“I’m Not a Sad Girl, I’m a Person”: Indie Singer-Songwriter Hana Bryanne on Upcoming Debut Album ‘Dollface’
HANA BRYANNE’S DOLLFACE — her debut album, arriving Sept. 1 — explores the performance inherent to the indie singer-songwriter’s womanhood, the omnipresence of the patriarchy, and the way these forces play out in front of different audiences, including Bryanne herself.
One night, Bryanne gets a call. She answers the phone calmly, then starts apologizing profusely. It’s been a quiet evening in our house, Bryanne writing on the couch, me watching TV in bed, the cat sleeping on his carpet tree, our roommate crashing with her boyfriend. I fall asleep to Bryanne’s side of the conversation, which moves from guilty and confused to exasperated quickly. The call lasts well over an hour by the time I’m unconscious.
In the morning, while we’re picking out the day’s clothes, Bryanne explains. She’s been calling out a friend for being misogynistic — he openly underestimates her musical knowledge, and he once said something along the lines of, “Guys better stop catcalling Hana or her ego will keep inflating.” He called to better understand why Bryanne was calling him out and ask if their friendship was fraying. By the end of the call, he still didn’t understand the privilege with which he moves through the world, nor the difference between the way the public perceives and respects men as opposed to women, or any other minoritized gender.
He says that his misogyny is always a joke, that people are just people — they're not limited to their gender. How wonderful that would be.
Bryanne met this guy right before she moved to LA last spring, just after dropping out of college to really pursue music. Since then, the Cancer sun/Aries moon/Capricorn rising (she turns 21 on July 1) has been in a major period of transition, introspection, and growth.
With patience, vulnerability, and without the convenient, bustling social network of a university, she vets new friends, slowly learning who’s worth keeping around consistently. She explains that she needs a community that validates her frustrations, rather than dismissing or belittling them.
“I’m tired of being the annoying girl in the back of the classroom who’s mocked for acknowledging misogyny,” she said, complaining to me once. She’s unapologetic about her sensitivity, using it as ammunition rather than shrinking behind it.
Bryanne has mostly spent her post-college era executing her musical vision, beginning with her debut LP, Dollface. The first three singles, “Visions,” “Susannah at the Wedding,” and the title track, “Dollface,” are out now.
The album’s title derives from two things. First, a Margaret Atwood quote: “Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own…You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” Bryanne’s studied feminism for a long time, guided especially by strong femmes in her family and in literature.
“I am a sensitive girl, a youngest daughter, and a sentimental bitch,” Bryanne said, distinguishing a few of the gendered roles she plays that affect how she and others view herself.
Dollface’s title was also pulled from her experience in service work. The singer-songwriter worked public-facing positions at a bakery and a law firm during her teenage years in her hometown of Morgan Hill, the southernmost city of the San Francisco Bay Area. Often, men would respond to her big blue eyes and fluffy round curls with unwelcome pet names — “doll” was one of them.
“That always made me laugh,” Bryanne said. “Not only are you making me super uncomfortable and treating me like I'm the commodity being hawked by this establishment, but also I feel like we're in an episode of Mad Men. Like, who says, ‘doll’?”
Dollface is reclamatory in this way. The album parodies the overconfident men who feel entitled to her good looks, acknowledges her inner prejudice shaped by the cruel world, and speaks power into her sensitivity to misogyny. Bryanne does so by calling out the uncomfortable, unfortunately common experiences that should be illuminated rather than ignored for the sake of the illusion of strength. Only with acknowledgement can growth and hope persist.
“It sometimes serves as a prayer,” Bryanne shared about the optimism in her songs.
Self-reflective and open-minded, she naturally embraces liminality like this, highlighting strength in softness. Bryanne is a college dropout who loves writing essays. She’s the best baker I know, and she’s recovering from an eating disorder. She’s been raped and wants to feel sexy onstage. She’s suicidal and alive.
