Hana Stretton is an Australian-British singer-songwriter and producer who grew up on a farm in New South Wales. Ten years ago, she recorded her first single that would make the rounds on the internet, ‘The Thrill of Loneliness’, which was quickly followed by the Wail EP. Stretton self-produced her debut album, 2023’s hazy, impressionistic Soon, alone on her grandmother’s farm after she passed away, tending to the land and its animals during the Australian wildfires of 2019. Its soft, ghostly meditations reached Phil Elverum, who reissued the album via his P.W. Elverum & Sun label in 2024, and is now releasing Stretton’s second full-length, tiarn. This time, the composer’s solitary instincts led her to Lake Tabourie, a beach town south of Ulladulla, suffusing the album with the ephemeral beauty and rich textures of the blue hour, her voice a gentle presence wary of intrusion. It feels like waking up to the unsurety of dusk and treating its porous boundaries like a fresh start, not a natural conclusion: bountiful in its subtlety, ambient folk with an emphasis on folk, open to reinterpreation. Weaving in field recordings alongside contributions from an opera singer, a string quartet, and Forest Creek Folk, a local 60-person choir Stretton has since joined, it threads the needle between Stretton’s nature-bound lonerism and a more community-oriented existence. Or maybe it simply blurs the line between the human and the non-human, careful with it all.
We caught up with Hana Stretton for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her earliest musical memories, finding community, the process behind tiarn, and more.
I was listening to the record alone at night, out on a walk, with noise-cancelling headphones. The moment they muffled the world around me, it felt like I was doing a disservice to the record. There were these natural sounds buzzing around me, and tuning them out felt somehow wrong. I don’t know if you feel strongly about this one way or another.
I do, totally. I love that you felt that way, because you have described exactly kind of how I made the album – walking alone in nature at night. If the world around you exists in that exact same light, then it’s part of it, so you gotta put it on the half-cancelling setting. [laughs] Let the world in. But some of my favorite music, if I’m having a really stressed-out day and I’m trying to get from one place to another in London, that’s when I can bleed the world out and just be soothed by another place, musically. It’s contextual.
If you’re on the underground, you want to minimize the noise as much as possible. But if there are cicadas singing, and those same sounds are on the record…
Bring it in! That’s so beautiful. If you’re by the beach, let the sea in, you know? If you’re by a tree, let the wind in. That makes me really happy.
Can you tell me more about your own listening habits? How have they evolved over time? Are there some things that have stayed the same since you were a child?
That’s a really good question. I would say my world has gotten smaller when it comes to the music I listen to. It’s very specific, and very tied to emotion and place. When I was a kid, I was living on a farm in Australia, and I would go off on my own. I was a bit of a dirt kid. I would take my dog, and we would go off, and I would take my Walkman and kind of enact what I was listening to. It was very much like the music was part of my surroundings, and the surroundings were part of the music I was listening to, so I don’t think that’s really changed. And then when I started making music in my teens, I would take cassette machines to the river and record there. Nature has kind of always found its way into the way I make music, so it’s intertwined. I wouldn’t even know how to separate them, which is why studios are – I feel like a fish out of water.
Do you mind sharing a memory of enacting music in that way?
There was a really big rock, just like The Lion King – the big rock where they walk out. We had one of those on the farm that looked exactly like that. I would take my dog, Bonnie, and I would pretend and sing all The Lion King songs. Things like that. Every day it was an obsession to become – it’s so silly. [laughs] That’s more musical theater-y type stuff, but it did happen with dancing along to Britney Spears as well. But yeah, music was always being taken off by me as a kid, I wouldn’t listen to it in the house. I would go, “Bye, everyone,” as a little five-year-old, and go and walk far off into the paddocks to listen. It was kind of my thing.
And that’s kind of stayed with you, I presume?
Yeah, it’s my little world. I’m very protective of it.
How do you feel, then, when you’re at a concert, or when live music started becoming part of your world?
