Hana Bryanne’s debut album Dollface begs to be seen, not looked at
Photography by Emily Entz
When Hana Bryanne was 10 years old, she wrote her first song: a country ballad titled “Amarillo.” She’d never been to that town in Texas and she’d surely never been divorced as her narrator had, but she could tell a story just as well as the songs on the country radio her parents played did. Along with her best friend Shaylan, Bryanne spent her tween years writing. But when the two went to separate high schools, using lyrics as a story-telling outlet took a hiatus.
“I convinced myself that it was something that I couldn't do,” Bryanne says. “I think there was just so much fear of being, like, ugly that comes with being a young person and being like, well, it's scary to get shit wrong and to be bad at stuff. So for years, I didn't write.”
But lucky for her now growing fanbase, Bryanne picked song-writing back up when she turned 16 and says it “exploded” from there. After a three-song EP in 2020, titled Holy Ground, and her well-loved single “Klepto,” Bryanne released her debut album Dollface this past summer. The album came accompanied by a pair of essays on Talkface, where Bryanne tells more about the experiences in her youth that informed songs on Dollface—but the album goes deep beyond these teenage moments that stick for years to come.
Between reflections on what it means to be a daughter who looks just like her mother, being the “cool girl” and what Bryanne thinks about intimacy now, the album pulls vulnerability out in new layers with each track. Dollface opens itself to the listener in the same way story-laden songs did in her own youth—and without the veil of pretending to have all the answers within its honesty. Pleaser spoke with Bryanne about this and more:
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PLEASER: Dollface spans so many genres, and I’m curious when you're writing a song, how does that happen? How do you find your way into each sound?
Hana Byranne: Generally when I write, it's usually just me and my guitar, by myself. I know some people who will produce demos themselves and kind of…the place that they'll start from will be a lot closer to the place that it ends. But with “Clementine,” which is this big 80s dance track, I wrote that song initially as kind of a country ballad. So the way that “Clementine II” sounds initially, that was the ethos of the whole song. That lead keys line, that was something that I initially wrote on acoustic guitar.
And that was the guitar part that was ticking away at the back of the entirety of the song. And then when we got into the studio, that was one of those songs that every time I tried to sit down to write another verse, I would burst into tears and I couldn't listen to it. So when Carter Jahn, who was producing my record with me, was like, “What if we made this a dance song?” I was like, fuck it.
It was the most fun turnaround of my career making that song. It was so fucking awesome. So a lot of the time, I really enjoy being able to take a song in an entirely different direction. I think that that helps me because, I don't know, my writing process always looks very similar. So it's in the studio that I sort of get taken more out of my comfort zone.
P: Tangentially, I have an affinity for fruit songs and specifically orange songs and poems. In an anthology of poems about oranges and clementines, do you feel like “Clementine” would sit right next to The Orange by Wendy Cope?
HB: Oh yes. Yes.
P: You write very poetically and candidly. Do you have specific inspirations that guide your understanding of writing lyrics or does it kind of just come through hearing it and reciting it back to yourself? In one of your essays, you mentioned reading an interview with Richard Siken. Do you have a lot of writing inspirations that turned your style into what it is?
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HB: I think it's a lot of instinct. I am not a trained musician in the technical sense of the word. Like the way that I play guitar, I'm very self-taught. I do everything by ear. I really can't read music. So my background is quite different from a lot of people that I spend time with who have very traditional classical training in music. So I think that I'm such a lyrics first person—that I admire that in other people's work. That I pay close attention to.
So, like me and every other bitch on this planet, I'm a really big Jeremy Strong fan. I think that the way that he talks about his work is so reverent and [he] holds the process in such high esteem. I admire people who treat this work like a kind of religious practice.
P: In your essays, you talked about the currency that is emotional vulnerability today. So in being interested in how actors approach their craft, do you ever feel like when you're songwriting, you're creating a character within those songs that is like a piece of yourself turned into something else?
HB: Absolutely. I think that that's why I love this work so much because it combines every aspect of artistry that I loved as a kid. I was a dancer, I did a lot of musical theater and when I'm on stage, I feel all of that come up for me.
I think that it's all in pursuit of this; you're always swinging at the same pitch, in the writing room, in the studio, [and] on stage. It's all about deciding what it is that you're looking at and trying to turn everybody's face towards the same thing. And I think even more so my artistic self, like Hana Bryanne, as opposed to Hana, is a character. I think that I can kind of separate the albums and the projects into different characters.
Dollface is a character that is like a play to me, that's a space. And then this next thing that I have been working on, which is like a country project, that's a completely different character. I think that's why I really prefer to work in that way, thinking about bigger projects rather than just doing a single here and a single there.
P: I was really curious how you chose the order of tracks from the album. I'm a big nerd for where it starts and where it ends and that kind of wandering between. So it opens with “Doing the play” and it closes with “Dollface (reprise).” How did we get from one to the other? How did you make that decision of where to start and where to end?
HB: I'm also a big nerd about that stuff. In high school, my nerdiest hobby was [taking] my favorite albums and re-ordering them so that if it had to open and close with a different track, I would make that playlist. So that's something I really, really care about.
I think I wrote “Doing the play” to be the opener. I think of writing this album in sort of two phases. That was one of the first songs I wrote in the second phase of the album. I knew that I wanted it to be kind of sonically sprawling and glittery. I just wanted to sonically kind of ease you into it, but lyrically just like really come out swinging. Because a lot of the lyricism in that track is really intense.
