By Chelsie Derman
Editor-in-Chief
Hana Bryanne, tired of just sitting around during the height of the pandemic, posted a snippet of her original song, “Klepto,” on TikTok, Jan. 8, 2021. Before Bryanne fell asleep, her video had only 2,000 views. The very next morning, that number shot up to over 100,000, which left her stunned. She told The Signal that, because so many people viewed and liked her TikTok (garnering 107.9K likes), she tried her best to finish the song.
“I did feel this surmounting pressure to get [the song] right since so many people had already fallen in love with it,” Bryanne said.
Bryanne released the song six months later on July 2, 2021. She admitted that she doesn’t identify with “Klepto” as much anymore. Released at age 18, the song was about her sad 15-year-old self who tried to subtly hint her sadness to the world by reading Sylvia Plath in public places and crying in the movie theaters.
“It feels like a vignette of a very particular time in my life, which makes me feel somewhat disconnected from it now,” she said. “It’s so angsty, it’s so 18, but I love that. I think it’s meaningful because of that. It’s so honest; it’s such an ugly portrait of what it means to feel so lonely and so crazy in your own head and trying to process all of these big picture things when you don’t really have the perspective to do that yet because you’re so young still.”
Around the time she released her single “Klepto,” she had also released her three-song EP “Holy Ground” in December of 2020 through Bird Street Records.
Bryanne, now 20, is about to put out new music that resonates more with her current self. Her indie folk/rock album “Doll Face” is slated to be released mid-summertime, and it will have 12 songs. She has been working on this album most of this year and started when she moved to LA roughly a year ago and worked closely with her friend and producer, Carter John. She moved to LA from New York (where she temporarily attended college) to go into the music business.
“Doll Face” will be about misogyny, sexual violence and loss with a hint of optimism. The album is nearly finished, and Bryanne said the first single will come out April 21. Bryanne describes her style of music as very “confessional.”
She often writes songs on her bedroom floor, with her acoustic guitar, and pulls inspiration from her life.
“I’ve been really enjoying letting some of the songs live in some more produced space than my earlier work, so less folk roots, more pop influence, which has been really fun,” she said. “It has been really exciting to write a song about something that is really sad and then go into the studio and make it a dance song, just a really enjoyable catharsis of working through experiences.”
Bryanne recently went on tour in the East Coast with indie singer/songwriter Eliza McLamb, stopping at D.C., Brooklyn, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New Haven, Connecticut.
Prior to her 2022 tour, she left her hometown south of San Francisco to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York for a semester and half to study dance. She ultimately decided to leave school, not liking it as much as she had hoped.
“I’m from California, so I wasn’t really prepared for an East Coast winter,” Bryanne said. “That was a little bit of a shock to me. I was just also in a challenging place with my family life and with my mental health and with my physical health, and it just ended up being not the right place or not the right time for me. Making music is what I always wanted to do. It’s the only thing I could ever really imagine myself doing, and so the ways I was spending my days there didn’t feel conducive to that kind of work.”
Because she attended Sarah Lawrence and resided in New York — and thus in close enough proximity to the College — WTSR 91.3 FM invited Byranne to perform at their semi-annual WTSR Underground in Fall 2021. Students may remember sitting on AIMM Ellipse lawn on the sunny day, watching Bryanne with her curly brown hair and red dress performing her original songs.
Bryanne now resides in Los Angeles. She heads into the studio to work on her new album a couple days a week, putting in 12-hour workdays. When she isn’t in the studio, she writes freelance. She will also soon have an article published in the magazine, Talkhouse, which is an outlet where artists can write essays and criticisms about their own work.
“It’s going to be sort of a companion piece to the album,” Bryanne said. “I feel like we tried to take on a lot of ideas with this album, and I do feel like the album is done and we did all of the ideas justice to the degree that you can in music, but I’m also a prose writer, and so it was really important for me to explore certain ideas that we talk about on the record more in-depth, especially when it comes to ideas about feminism and about sexual violence, so that’s what a lot of the essays are about.”
Music has always been a big part of Bryanne’s life as her mom is a writer and a musician. She also grew up dancing and doing musical theater.
“[Creating music] was just something that floated just underneath the surface for my whole life, but came into fruition when I was about sixteen,” she said.
But she dabbled in song writing before she hit sixteen. When she was either nine or ten, she and her elementary school best friend — both Taylor Swift-obsessed — started writing songs together.
“They were not good,” she said, laughing. “I think I probably started to take it a little bit more seriously my sophomore year of high school. I wrote my first EP when I was sixteen and seventeen, and it came out when I was eighteen.”
Bryanne draws a lot of inspiration from Swift’s music and also admires her as an artist.
“I love how definite she is in the face of this industry that says we don’t want to hear from young women, your problems are trivial, we don’t care what you have to say,” she said. “Now that we understand that young women have some of the greatest power of the entire economy, but beyond that I feel like the way writing serves me is to moralize these parts of my life into something really tangible.”
Swift gave Bryanne the courage and inspiration to use personal narratives as lyrics.
“She taught me no emotion is too small...the things that you didn’t think were trivial at sixteen that you now look back on and you’re, ‘oh, come on, that really wasn’t that big of a deal,’” Bryanne said. “The stakes are always up here when you’re that age, and I think that’s beautiful. I think that’s so finite, and I think there’s something worth distilling about that.”
Bryanne’s also inspired by artists such as Gillian Welch, Leonard Cohen, Indigo De Souza, Lana Del Ray, Pinegrove and Alex G.
While many of Bryanne’s listeners most likely know her work through TikTok since she now has 15.7K followers and has been posting music content since December of 2020, Bryanne admitted she isn’t a big fan of social media as it does not help her mental health. The platforms are “sucking all of us dry,” she said.
The news of Congress wanting to ban TikTok doesn’t worry her. Not only does Bryanne not anticipate TikTok actually getting banned, but she would not miss the app, either. She posts largely on Tiktok because she feels compelled to for her music career and to achieve, as she called it, “manufactured success.”
“There are wonderful things that the internet has brought me certainly that I am exceptionally grateful for,” she said, “but if I had a magical wand that I could wave, the internet would not be as much of a part of the music industry as it is right now.”