I think I’ve never been a big gig person, and even playing them is difficult. I wouldn’t consider myself a performer at all. I really struggle with this next phase of my music life. I really don’t believe that it suits me at all, but I’m trying it out. I’m just gonna try and see whether I can maneuver the uncomfortability of it by doing it. By the end of the year, I’m doing so many shows that I’m hoping I’ll have a better sense of whether this is something I do throughout my life or not. That’s a big question I’m asking myself. If people want to come to a show, they should probably do it soon, because I don’t know if I’ll continue. I don’t know if I’ll be able to. It’s not good for me at this point in time, but I’m hoping that will shift.
Does the idea of touring feel different to you compared to traveling in a way that feels significant to you? Or is traveling part of what makes touring an exciting prospect?
That was the dream. I think when touring started becoming more of a reality as something I could do, I thought, “How incredible,” because I’m a big traveler. I’ve always traveled, and I really loved to travel by myself, so I wasn’t scared and I was really thrilled to be able to do it. But then it just got hard very quickly. I really struggle with being perceived, being in front of people. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out why all of that is so difficult. But I don’t think that I’m alone. I think a lot of people who make weird music in their bedroom and find creativity that way, and thrive in aloneness – of course it wouldn’t match up that they’d be necessarily fantastic performers and love it. I’d really love to be able to travel, perform, and feel good about it, but I’m not there yet.
Talking about it isn’t going to replicate that experience, but have you had conversations with people who have, if not shifted your understanding, encouraged to think about performing differently?
I think the way that I’ve learned how to perform in a really healthy and good way is to take community with me, whether it be WOOM as a group of friends [with whom Stretton is touring in September] or performing with a choir in Australia. The shift between solo performance, which feels self-aggrandizing and strange, to a community project is so soothing to me. It completely recontextualizes it so I feel completely okay with doing shows. One idea that I might do in the future is to go to towns, find small choirs, and stay for a week at a time with a choir to the point where we can do a small show, and then move around that way. Because then you can really get into a community, meet lots of people, have a lovely time swimming in the rivers, and get to know an area super well. So you’re getting all of that travel and community in there. That might be on the cards for my future. Sometimes we just have to recontextualize things for ourselves, to suit our personalities.
Does that experience of singing in choirs recontextualize tiarn as a record as well, listening back? Do you see the record in a different light, having had those experiences post-recording? Do the harmonies feel different or lonelier in some ways?
There’s a lot that happened within this album to help me get into community, and I can see that now two years on. I made most of it in the winter of 2023, so it’s been three years. But I was so happy in my aloneness. And I could see that at some point, my subconscious, without me knowing, was saying, “Look, it’s time, Hana. You have to get out and speak to people, and be part of something.” That wasn’t really something I could access because I was so happy on my own, but I’m still human at the end of the day. I can say to you now that I’ve learned how much I need community through the music needing me to get out. I was stomping around in five different pairs of shoes on a plank of wood, pretending I was a group of people dancing. Being one person on the left-hand side of the room and another person on the right-hand side of the room, 100 times over, to pretend I was a big choir – at some point, you just have to go, “This is ridiculous.” The music wants what it wants, and you have to go and find it. So, I’m glad I did.
I read an interview you did with Catrin Vincent three years ago, and a lot of things were aligning for you at the time, from traveling to Tokyo to being asked to support Mount Eerie. Did the following months, the beginnings of the record, change the way you viewed music or the music industry? Did isolating yourself put you at a distance from how it might be perceived?
I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I don’t think about releasing the music or how it’s gonna be taken by other people. I also have this very stubborn idea that nobody is listening or cares, which is very freeing, but so stubborn that everything surprises me continually. But I kind of need that. I need to be left alone in every regard, and that includes the idea of perception itself by other people, in order to be as weird as I need to be to make what I make. I think now that I’m done, all that I’ve done is quite formulaic, actually, this time. But it does hit a rude shock that all this exists on the other side of making it.
Around that time, you found some footage of your family living in Japan in the ’90s, which served as a guiding light during the recording. Did you find that the line got blurry between your environment and where you were living in your day-to-day life, and then this memory of time and place that you never got to experience? Was that something that felt palpable to you at any point during that process?