Then “Dollface (Reprise)” that was the last song I wrote for the album actually. At the time it was going to end with “News,” which I had sort of always known would be towards the end of the album. It was one of the first songs that we worked on producing and it was, you know, so anthemic and so vast.
But then I was listening to the album and I was like, so much of the narrative of this character posits itself against the world. It's so defensive. It's so young. It's an us and them kind of voice, which I do think is sort of inherent to being a teenager, which I was, you know, a teenager when I wrote most of this album. So I sat down and I was like, what do I want to say that I feel like I know now, that I've learned about myself over the course of making this album.
It was sort of that tongue-in-cheek thing of, “I've been the baby of the family, I've never done anything wrong.” I didn't want to take myself too seriously. I didn't want this album to think that it knew everything, even though it is a Dollface kind of thing—she “knows everything.” But I feel like I wanted that clarification that I know that I don't know everything.
P: What was your favorite song on the album to write? Or were there any that took the longest or that felt the most cathartic to finish writing? Which one was maybe the best or the worst—pick any way to approach it.
HB: “Lake Michigan” poured out of me. I wrote other versions of that song, essentially just an angry, angry breakup song, that weren't quite right. I kept listening back and being like, “yeah, it's closer.”
And then I had just moved into this new apartment and was sitting on the floor. I didn't have any furniture. So I was sitting on the floor, playing guitar and I was so pissed off. And I got to use a handful of things that had been sitting in my notes for a while, like “bastard grandson of the new scene” was one that I had been saying in my head over and over again. Then I remember, I was singing through that second verse and I didn't quite know what I was going to say yet. And I just kind of went, “Come on, baby, try me I can show you what dramatic is.” It just fell out of my mouth and I was like, “oh, that's kind of good.”
P: Another specific song question, total pivot. “Susannah at the wedding.” What a rock banger between sweet and slower songs. What was the writing process like for this song and the creation of it that made it?
HB: So the writing process — I wrote that at the end of a summer, I think. I had been thinking about the album and I was like, we're not having any fun here. I really would like to have some fun at some point.
That song is pretty sad and lyrically in some ways, but it's also mostly, I think, just kind of exasperated. It's like, “Oh my God, this shit again.” And I think that there's like a lightness in that maybe, that I didn't feel at the time, but that I certainly feel now, just a feeling of “Oh, the stakes don't have to be up here all the time. Sometimes things can be annoying and that can be down here.”
So I [had] a lot of fun with the instrumentation of that one, there's the giggles that are in there and that was me and a friend in the booth. And then my favorite bit is at the top of the breakdown. I think it's after the guitar solo if you listen really closely, you can hear Dusty Moon, who's a brilliant drummer, you can hear him going “Andiamo!” Which I think is so funny. I was like, keep that, keep that.
P: On your Spotify page, it starts with “There's a joke Hana Bryanne is dying to tell you.” That lyric and idea comes up several times throughout the album. There's a feeling throughout the album that reminds you a lot of life's experiences really pull the rug out from under your feet and laugh at your face when it happens. Was it intentional for that to come up so many times? Or did it just happen over and over?
HB: It just kind of happened, I think. I don't know, so much of this album is about attention, I suppose. And the ways that especially young women cultivate that for ourselves.
I mean, it's a line here all the time, like, “Oh, she's doing that for attention. She's saying that for attention.” And I think that’s dismissive and un-nuanced, but also like, yeah, sometimes 12-year-old girls need attention. She needs attention. She's 12. Or even beyond that, she's a person.
That is one of the foundational experiences of being human, that people paying attention to you is important. Then also, I think there are some ways that you invite attention to yourself that you don't really understand. Like wanting male attention, but not knowing that it opens doors to cliff edges. And I don't know, telling jokes, being funny, is one way to get people looking at you.
But then they're laughing at you, you know, and it's like, it's all just a careful line between wanting to be seen, but not wanting to be looked at, I suppose.
P: The album cover is looking at your back through an open door. You're not facing the viewer—being seen, but not looked at. What was the ideating and making of the cover like?
HB: I had this idea, it was sort of what I had kicked around for the whole process. That Margaret Atwood quote, where she says you're a woman with a man inside watching a woman. [laughing] I'm a bitch with a Twitter account. So yeah, I was thinking about that a lot. And this notion of voyeurism and performance even when you're alone.
I think that's what the thesis of the album is, the character that you construct for when you're alone in your bedroom. This performance of intimacy? It's like, yeah, it's a sexual character. It's a construction of an intimate moment. You would think that the closest you can get to somebody is just no facade, no posturing. But if this is the most intimate performance that I give, doesn't that say more about the inner workings of the mind? Or doesn't it say a different thing about the inner workings of the mind?
So that’s really my bedroom and my best friend took the photos. And what I always said [was] I wanted to be looking in on a moment that the camera is not supposed to be privy to, but I also do know that you're there. And so when we started shooting through the door, I was like, this is it.
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P: What's next for Hana? What can fans expect next? Are you doing the album decompression or are you always in writing mode?
HB: I'm kind of always cooking. I have some things that I had the pleasure of working on in Asheville, North Carolina earlier this fall. And that has been just such a joy to get to do. I'm so excited for people to hear the things that we worked on out there.
Other than that, I just wanna keep playing this album live. I'm kind of still writing. And kind of just kind of feeling around in the dark, nothing too concrete planned in terms of “what next” other than this stuff that I've got in the can that's jumping out of my pockets a little bit. It's bursting at the seams. I truly cannot wait for people to hear this new stuff. But I'm also glad that people are still sitting with and enjoying the album.
