Nested in Tangles
ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT + NEW SINGLE Surviving You, a little bit about it all, HEAPS of gratitudes, album release tour, collaborative world-building, etc...
Greetings!
Hannah here, writing to you from the train on the way to London moving through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Today is the day we announce my album Nested in Tangles, releasing October 10 on Fire Talk Records. 10/10! That is 10/10. I am also sharing my song Surviving You and its accompanying video with you today.
I am so thrilled to begin unfolding this album tapestry. It is another dense collection of stories straight from my heart, and I am incredibly proud of this work.
Nested in Tangles is a vast, intricate, and dizzying landscape of stories about familial and relational entanglement, estrangement, complex trauma, trust, and healing. It is a recognition of life’s cascade between heaviness and light and is a work born of collaborative world-building. I am deeply grateful to everyone involved in bringing this project to its fullest life with such breadth of vision and intentionality. I feel so lucky to weave together the interdisciplinary aspects of my creative process with my community of brilliant composers, musicians, producers, designers, photographers, engineers, choreographers, dancers, filmmakers, editors, writers, costume makers, set designers, animators, makeup artists, and more… My creative world is so abundant I can hardly comprehend it most of the time. So many hands and hearts are a part of this.
I also cannot understate my gratitude for my manager Bekah and Trevor and Jon-Carlo at Fire Talk who have been helping me keep the HF train rolling for months and months behind the scenes! It takes so many hands.
The Hannah Frances Ensemble (expanded) will be presenting the album to you in full in Chicago and NYC, with a run of quartet shows around the northeast in November:
TICKETS ON SALE FRIDAY at 12pm CST
Hannah Frances Ensemble Presents: Nested in Tangles
17 October Chicago, IL Constellation
tickets
LIVESTREAM TICKETS for Constellation
(if you can’t attend in person but still want to support us)
05 November Washington, DC Songbyrd
tickets
06 November Philadelphia, PA Kung Fu Necktie
tickets
09 November Burlington, VT Higher Ground
tickets
11 November Montreal, CA L’Esco
tickets
12 November Toronto, CA Baby G
tickets
14 November Brooklyn, NYC National Sawdust
tickets
NESTED IN TANGLES BIO
written by Tasha Viets-VanLear:
Following her critically acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet Hannah Frances returns with Nested in Tangles. With this distinctive body of work, Frances solidifies herself as an artist of insurgent emotional clarity, committed to personal truth and self-actualization. Here, she narrates complex stories of familial estrangement, emotional trauma, and a deepening of her own sense of trust, through a collection of intricate, dizzying, and large-scale compositions. Nested in Tangles spans the realms of progressive rock, avant-folk, and jazz, but remains anchored throughout with Frances’ signature vocal leaps and percussive, polyrhythmic fingerpicking.
Almost immediately following the completion of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances wrote Nested in Tangles throughout 2023 and 2024, deeply inspired by her continued experimentation with open guitar tunings and the healing work she sought out amidst a tumultuous resurfacing of familial trauma. Frances returned to Arlington, Vermont, to record with her longtime collaborator Kevin Copeland. In addition to horn, wind, and string arrangements contributed by friends, Frances brought on Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear to produce and arrange “Life’s Work” and “The Space Between”. As a longtime admirer of Rossen’s work, Frances was incredibly excited by the opportunity to collaborate, and the process proved to be easy and natural between them as their expansive creative instincts are akin. Bookended by instrumental pieces woven through with spoken word poetry, Nested in Tangles is a raucous and jubilant circus. Strewn with billowing orchestral arrangements, each track investigates the nuance of contradiction and multiplicity. A paradoxical whisper and shrill, we’re volleyed between intimacy and the expansive maximalism of her inner world. Nested in Tangles surprises in its dynamics and compositional detours, born from an expanded range of musical influences including contemporary avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, as well as 70s progressive rock bands Gentle Giant and Yes.
True to form, Frances incorporates layers of nature imagery – blue herons, birds in murmuration, sandcastles, a body of water’s lapping edge, smoke drifting, roots, nests, and wings – alongside cuttingly lucid interrogations of her own grisly histories of familial manipulation and abuse. On “Life’s Work,” Frances aches for her younger self, singing “Reconcile the child through hostile family/rupture is tradition, born into dissonance”. And on “Surviving You,” Frances remembers a past of harm, lamenting “How you hurt us to feel stronger / in the wrong, doing the wrong / smoldering as the rage lingers longer”. Nested in Tangles probes the edges of memory, entanglement, and estrangement. Through each track, ideas of both the nest and the parent are reimagined and reshaped. Frances bravely reveals the ways she’s learned to re-parent herself and care for her inner child in an attempt to emancipate herself from her past of entanglement. “I am fragmentary and whole at once,” she declares on the opening title track. “I am tender heart and jagged hand / I am a bird, and a stone, and a fragile bone, and I am here to listen, and love the child I have always been.”
The album's climax arrives with “The Space Between”, a sweeping exhale of recognition of life's cascade between heaviness and light. Frances sings, “I don’t forgive, I let it live in the space between / what’s gone and what’s given / if there is another way let it move me, if there is a way out let it be through me”. Frances asks herself what healing looks like outside of forgiveness. If the harm is too big to forgive, where does freedom emerge from?
The answer proves to be here, in the space between, present for the love and care that remains, and with a resolve to actualize a new narrative. Frances disentangles herself from the vicious cycle of generational trauma and maladaptive patterns. She chooses light, and in her choosing, teaches us all a new way of unburdening, a way to transfigure our pain and fear into a new embodied wholeness. On the final track, “Heavy Light” amidst a flurry of strings, gentle guitar and a sound sample of children playing, Frances’ somber resolve is made clear: “And I will keep reaching”, she promises. “To live here, in the heavy, in the light / I am the heart I've needed, and I feel it all.”
Surviving You
Falling From and Further was technically the first single released from the album, but Surviving You is our official album announcement lead single out today. There’s a video that was filmed in Chicago by Derrick Alexander and edited / colored by Vanessa Castro. ‘Twas directed by me but Derrick and I meld our creative minds so it was a collaborative endeavor as always. I wore more eye liner than I hope to ever wear again, I smashed a mirror I found in a Chicago alley, and then wrestled with Sarah Clausen out by Lake Michigan in underwear, fish nets, and a big t-shirt as groups of kayakers walked by.
Surviving You is a personal account of receiving harm from people who have projected their own pain onto me, who refuse to see themselves or take accountability for the impact of their actions. I was reckoning with my deep-seated rage, and recognizing how much I've lived in survival mode for the majority of my life in response to a lot of fear and lack of safety. This is for anyone who grew up in a turbulent and harmful home, or have endured heavy gaslighting and is learning to affirm their lived experience.
That’s all I’ve got in me for now. I hope you spend some time with the two singles that are out, pre-order the record, buy tickets for the release shows. If you’re on the west coast, I’ll be opening for Foxwarren with a trio in December—not technically the release tour, but we’ll be sure to play many Nested in Tangles songs.
ALL TOUR DATES HERE
Thank you for reading, if you’ve made it this far.
Thank you for supporting my work and I am sending you big love!
HF
congrats Hannah!!