Hannah Frances Makes Prog Rock for Tender Folkies

In the spring of 2022, the singer-songwriter Daniel Rossen posted on Instagram looking for a last-minute merch person to work his Philly show. Hannah Frances Pautler happened to be in town and saw the IG story a minute later. An inventive artist in her own regard, she jumped at the chance to chat up one of her favorite musicians. Everything went well, and at the end of the night, Rossen—a multi-instrumentalist who led ’00s indie rockers Grizzly Bear—gave her a vinyl copy of his solo record, You Belong There. With zero expectations, Pautler—who goes by Hannah Frances professionally and plays a striking mix of folk, jazz, and prog rock—handed Rossen a CD copy of her 2021 album, Bedrock. “It was corny but I remember being like, ‘I know you’re touring a lot, if you have a CD player,’” she recalls. A week or so later, Rossen messaged her on Instagram saying he listened to Bedrock on a long drive and really enjoyed it, drawing comparisons to ’70s psych-folk singer Linda Perhacs (a compliment, to be sure). “Even Daniel saying to me ‘good luck out there’ meant a lot because he’s so cynical about the music industry,” adds Frances, 28.

Back then, Hannah Frances was just starting to take herself seriously as a musician. 2022 changed everything: She left a relationship that made her feel small, moved to Chicago from NYC, traded her car for a van, and made a “figure-eight around the country” on her first tour. Towards the end of the year, Frances recorded her sixth album (and future breakthrough), Keeper of the Shepherd. She sent it to Rossen before it was even finished, hoping he might take on a production role. But Rossen was in the midst of scoring Past Lives with his old bandmate Chris Bear, and their emails tapered off. The timing wasn’t right, but Frances—who has a habit of recording music years before it sees the light of day—had faith that they’d collaborate. When Rossen congratulated her on Keeper of the Shepherd’s release last spring, she already had another, even more avant-garde LP in the works, and was curious of his thoughts.

That album, Nested in Tangles, arrives October 10 via Fire Talk Records, and includes Rossen playing a half-dozen instruments across two tracks. “I listened to so much Grizzly Bear in high school—they’re in my blood, so it makes sense that we would collaborate so easily together,” says Frances. There always was a touch of prog’s technicality tucked within Grizzly Bear’s baroque instrumentation and vocal harmonies, and clearly this sensibility hits home with Frances. “Yes is my favorite band,” she told me over Zoom from Delft, Netherlands earlier this month. When someone from her label frowned upon using the ’70s UK prog group Gentle Giant as a reference point for Nested in Tangles, Frances pushed back… three times. But let’s be clear: for Frances, prog is just one texture to be explored and contrasted. “All of the tender moments on the record are necessary because they help juxtapose the more angular parts and uncomfortable moments where you're like, whoa, that time signature is crazy.” 

The Nested in Tangles song that I keep returning to is called “Life’s Work.” Here, Frances’ guitar playing brings to mind a twisty trip through thickly forested hills, but it’s her vocal agility that impresses me most of all. Her voice curves and swoops around a cartoonish trombone in the chorus with playful ease, repeating the line “learning to trust in spite of it is life’s work” like a semi-yodeled mantra. There are other lyrics like this in her work, that make you want to listen deeper, closer. (“Blamed for all the shadows of those who remain blind to themselves,” also from “Life’s Work,” is a Biblical-level ethering if you ask me.) Yearning for an end to familial trauma in “The Space Between,” she asks the universe: “If there’s a way out, let it be through me.” On “Falling From and Further,” Nested in Tangles’ gorgeous first single, Frances speaks of a past that keeps her locked into disorganized attachment and self-sabotage. 

The album can feel oh so cozy at times, like “being swaddled” as Frances put it, but there’s also this sense that she and her extensive ensemble are wrestling musically with the agitation she feels in her soul, through chaotic polyrhythms and flashes of feral instrumentation. It’s intense enough to make you wonder: what’s the backstory here? “Keeper was about my daddy issues, and this one's about my mommy issues,” Frances jokes. A touch of gallows humor is needed to deal with family trauma head on, but in all seriousness, Frances thought of Nested as a space to reparent and heal herself. “While I was making it, it felt like I was writing for a future self,” she says. “This music hits so hard for me still, and I wrote it almost two years ago. So that’s cool. My process of songwriting is, in a spiritual sense, always coming from my higher self.”

Ahead of a busy fall on the road, Frances and I shared a frank conversation about her lifelong pursuit of music and how it’s bound up in some pretty complicated family dynamics. 

Hearing Things: Keeper of the Shepherd felt like a fully formed vision arriving out of nowhere, with a lot of technical skill in your vocals and guitar work. It made me wonder: What’s your background? Did you go to music school?

