Hana Stretton Makes Ambient Folk Music for an Overstimulated Era
How the Australian artist broke all the rules en route to becoming an unlikely cult sensation.
When Hana Stretton was small, she traveled up a snowy mountain on the back of a donkey. As the donkey trudged along, their front legs buckled, and Stretton tumbled over their head. She landed with the animal’s sad little face looking down at her and began to cry. She sobbed for hours, but not because she was hurt. She was desperately sad to ruin the donkey’s peaceful day. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she pleaded as the tears flowed down. After that, her family jokingly called her a “donkey whisperer,” because wherever they went, a donkey always seemed to find their way right to her. “Even as a kid, being on a donkey felt so wrong,” Stretton recalls.
The 32-year-old peppers this story with laughs and winces as she sits in a sunlit room near Bordeaux, France, where she’s preparing to rehearse with her band for an upcoming tour behind her second album, Tiarn. A playful painting of a horse sits over her right shoulder. Her own animals, including chickens and a couple of dogs named Maggie and Roo, are back home in rural Australia. She already misses them desperately. “At some point I’ll stop touring and have a bunch of animals, one of everything,” she daydreams. “I want a whole ark.”
Stretton’s bespoke style of ambient folk is of, and about, the natural world, which is also her world. Our world. “We are animals, we are nature, we’re part of it, and that’s something we’ve lost or forgotten,” she says. “If I can remind myself and other people of that through the music, then I’m really happy.” In her productions, birdsong, churning waves, and the sound of panting pups are as important as guitar plucks and her own lilting vocals. In her lyrics, she pays tribute to migrating whales and solemnly expresses her frustrations about those who ignore the ravages of climate change. It’s all of a piece, together, whole.
The effect of her work is often elegiac, as if Stretton is honoring a world that no longer exists. The descriptor “timeless” is tempting, though it may suggest the fantasy of an unchanging eternity. That’s not the point. This music is more than pastoral ambiance, more than a cheap headphone vacation to the countryside as you scroll past doomsaying headlines from inside an office building. It’s an invitation to reacquaint yourself with the spaces beyond screens. To dive headfirst into the depths of your own empathy at a molecular level. To understand what is lost in the fires and the floods all around us, all the time.
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