INTERVIEW: HANAKO: PATIENCE AND DEDICATION
I discovered you at Birds Of Prrrey’s show in July for the release of their debut full length. You were in Lucy’s Delirium and they played a couple shows with Birds Of Prrrey in the past. I was wondering were those previous shows the first time you met Clarence (guitar, vocals) Grace (bass, vocals), and Noelle (drums, vocals)? Or did you meet them prior?
I knew them before. I've known Grace since I was probably eight years old or something. Our younger brothers have been best friends since kindergarten. We were really close friends in elementary school. She changed schools in high school, and then we reconnected again as older teenagers, and now we're friends. I've known Grace for a long time. Clarence and Noelle I discovered more through music, in Cegep. During my Dawson days, when I met the people in Lucy's Delirium, that's when I met Clarence. Clarence was friends with Lila, who's the drummer of Lucy's Delirium. And I also met Lila through Dawson in a classical guitar class which was very fun. We were in a pretty strict classical guitar class together. And I think Lila just came up to me and introduced themselves to me and kind of started from there. I think I met Clarence at a house party, at Lila's or something.
How did the conversation about you joining Birds Of Prrrey come about?
They messaged me very specifically for the FEQ gig. That's kind of how it started and that was the first show I was supposed to play. We didn't play that show because of the rain but then I played the album release show. I was still living in Germany this past fall and winter, so I got the text from Clarence when I was really far away from home, and it was very exciting. When I was in Lucy's Delirium when I was like seventeen, we jammed with Clarence as a possible guitarist. But then we just kept it to me, Franky on bass, Addie who is the vocalist, and then Lila who's the drummer. So it's quite a full circle moment that now I played for them. And Grace, when we were I think nine or ten, started taking guitar lessons. I remember thinking that I really wanted to do that too because she was really good at finger picking guitar, and she also did violin. And I hadn't learned any instrument. I think at that point, I only started when I was twelve. Seeing Grace do it was like inspirational to me because she was so serious about it.
I read that you lived in Berlin at some point. So I was wondering how would you compare the Montreal music scene versus the Berlin one?
Berlin is a lot more electronic. The scene is less acoustic and alternative rock than the UK, France, Belgium. So that was a bit difficult. When I first got there, I went there alone with no band or anything. Every week I tried to go to open mics at this jazz bar that had folk open mic nights. It's this club called Donau115 and they’re a pretty famous jazz bar, but they seem to have folk. So I went there every week, and then I went to a jazz and R&B jam open mic on Mondays. So I did those two every week and just tried to get to know people and make connections. But it wasn't until I went to Paris on my way back that I found there were a lot more rock and alternative rock venues. I was in Paris and I saw two completely free shows organized by people with really cool British bands, French rock bands, and it just seemed like a more accessible community than when I was in Berlin. Berlin has more ambient music, techno, and experimental music, which is great. I saw a lot of experimental music out there, but that's not exactly what I'm doing. I had a really good time listening to music, but it was really hard to book shows out there and find bands that sounded like me. I found that more in other countries. For that dream pop sound that I'm kind of doing recently, I don't think Berlin is really the spot.
You mentioned going to open mics EVERY week.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was rough because it was like the middle of the winter there. And I lived in this really random southwest part of Berlin called Wannsee. It's kind of really out of the way, but I just knew if I didn't get out of my dorm area and go inject myself in a certain musical community, that it wasn't gonna happen. It doesn't just come to your door, you know. You kind of have to push yourself a little bit. I think some days it took an hour to get there and then an hour to get back. It would be freezing cold and I would bring my guitar to school, do my classes and then at five go into central Berlin to do the open mics and take the subway back home. One time it was so bad. I got back so late that I missed the last bus so I walked two hours in the dark. But it was so worth it because I made some great personal connections. There were some rough nights out there but it builds character trying to establish yourself in a new place.
Besides personal connections, did anything else keep you going?
The first month I didn't do anything musical. I was just trying to absorb this new environment. And then I think after a month of being there, I warmed up and I thought, “Okay, I need to go do this”. I made a lot of good friends through the university. That really helped. We just cooked together and we played cards together. We did drink a lot of beer together because it's absurdly cheap. And in Berlin, you can still smoke inside, which was terrible for my health. But it’s one of the first places I've been to in the world where it felt like a time warp. We were all at the student bars, everyone's smoking inside, no one's on their phone. It felt very not 2026.
Would you say that living in another country taught you anything, whether it's on a personal or musical level?