That’s an incredible perception, because, yeah, absolutely. My creativity came up mostly around that blue hour time, which is when the video is set, and I was also living on a lake, where the video is also set there in Japan. I don’t really know why that film was so sustaining, but I think it’s always strange to see your family – how they interact with each other, how they move – to be so different to how you know them. I was fascinated by all the interaction between my family members feeling quite different to after I was born. I just kept making to that film. I was so glad that I had such a draw to it. And then I took it to my dad, and I said, “I hope this is okay. I just want your permission, because I’ve made this music—” half an album at that point —”to this footage of you guys.” And they said, “Well, that’s pretty weird, because that was, if not the day, then the week of your conception.” [laughs] So, I’d made an album to my own conception, which I don’t think there’s any significance in that at all, but it’s still pretty strange.
I was curious if that was the only video and that’s why you clung to it, or whether there was a lot of material and you just gravitated to that one.
I gravitated to that one because it was already the visual that I had in my head for where I wanted the music to be set. I found it quite strange that this perfect encapsulation of what I was imagining existed in this video. Also, they’re being very still, listening to music down in the valley. I had already decided, prior to seeing this footage at all, that I would have it set in a valley overlooking water, with music and opera coming up delicately from far away. A lot aligned for that to be very right for this project.
You mentioned feeling like a fish out of water in professional studios, which made me want to ask about making your own space. Apart from the aloneness and the freedom to be weird in your own space, what’s important for you in making your home studio comfortable?
I think I keep everything that I use super shitty and minimal because I’m pretty technologically challenged. I don’t enjoy learning techy things, and really stubbornly so. I don’t want a synth with lots of buttons or a DAW that asks too much of me. I pretty much just use one EQ, and that’s it, on everything. My Ableton use is pretty rudimentary. So I like to keep my studio quite real, just covered in crappy instruments I’ve picked up for $10 somewhere and tried to play. I believe in accessibility, especially for women, and trying to show to myself and maybe others that you really don’t need much at all to make things.
Listening to your music, too, it feels like the bigger project is not to stay inside, but to integrate things from the outside world. Your day-to-day life at the time is really heard on this album, and I’m curious how much of it you felt like you were consciously translating and capturing it, or if it was more so glimpses of it that seeped through.
I think the most conscious part of my life when I’m making and living alone in this kind of way is how I’m interacting with nature every day. The music comes secondary to that. Naturally, I’m just spending so much of my time outside, and so much of my productivity is outside, so it’s got to come indoors that way. But I’m very passionate about – not just for myself – coming back to nature a bit more, getting off our devices, getting off phones, and just being part of it a bit more.
I read that you’re a dumb phone user, which I’m curious about.
Yeah. I was getting to the point with my despair about the world where it was really damaging my life and making me quite angry at people, and I couldn’t join the dots and be okay with it all. But getting off my devices and getting out into nature much more really softened my life so much. I believe in softness, especially in this world that is very sharp and demanding our attention constantly. My nervous system has calmed down, and I’m generally a lot happier. I can tell you that my phone is an AGM M7, and it has the most hilarious version of Maps and WhatsApp.
Those are the two extra things you need.
For so long I said, “Oh, I can’t change because I need Maps and WhatsApp,” but I bloody found it, and it’s really good. [laughs] It’s called “the rugged man’s camping phone,” so I guess I’m a rugged man.
One thing that drew me to the album is that I feel like there’s a lot of production or experimentation that defines the structure of a composition, but there are some tracks, like ‘As If Was Before This’, that seem to naturally cling to a song form. Do you feel like there’s an instinct that you have for when a song needs to retain that form, or when it’s more improvisational? Do you even draw a line between those two?
Every song came to me completely differently. ‘Right Whale’ is a chopped-up improvisation on piano. It sounds like a proper song that I wrote on a piano, but I’ve actually never played it, I don’t even know how to play it. So that’s, I guess, “highly produced,” because it’s not really produced at all, but yeah. But songs like ‘As It Was Before This’ and ‘Salt’, these community-type of songs, they are what they are. They come very quickly, more like children’s songs or something that you would make up as you’re walking along. Which is exactly how I make them anyway – I make them up as I’m walking along.
Is it maybe because they’re more like children’s songs that they feel precious in a way that you don’t want to mess with them?