Hannah Frances: I didn’t go to music school. I think that’s why my approach to music has stayed more innovative—I wasn’t formally trained in composition or theory. But vocally, I grew up very trained. My mom is a voice and piano teacher, incredibly talented, and I grew up immersed in her world. She was also a theater and music director, so I was constantly performing—musicals, choirs, jazz band, dance, School of Rock in high school. Our relationship has always been difficult, and a lot of this album speaks to that. But at her best, my mom was extremely passionate and motivating, and I inherited that energy. She pushed me into every audition, every class, every choir. Sometimes it was too much and without much emotional tenderness, but I’m grateful for the drive it gave me. 

Throughout my life, I studied opera, classical voice, and musical theater, which gave me both a strong belt and a wide range. I think my voice is dynamic because I went deep into so many genres. But I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 18. I took two lessons, hated it, learned a couple Beatles songs, and gave up. At School of Rock I was always “the vocalist,” and I felt insecure that the boys played guitar better. I stayed in my lane as a singer.

After high school, I went to Savannah College of Art and Design. My dad, who was very controlling, wouldn’t let me go to music school since he was paying for college. He passed away right before I left for school, and afterward I switched my major to performing arts. I only stayed a year, then moved to New York. I did an NYU songwriting intensive—it was industry-focused and not particularly inspiring, but it got me writing. I started teaching myself guitar through open tunings, which unlocked a whole new relationship with the instrument.

I’m glad I never went to music school. A lot of my friends who went to conservatories came out disillusioned, or they’ve had to “unlearn” things to reconnect with creativity. For me, music has always felt pure. I love playing with time signatures, but I approach it instinctively rather than intellectually. That freedom is the root of my creative process. I’m self-disciplined, and I’ve always needed outlets for my emotional intensity. Whether it was theater, dance, or singing, I poured myself into it. Eventually that shifted into songwriting. With discipline, passion, and the need to channel big emotions, I never needed a conservatory.

In New York, did you find a music community—open mics, certain venues, a scene of likeminded folks?

Not really. I was 19 or 20, nannying full-time in the East Village, and didn’t know many musicians. I had one close friend, Riley, who introduced me to older friends from NYU. They were progressive, intellectual, and inspiring, but I wasn’t yet confident in my songwriting. I was in a liminal phase.

I recorded my first albums, Lady [from 2017] and White Buffalo [from 2018], with my friend Ryan O’Grady in Philly. He had access to Drexel’s studios, so I’d take the train down and we’d record. But in New York, I almost never played live. I did one open mic at St. Mark’s Place—which happened to be election night when Trump won. The energy in the room was one of chaos and dread, it scarred me a little. I never did another open mic.

For years, my music stayed personal. I put things on Bandcamp, but I barely even called myself a musician. I didn’t jam with others. I didn’t play covers. Everything I did was solitary. That only shifted when I started working on Keeper of the Shepherd, when I finally thought, I want to play with people.

When did you start to fully claim being a musician?

Honestly, not until after the pandemic. I lived in Brooklyn in 2019 with a musician partner, but even then I didn’t really identify as one. I was studying herbal medicine, doing other things. I had a habit of putting men on pedestals—being the supportive partner, the cheerleader—while dismissing myself.

When that relationship ended, I moved to Chicago at the end of 2020. I finished Bedrock there and put it out, but of course there was no touring in the pandemic. I was teaching music, feeling directionless. By summer 2021 I decided I needed to really try. I self-booked a national tour, sold my car, sublet my apartment, bought a van, and hit the road in 2022. It was terrifying—driving alone, playing shows across the country—but it legitimized me. That tour was the moment I said to myself: I am a musician. After that, I knew I could take myself seriously.

And that’s when Keeper of the Shepherd took shape?

Exactly. By the end of that summer, I had the title in my head—it felt divined. I was on the beach in Chicago telling a friend, “I’m going to Vermont, I’m going to write an album called Keeper of the Shepherd.” I had concepts and themes, and I sat for a month fleshing out songs. Then I went straight into the studio while they were still fresh.

That record changed everything. I felt so alive and powerful in that process. It unlocked something in me, and since then I’ve felt solid in my creative identity. Before that, I was wobbly, wandering through other paths. 

To go back to Nested in Tangles, some songs address your fraught relationship with your mom. Is there one that would be particularly tense for her to hear?

My mom is so detached that she probably won’t ever listen. She’s never heard Keeper of the Shepherd. She doesn’t ask about my music, doesn’t comment on it.

If she did listen, “Surviving You” would be the hardest. That song, and others like “Life’s Work,” speak directly to her defensiveness and lack of accountability. After my dad died, my sister and I used our inheritance to buy a house with her. Years later, it was weeks from foreclosure because she hadn’t paid property taxes in years. We had to bail it out, and she reacted with volatility and denial. That’s the dynamic I explore in my songs—her refusal to reflect, her invalidation of my experience. She doesn’t believe she’s ever hurt us. Writing about it has been a way for me to acknowledge what she won’t.