The first Dollface single, “Visions,” contains this complexity. “I wear lace underwear to go nowhere / and no one walks me home,” Bryanne sings, opening the track with an image of lonely romance. She closes the song with some understanding, reflecting on a lost love, painfully alone after bad company: “Did you feel wicked / or just indifferent / or anything at all?”
“‘Visions’ is about being in love with somebody who's really mean to you,” she explained. “But ‘Visions’ is also about forgiveness.”
The love — or lack thereof — described in the track comes from others, yes, but also from Bryanne herself, as well. Her mental health struggles are a recurring theme on the album.
“Eating disorders make you such a good liar, and that incurs its own kind of loneliness because you're constantly trying to make sure you keep the story straight with everybody,” Bryanne described. “It creates so much distance between you and the people that love you.”
The other two singles, “Susannah at the Wedding” and the titular “Dollface,” summarize the album’s persona well. Bryanne encourages us to dance to forget our struggles in the former — it’s hard not to groove to the repeated “There’s no room in you / for the things that I like” — and urges us to face them in the latter.
Bryanne’s sound pulls from an amalgamation of influences. One is her international online music community — she still has friends from the UK, whom she met while posting webcam videos of her singing and playing guitar on YouTube as a tween. Another is her love for Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, John Green, and Joan Didion; yet another is her experience performing in musicals (where she and I first met), and her attention to the current state of indie music.
Melded together, these influences create a project of purposeful poetry, an anger at prejudice, a multi-scene painting à la Sunday in the Park with George that demands to be absorbed and felt. Some of the scenes on the album look like funerals. Others, a night out with friends. For instance, “Dollface” devastates. But “Susannah at the Wedding”?
“I wanted something fun, something for the summertime; something for the girls to get ready and party to,” Bryanne said about the boppy track.
Ironically, misogyny still shows its face, familiar and boring yet still upsetting, while Bryanne traipses through her musical career.
“Men assume that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to my guitar-playing [and] my songwriting as a craft and a skill rather than just, like, a whininess,” Bryanne explained.
Especially in the indie scene, in which the singer-songwriter has carved out a space for herself, the music industry seems to be cluttered with men who seek a bland, repetitive, marketable melancholy from girls they actively underestimate. Those who play the game — the ones who appear as doe-eyed, heartbroken darlings repeating, “I’m a girl, I get sad, and I have the money to fund an art career” — grow more popular with each TikTok hook. Bryanne must scythe through the weeds of oversaturation in the music market to expose her nuance, authenticity, and holistic writing.
“I'm not a sad girl,” Bryanne declared. “I'm a person.”
And her listeners realize this. Bryanne’s fanbase is on the smaller side, yet mighty. They are inspired by her strong voice, alive, in love, and in pain — just like them. Bryanne went on tour on the East Coast with her friend Eliza McLamb earlier this year, and at shows she met with fans who sing along to every word and write her lyrics on their jeans, hailing her as a prophet already.
“Having Hana on tour has been such an honor and a gift,” McLamb said. “I love watching her open heart up there on stage and all the wide-eyed girls staring back. I’m constantly in awe of her ability to transmit feeling through music.”
This awe is felt across Bryanne’s musical collaborators, who clearly see the skill in her craft.
“Working with Hana was such a breath of fresh air because she has such a vision for what she wants her music to be,” Ritwik Krishnan, a producer on Dollface, said. “This album is some of my favorite music ever… and it's just so sick I got to be even a little bit of a part of it.”
Bryanne’s marathon of an experience, writing, recording, and releasing this album is easing up.
“I was a ballet dancer, so I am no stranger to tests of physical resolve,” Bryanne said. “This felt like a similar level of exertion for my brain and for my heart.”
The singer-songwriter knows there’s value in seeing the whole race out, for both herself and her listeners.
“Just spend an hour with me,” she said, “and let me talk about the shit that's happened to me and the shit that I feel.”
Bryanne will get back on the road in July, playing along the Pacific in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.
CONNECT WITH hana bryanne
SPOTIFY
-
weekly tunes playlist has been updated! new tracks from @furtradeband, @pecqband, @garryfool & more! check it out! https://t.co/ToFU0R6YGo
