Hannah Frances Lives In the Space Between

Nests are often viewed as sites of nurture, mothering, and care. Birds collect mud, twigs, and dried grass to construct a habitat so structurally sound that it can weather the most violent storms, natural and manmade. But when a nest is poorly built, the consequences are dire: spiky brambles that poke and prod; openings that leave eggs vulnerable to predators; a gnarled, tangly mess that doesn’t protect its occupants but ensnares them.

It’s the latter metaphor that interested singer-songwriter Hannah Frances when she was making her sixth album, Nested in Tangles. The Vermont-based musician’s tumultuous childhood has long been a focal point of her work; but here, she discovers new branches of thought on the family tree. Frances views her upbringing not as something to be discarded but a place where she can wander, a locale rich with epiphanies yet to be grasped. It’s a setting of reconciliation, where she can return to time and again, repeatedly navigating the bramble so as to find a safer passage on consecutive trips. Eventually, she learns where to evade the poisonous foliage and the prickly thorns, and she can emerge unscathed.

“That’s why, in the album cover, I’m in this crazy, tangled cypress tree,” she explains over Zoom from Putney, Vermont. “This is the ground that I’ve come from. This is the nest. This is the gnarled past. This is history.” Whether or not you’ve had a difficult upbringing, “it’s something that everyone can relate to,” she continues. “We all have this internal tangle that we have to move through all the time.”

Her move from Chicago to Vermont has afforded her a life of solitude that she has come to appreciate as a welcome respite from touring. When she’s not on the road, she describes herself as “very, very much a homebody.” She takes this Zoom from her car, which she has parked at the Putney Public Library so she can use the free internet, an amenity her cabin doesn’t have. A change in scenery was an idea that her friend and collaborator Kevin Copeland, who produced her 2024 breakthrough Keeper of the Shepherd, and its follow-up, encouraged. Copeland’s family has land in Vermont, so he suggested that Frances spend time with his family, plus their sheep and horses, while she worked on music. She took him up on his offer, and the two got to work on Keeper in 2022. Once she secured her own cabin in 2023, the pair created Nested in Tangles.

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Vermont’s natural beauty lends itself well to Frances’ songwriting, most of which she accomplishes in the fall and winter months. The seasons compel her to write so much music that there’s already a follow-up to Nested in Tangles in the works “Last winter, Kevin and I started another album, and this winter we’re going to finish that,” she says. During the spring and summer, she’s usually out touring. Seclusion, which naturally arises in the chillier seasons, gives her the wherewithal to process her life, write music, and schedule recording sessions with Copeland.

Because both albums were made in her adopted home with the same producer, and because they’re releasing just one year apart, it’s difficult not to think of them as related in some way. Although they’re certainly in conversation with each other, Keeper of the Shepherd and Nested in Tangles are at different points on the same line. As Frances puts it, Nested’s predecessor “felt like the ground and the roots, the damp moss and the dirt,” but then “you go up through this tree and these gnarled branches, and that’s where Nested in Tangles lives.” Whereas her last record wrestled with grief, sorrow, and the cyclical essence of those emotions, Nested imagines that cycle as a chaotic, labyrinthine web. That notion seeps into the music, which sees Frances draw even more from prog-folk and jazz influences to mirror the rangy knottiness of its subject matter.

“Life’s Work,” featuring arrangements from Daniel Rossen of indie stalwarts Grizzly Bear, unspools gradually; plucky guitar chords, Frances’ sylvan alto, and ambling brass and percussion get layered in like a baker adding ingredients to a mixing bowl. “Reconcile the child through hostile family / Rupture is tradition, born into dissonance,” she sings in the second verse, atonal horns crescendoing into the word “dissonance.” “Surviving You” shuffles along at an uneasy, 5/4 sway like a ballroom dancer with an ankle sprain, trumpets and discordant feedback lingering at the periphery. Over the course of its five-and-a-half minutes, Frances’ double-tracked vocals weave in and out of each other, never in total unison but always finding their way back to each other. “Falling From and Further” shifts tempos on a dime, going from straightforwardly pretty folk to a spry, double-time train beat and back again. Nested in Tangles is full of moments like these, its nine tracks never settling, invariably in motion and en route to somewhere new.

“It was my intention to [go further] into more progressive, jazzier realms,” Frances says. “I wanted to bring in different kinds of instrumentation, challenge myself as a guitarist, challenge myself as an arranger.” While its music can be unconventional and challenging, Nested in Tangles also contains some of the most forthrightly beautiful music of her career. The record bookends itself with the title track and “Heavy Light,” both of which feature spoken-word prose, a first for one of Frances’ albums. The former showcases her ornate guitar work, and her prowess with the instrument is undeniable. The latter is an instrumental piece, a grandiose statement replete with horns, woodwinds, and orchestral strings. As a diptych, they underline one of the album’s core themes: how everyone must maneuver through rugged terrain at some point, but there’s a glow poking through the boughs, a lightness to being alive.

This duality is central to understanding Nested in Tangles, but Frances refers to the penultimate track, “The Space Between,” as its thesis. As its name implies, it’s about the intrinsic liminality we embody simply through existing. “I was working with the experience of forgiveness and how to forgive people who have harmed you, but how to acknowledge that they have harmed you or are no longer here to have that kind of resolution with,” she says, speaking of her father, who died from a heart attack when she was in her early twenties. “How can I live in this space where there’s no forgiveness, there’s no resolution?” She may not have the answer, and no one truly does. Posing the question itself is entirely the point. Along the way, as Frances realizes on Nested in Tangles, you can familiarize yourself with the unknown. With time, you can even learn to find solace in it.

Nested in Tangles is out October 10 via Fire Talk.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.

Hannah Frances Lives In the Space Between

The Vermont-based songwriter talks about leaning into jazz and prog-folk, how the seasons inform her work, and her brilliant new album, Nested in Tangles.