety of artists, from Bonnie Raitt to Metallica to Lauryn Hill. On a return visit to Atlanta in 1998, HANA saw Spice Girls in concert.
“It was amazing,” she says. “It was the best experience of my entire life.”
In Billings, HANA’s parents bought her a guitar at a garage sale when she was in the fifth grade, but it was difficult on her fingers. She upgraded to a newer, smaller guitar that was better suited for a youngster, and with persistence and calluses, she learned to play songs by Radiohead and Morissette. A fascination with politics and anti-establishment music coincided with her learning songs by Ani DiFranco and Bright Eyes, whom she saw perform in Montana circa the Lifted album. By learning the chord structures and progressions to play covers, she developed a sense of how to compose her own songs, culling lyrics from poetry that she had written in her journal. In her notebook, she made a list of all the coffee shops and bookstores in Billings and asked them if she could sing and play guitar there.