Hannah White
About Time
Paper Blue Records
2022
About Time is Hannah White‘s follow-up to her 2020 album Hannah White and the Nordic Connections, which was nominated in the UK Americana Awards for UK Album of the Year. It finds her shorn of the original band save for keyboardist Lars Hammersland. The album was self-produced and features another longtime Norwegian collaborator, Svein Henning Berstad, on bass, alongside husband Keiron Marshall on baritone guitar and Luca Wade on drums. This ambiguously titled collection offers ten self-penned songs that speak to her musical influences and life experience.
The curtain rises on heartbreak with the funereal paced, muted drums and strings of You Don’t Want Me Anymore, her anguished voice soaring to quivering Patsy Cline heights, and proceeds to get more despairing on the organ-backed It Will Be Alright (“I’m in physical pain from the tears that I cried/I just lost my home/It’s like I woke up this morning/My friends had all gone… My children cry before school/Where they learn to divide, to compete and be cruel/The neighbours do nothing but fight/And every night I hear cries as I turn out the light”), yet relieved by the comforting arms of love (“he’s holding me, saying it will be alright”).
Backed by echoey twang, rumbling drums, and classical piano runs, Bluest Eyes touches on deception and abuse (“The bluest eyes can’t make innocent lies…the sharpest tongue can’t talk wreckage undone…The righteousness of the ones in power is a fist to those with none”), the mood equally downbeat for the classic country styled bittersweet Broken Bird (“My heart is full of pain again it’s like a country song/It skips along but darling how it aches/Tomorrow if the same again might be my giving in/Cos I’m not sure how much more I can take”) the narrator comparing her situation to “a broken bird/With a past a place my wings won’t let me grace” seeking to return to “every childhood comfort I have known/To pastures green and waters blue/To the arms of those I loved more than they knew”.
A particularly striking track, drawing on her experience of being homeless with her young son, the slow, brooding, sparsely arranged Car Crash is a poignant sketch of a desperate mother at the mercy of social services (“They wanna take my child/I was only trying to feed him/No I wasn’t out there running wild/Now they’re wagging at their fingers; Making sure I understand/They’re taking all my chances; When all I needed was a hand”), scared to answer their questions “Cos if I’m wrong they’re gonna take my child away”.
Taken at a breezier tempo with upbeat notes and catchy melody line with tumbling notes, hook chorus and hints of Dolly Parton, The Good Stuff mingles joy (“They say slow love, taking in the rays of one love is the highest place/It’s the good stuff they’ve been singing about since dawn”) and doubt as to how long it can last (“The dark is sure to come again/Is harder now than it was then/And it was hard back then”), Marshall’s guitar solo punctuating proceedings.
It’s not all Americana noir, and White shows her whimsical side with the tangoing Daddy’s Gonna Make Me A Star, nodding to 60s girl group influences as she sassily sings in the persona of a wannabe (“They’re gonna be dumbfound when they hear my sound/They’re gonna paint my face all over town/They’re gonna feel that groove when they hear my song”) who learns that daddy’s don’t always deliver on their promises (“Years have passed not a soul even knows my name/Losing out seems to be my only winning game/If I just close my eyes I can hear him saying/Girl daddy’s gonna make you a star”).
The final stretch starts with Heavy Light and, musically echoing Kris Kristofferson, the first really positive song on the album (“When you’re lying by my side/There’s a trouble that is gone… when you hold me tight/We can make the world alright/Cos even when I’m wrong you take my burden”), though it’s followed by a cautionary note on the soulful slow waltzing Cline-barroom country Don’t Make Love Too Easy (“I remember/These walls take more than we build them for/But for how long? For how long/By heart’s the blood of a babe still born/So don’t make love too easy”). If it’s not a struggle, maybe the prize isn’t worth it. She ends with another relationship in crisis, again tapping into a whimsical vein in the opening lines of Fourteen Years as she sings, “Babe let’s not talk of how the people of Gaza need peace/You and I’ve not exchanged a civil word in at least/Fourteen years”, continuing “let’s not philosophise about how to bring peace to Sudan/Look at us, we’re just one woman one man”, nicely capturing the bigger picture in a domestic microcosm (“We are the world’s problems and isn’t that painful to see”), as she ends with the wry comment “If time sheds a light then we are not turning it on”. White, however, is positively luminous.
Broken Bord (Live)
https://www.hannahwhitemusic.com/