Hana Stretton ends her wordless white winter

Back then, only a track titled “The Thrill of Loneliness” graced online communities in its virality, alongside a SoundCloud burner account called Nora’s Bin housing otherwise unpublished demos. 

Three years after our last call, where I was told about the billowing smoke creating a horrifying backdrop to her grandma’s farm, Stretton tells me she just got a 43-degree train from Paris to the south of France, unable to breathe.

“I’ve now had four or five situations trapped in small spaces with unbearable heat,” she says.

By contrast, Stretton self-produced Soon in the expansive outback after her grandma, Bid, passed away. Looking after the family farm solo was never the plan. Her father covered riots as a journalist in D.C. and her mother faced another blaze elsewhere, both unable to return. This happenstance provided enough space and solitude for Stretton to hear her own thoughts, and the pivotal moment for her musical visions to materialise. 

Often driving an hour for supplies and to wave at locals in the supermarket – reminding herself other people existed at all – Stretton felt an unprecedented sense of peace in her solitude. As pictures of black-smog skies looming over the mountains emerged in the news, it felt like the first time the direct effects of climate change were catapulted into mainstream consciousness. 

Stretton’s music never once, however, preached to the choir. It simply documented: a feeling, a moment, a thread of a thought just beyond her grasp. She found beauty in the quiet, small things: in feeding the wordless animals no matter what fires raged next to them. In a walk to the beach, softly singing into an iPhone and asking her parents to come home. In the gentle croon of “it’s in the water,” written after staring into her reflection. Soon was finished before Stretton even understood it was a record. 

Her sophomore album, however, was like a “petulant child” that didn’t want to be seen, heard, or put into the world, which Stretton explains is a parallel with her own temperament, too.

Naming the album after her friend Tiarn, she didn’t know what it meant until I ask why she named it “landholder,” serendipitous with the fact that she was quite literally the landholder of her grandma’s farm for a while. She finds the meaning of her friend’s name significant. She met Tiarn where she made the album: Lake Tabourie in the south-coast region of New South Wales, Australia, which bristles with black swans, sea eagles, and a whole ocean laid between the world and her.

Stretton says the album is essentially an unanswered question. It asks, How do I take care of the earth, and how do I take from it? How do I not feel so devastated all the time?

The answers to those questions, she says, lie in her friend. She looks at Tiarn and Tiarn “simply knows – she’s the most alive, awake, and poetic person that I’ve met,” Stretton shares. 

I’ve listened to Tiarn on loop while walking around Cheshunt, a leafy natural haven north of London, where the canal boat I live in is currently moored. Her music always seems to soundtrack pivotal moments in my life. I have always felt interpersonal grief echoes systemic grief – that our grief for nature reflects our grief for ourselves, but that grief can also be incredibly transformative, and a portal to change. Stretton’s album sounds to me more like a celebration of the natural world, even if steeped in ecological grief. As I walk past blackberry leaves scorched from the heatwave, automatic porch-lights illuminate floating homes. An England flag waves next to a Palestinian one. An apple tree grows on someone’s roof. A boat called sun-dial effortlessly sails past. 

Stretton tells me that she looks at her friend Tiarn and sees her north star. While loneliness might feel like a thrill to her, important figures in her life are dotted around her songs like constellations, weaving their way into names and lyrics; whether it’s her grandma, a cow called Captain, or lost lovers memorialised in quiet, soft, un-naming sentences. Without realising, the album became her way to connect the dots. 

“If I’m surrounded by people, then that link to the creative part of me is completely severed,” she says. “I’m trying to work on that, but all I’ve known is that creativity can only emerge in silence. This album has nudged me out of that.”

“Because you’ve worked with the Forest Creek Folk Choir, haven’t you?” I ask.

“My music was trying to tell me subconsciously that I needed some friends and community,” she replies. “A few of the songs on the album are community-based, chanting or dancing with a group of people. This album is trying to create a bridge between my world in nature and my world with people.”

Before Stretton found the choir, she’d stamp her feet on different parts of the floor in an attempt to become a crowded room, or sing in different pitches and funny voices to become the group of people she never found herself surrounded by. Sometimes, she wanted her songs to sound like they were recorded in pubs, so she’d clink glasses together. “There were no pubs around in my tiny beach town,” she says. 

She’d take a piece of wood and five pairs of shoes up to her bedroom pretending to be a group of line-dancers, performing the same tap-dance over and over. She’s dreamt of musical ideas for big groups of people ever since school, then stumbled upon Forest Creek Folk Choir at Castlemaine’s Town Folk Festival. It felt so euphoric, she asked them to join her on the record.

“It was an amazing feeling – to see everyone have so much fun with my songs,” she says. “I will happily continue to be a loner throughout my life, but this album in particular was the tap on my shoulder to tell me I need balance. Music can be like an oracle card, showing us what we need.”

Woom sing with her, too. Woom are long-time friends, a four-piece harmony-led group with similarly sparse, cinematic music who she met during her time in London. Stretton explains how when she found other people to sing with her, she felt the songs “escape from my grasp and become part of other people. They no longer feel like mine.”

Animals are still front and centre on Tiarn. At Lake Tabourie, Stretton spent hours watching the humpbacks and ‘right whales’ migrate with white callosities on their heads, coalescing like small islands. Right whales got their name from being the ‘right whale’ to harpoon, Stretton tells me. “They travel north to have their babies, then come back down to bring their babies back,” and on the track “Right Whale” Stretton sings, “In a wordless winter, in a north migration,” perhaps seeing herself in them.

Stretton’s music has always felt like an unconscious mirror. Throughout the record, the choir hockets fragments of memories, singing the same loop over and over. A string quartet tunes in “Nojiri 1993”, the opener, alongside voices and footsteps; a small child uttering “it’s an orange” can be heard if listening in a quiet enough space. A sweeping cello finds an unresolved chord to land on, and suddenly it’s as if the universe has become an endless question, too. 

“Nojiri 1993” ends with a small, stringed instrument being strummed with what sounds like a paintbrush, quietly answering. Stretton’s songs have always sounded like patchwork quilts or the soundtrack to the subconscious. Comparable artists include Grouper and William Basinski, but in a whirlwind of analogue tape and song structures inspired by the sea, or a slow-moving whale, Stretton’s music remains truly standalone. 

She tells me she envisioned the album opening with an opera singer emerging from across a mountain gorge like a siren. She approached her long-time collaborator Nick Huggins for one, and he suggested his neighbour Teresa Duddy. 

Duddy came over and was instructed to sing whatever first came to her head, Stretton carefully selecting the parts that felt right. As a producer, she has never relied on solid, traditional song structures, instead cutting up sections on instinct, simply sitting back and listening. As a result, the music feels boundary-less to the rest of the world – more of a shared noticing than a way to speak and be heard. 

I ask about the significance of Nojiri in 1993. Stretton tells me her family lived in Tokyo in the early ‘90s, before she was born, and travelled to Nojiri for a holiday. She showed her parents the music set to videography of them, and they told her she was conceived there.

As we end the call, Stretton tells me that the day after we last spoke in 2023, she began writing Tiarn. She jokes she’ll walk away from this call and start writing another record. Perhaps the thrill of loneliness can be joined with conversations, too.