Hana Stretton Makes Ambient Folk Music for an Overstimulated Era

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.

Stretton made her first album, Soon, from a place of solitary grief. She was living on her late grandmother’s farm in New South Wales, with wombats and cows for company. It was the record-breaking brushfire season of 2019-2020, a period in Australia that has become known as Black Summer. Stretton anxiously watched as flames crept up hillsides near her house. Wiping ash off of her cutlery became commonplace. By the time the smoke cleared, 46 million acres—roughly the size of Washington state—were scorched. More than 400 excess deaths were attributed to the disaster. Nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced. Then came floods, cutting access to the farm. The pandemic extended her time of isolation even further.

The cascading catastrophes forced her to make music on her own, however she could and with whatever she could find. She had been writing songs since she was 15, and studied music at the London university Goldsmiths, but was indoctrinated to think young women couldn’t create music without the approval of a male producer. At the farm, with no one to turn to—or second-guess her—she was set free. She picked up a cello and learned to play it. She taught herself how to use Ableton and tape machines to compile the recordings she made around the farm. When she eventually let people hear her disarmingly raw songs, they told her, “You can’t produce. It’s not possible for you. You have to redo it.” But with the encouragement of friends, she stuck to her vision. “There’s merit in something not necessarily being right, but being mine,” she says. Following its initial 2023 release, Soon became a cult sensation well beyond Australia, with eco-minded Mount Eerie songwriter and DIY evangelist Phil Elverum pressing vinyl copies on his personal label because it spoke to him so strongly.

As Stretton talks about the harrowing story behind Soon from her temporary home in southwestern France, she mentions that area’s recent out-of-control wildfires. “They’re following me around,” she adds with a rueful laugh. On top of that, her power was knocked out the previous day when a storm rolled overhead, striking her house with lightning—for the second time in a month. “It’s the most incredible sound you’ve ever heard in your life,” she attests. “Very terrifying.” After years of self-sufficiency, though, she knew what to do, and spent the aftermath dutifully picking up branches and patching leaks.

To make Tiarn, which is named after a friend, Stretton headed to another remote Australian locale: a beach town called Lake Tabourie. It’s there that she imagined a physical landscape where the album could live, with a body of water between mountains. She watched whales. She swam in chilly evening waters. She dreamed up mini operas and drunken revelries, and then set out to make them real.

A key to Tiarn came when Stretton found a trove of old family videotapes from a trip to Japan in 1993, the year before she was born. Seeing her parents and siblings in this footage, relatively young and unburdened, fascinated her. As did one section in which her family is seen overlooking a lake, with lush green peaks surrounding them—just like she had pictured in her mind’s eye. She put the unedited audio from those tapes into Ableton and composed to it. The seamless time-traveling technique is featured on the album’s opening track, “Nojiri 1993,” which was reunited with its visual source material for the song’s music video.

Because Stretton’s music is like magic to me, I selfishly ask her to explain one of her tricks—a bleary, shape-shifting chant-along called “Seagull Theory II.” She graciously obliges. The song began more traditionally, with lyrics and chords; she recorded herself playing guitar with a mass of grass stuck in the bridge. Then Stretton put her producer cap on and stringently edited that song down to the 30 seconds that worked best, and added the chanting of what sounds like a friendly ghost. She heard a rhythm in her head, so she took a piece of wood up to her bedroom along with five pairs of shoes. She then made up a line dance and recorded herself doing that dance in the different shoes, before combining them to mimic a group of tipsy hoofers stepping out onto a barroom’s sticky hardwood. In the middle of telling me all this, she gets self-conscious. She imagines someone reading it and thinking, She’s crazy! But in her solitude, in Lake Tabourie, she was the only one listening.

For Stretton, her music acts as a Rosetta Stone, revealing desires she might not know how to articulate otherwise. With its stacked vocals and pretend dance troupes, the music of Tiarn told her to open herself up to the wider world, to move beyond her self-imposed exile. To engage in community. To, as she says, “Get a dumb phone, because you’re rotting your brain.” So she started working with a local choir and tapped a friend’s opera-singing neighbor to improvise on the album’s quietly epic centerpiece, “Stove.”

Stretton’s pattern of musical telepathy goes back to her earliest recordings. In 2016, when she was living in London and stifled by city life, before her years of aloneness, she released a bittersweet wisp of a folk song called “The Thrill of Loneliness.” “It was an oracle card of the future,” she marvels.

Then, in the past few years, as her music spread, “The Thrill of Loneliness” became an unlikely viral hit. It’s collected tens of millions of streams, and has been used to soundtrack more than 40,000 TikToks. Stretton is aware of this, but not deeply—she’s never been on TikTok. “I keep my nose out of it,” she says. “I really hope the song is being used in nice videos and not some terrible red-pill stuff.” (From what I can tell, she’s safe: Most of the clips feature verdant fields, kissing bunnies, and stoic cats.)

This virality means Stretton is currently able to focus on recording and touring exclusively, without a day job sucking away her energy. During our interview, Stretton is mostly charmingly self-deprecating—she might be the first artist I’ve ever talked to who requested to be heavily paraphrased—but when it comes to the business of her art, she is resolute.

Her creative autonomy is also achievable thanks to generous agreements she struck with a few different labels to release Tiarn on vinyl in various parts of the world. Whereas many independent record labels require artists to split all profits made from their recordings 50-50—including streaming royalties and sync licensing—the deals Stretton made with these small labels, all of which are run by close friends, only require her to share the money made from vinyl sales. Which means she gets to keep 100 percent of what she earns from all of those streams. Which means she can pay the players she’s touring with fairly. Which means she can keep doing things the way she wants to do them. “I understand what it takes to have a semblance of a career,” she says, “and if I were giving 50 percent of my income to somebody else, I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things I’m doing.” She stresses the close personal bonds at the heart of her business relationships, but also encourages young artists to think differently in terms of turning their music, however unusual it may be, into a life. “If people like the music and you as a person, then beautiful things can happen.”

By this point, even as she takes steps away from her largely solitary existence, Stretton’s work is still defined by the hushed power of being by yourself. When she sings of love on Tiarn, it’s not the romantic love of so many other folk songs. It’s bigger than that, more consequential. A love of all there is, and all we’ve already lost. This is related to another indoctrination Stretton had to shake over the last six years, the one that tells us we need someone else to make us complete. “I used to center other people, and men, and I don’t do that anymore,” she says. “I’ve felt incredible peace and joy on my own. I don’t want anything more than that, and I haven’t for a long time. That will change, maybe. But I could have a great life if I chose to be single, and that’s a really good place to start from.” She takes a beat. “People will really think I’m a loner now!” Then she laughs, unbothered.