Yeah, but I did. I totally messed with them. So much of that is that I don’t really feel like a producer; I feel like I’m very much still learning and having fights within my own production. ‘As It Was Before This’ is kind of like a brawl between lots of different voices that want lots of different things. Sometimes that’s the case, where my production and I are fighting: I want it to be one way, and it wants to be something else. Sometimes we’re in complete alignment, and I can feel that. I don’t know whether the listener can feel that. But I also believe that songs don’t have one way of being. I can play ‘As It Was Before This’ in so many different ways. I also perform it as a round, and I believe there will be more recordings in different ways. I’m sure a softer, childlike version will come out at some point, and I hope it will. But for now, it is what happened. [laughs] That’s what I’ve had to say to myself a lot. You’ve got to give yourself a bit of grace and say, “Yep, that’s just what happened.”
Going back to what we started talking about, you can’t control even how someone listens to it, and that’s a different version of a song. If someone listens to it on the street as opposed to by the beach, that’s a different version of the song in some way, like a field recording that wasn’t there before.
Totally, and I’m struggling quite a bit now with hearing how it sounds through Spotify, because that squishes it so much. I work really hard on a soft mix, and now the cicadas that I had placed on a far mountain in the back are flying straight at your face. I didn’t mean for that to happen. But some music is really affected by that Spotify squish, and others not so much, so I’m just a bit unlucky.
There’s often a lot of fighting over when the song is finished. But something that I’m thinking about in relation to your music is not so much how you determine that, but how you carve out the beginnings and the endings of songs. A lot of the time, you leave a lot of breathing room at the end of songs, especially on ‘Off Stokes’, but there are songs where you also leave that space in the beginning. I wonder how you navigate that part of crafting a song.
I’m gonna have to give you a very boring answer, and say whatever it is that you’re making dictates all of that. I have no consciousness, really, of “I want to do this,” or “I would like it to be a certain way.” If I have that kind of notion before I start anything, I won’t do anything. I won’t be able to make anything at all. The only thing is if I have visual stimuli, and I often did for this album, I’d have a very specific visual in my head. Sometimes I would find that visual in reality, pop it into my Ableton so that it was always there when I brought it up, and that would help to dictate, because there’s a natural arc in the video that you’ve put in. But other than that, I have no formula at all before I start doing anything.
That’s an interesting way to visualize music.
Yeah, visuals are kind of everything. If I have any formula at all, it’s that. I have a very clear idea of where I am before I start; not physically where I am, but in my imagination. Where I want the song to live: Is it near water? Wat kind of animals live there? Is it hot? Is it cold? And that dictates the notes that come up, and the color that I’m making, and the time of day that it feels like, and it gives context to everything. It makes making itself so much more natural and easy. And I’m very grateful for that. I think making without that would be very hard for me. But then the songs, once they start to take form, at some point, the roles will reverse, and the song will either go, “Okay, I don’t mind being where you’ve placed me,” or it will go, “Absolutely not.” [laughs] And we will fight. There’s quite a bit of fighting on this album, and that’s been fun. But I’m hoping that I will understand the process a little bit more as I make more albums into the future, and there’ll be less tension.
What’s interesting is that then there comes a point where the visual world of the record builds back up in a different way, with its own artwork and videos aren’t necessarily connected to the ones that initially inspired you. That’s part of the cycle of the music taking a life of its own.
Totally. I humbly understand that I am not doing this completely on my own. I am in a dance with whatever this song I am making is wanting. I can’t force it all the time to be what I want it to be. It has its own will. I’m sure that a lot of other people in production feel the same way.
Did you feel the same way about the record as a whole, or was it mostly individual songs that had a will of their own?
Yeah, very stubborn – didn’t really want to be out there and seen or heard very much, didn’t want to be finished. Whereas Soon was ready before I even knew it was an album, because I made it as demos and then kind of just released it as it was. There’s something about this album that was kind of feisty and like a petulant child, so I can’t explain that. But I’m happy I made it, I like it. It just is what it is – the second kid. It’s pretty weird sometimes.
You mentioned in that older interview that’s “it’s good to have a north star.” Do you feel like you have one that you’re looking towards right now?
I think year after year – and music has helped me through this as well – I’ve come closer and closer in asking all these questions of how to live a good life. I have so much more understanding as to what I need and how to do that, and that’s my north star. I’m just trying to get closer to that. A lot of nature, a lot of animals involved in my future, for sure. And community.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Hana Stretton’s tiarn is out now.