For music, absolutely. It gave me a lot of confidence to go restart somewhere else. I knew I was so scared and then I did it. Now I have a better idea. It’s gonna take about at least six months for me to start feeling comfortable somewhere. It was really right before I left that I started to have really good relationships with other musicians and even open up the possibility of starting a band with people. That only started bubbling up after six months so it taught me kind of what to expect and to be patient. How much time it takes to get to know people and to not expect things to just pick up and happen for you right away. You land somewhere and really nobody gives a shit. It was really good for the ego as well. You just focus on making music rather than trying to generate some sort of steam or to get known. Instead of trying to get shows booked right away, you just focus on creating and writing. You shift your focus to what you can do at that time. In Montreal right now, my focus is very, “I'm writing a lot less, and there's live shows and promoting”. That's the kind of headspace I'm in. Ejecting myself from Montreal, I was able to worry a lot less about that side of things with promoting.
I also read that your love for music is very diverse. You listen to indie-folk, post-punk, shoegaze. Was your taste in music always that diverse growing up? Do you remember the first song or album you fell in love with and what genre of music it was?
The first two CDs I had as a kid kind of shows the inconsistency I had. The Sundays’ Blind which is a dream pop album and then my other favorite CD was TLC’s CrazySexyCool album. It has the song “Creep” on it. Then I had Feist’s album The Reminder. It was all over the place. But I'm very grateful to my dad for giving me women-fronted bands and always kind of surrounding me with music because I've heard a lot of kids who grew up with vinyl-loving dads who just listened to Beatles, Rolling Stones and Queen. Which I did too and I love it. I think it encouraged me to hear so much music made by women growing up because I could just see myself doing that as well. I could picture that as a possibility for my career. It's also because my parents come from such different backgrounds. The music my dad grew up with in Montreal was quite different from the music my mom was listening to growing up in Tokyo. I know they're always joking the only band they had in common as kids was the Beatles. It just shows you how wide music can travel but kids who grew up in completely different parts of the world know the same albums and it's kind of cool. Just in the house I had a lot of music playing all the time.
I know you have a Hitchcock reference in your song "Stay by the Beach. And you also performed a tribute concert for David Lynch at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. What kind of impact does cinema have on you as a creative person?
For me, the performance side is very inspired by cinema. I want the performance, the people watching the performance, to feel absorbed into it, which I rarely get in my life. That feeling of being completely absorbed, all your senses, you rarely get that. I think it happens when you watch a really good movie or show, and I think it's something that's both sound and visuals. I'm always trying to take it a bit out of reality, and that's also why I have a lot of fun with my band with costumes. We like to dress up a little more classic, vintage looking, because to me it's just more fun that way. You come to a show and it feels a little fantastical. That's how I like to experience a show, but it's also refreshing I think just in our day and age when everyone dresses down most of the time. I'm in my jeans and t-shirt, and that's cool too. It's fun to inhabit a character. Since that David Lynch tribute show, it kind of narrowed down that vision for me. Wanting the performance to be that cinematic and specifically have a little bit of a old Hollywood gloomy feeling that David Lynch does so well. There's a Japanese artist my mom and I love called Ringo Shiina. She's very famous in Japan, but not so much in North America. She has very exquisite live outfits and lights, and it's a whole kind of production. I watch her live performances before my own almost every time to get my head in that zone. And to get myself out of my everyday Hanako into this more stage persona of myself because it is so nerve wracking. I feel like if I'm just completely myself and I just go up there, it's too scary for me. I've seen a lot of jokes or memes about people romanticizing something to make it more bearable, and that is how I feel on stage. I try to tell myself that this is a movie or something and not reality, in order to have a bit of distance from it and make it more fun.
You have performed with Lucy's Delirium, Birds of Prrrey, and you also perform your own music. Birds Of Prrrey's music and your own music are very different from one another. What's the most challenging and the most fun parts of performing your music and when you perform music that is louder and more aggressive in a way?
I think the challenge with Birds Of Prrrey is that they're such a driven band. They practice so much. The only difficulty for me is trying to balance the workload of both bands, because I'm very serious about it. I don't take myself too seriously, but I take the music so seriously, and I don't want to do it kind of half baked. When I'm playing with them for a show, I want it to be really good. I have to manage so much because I'm managing it all myself and juggling schedules of four other musicians in my own band. This is a struggle I've heard from many indie musicians who are in multiple projects. It's really hard to try and juggle all your time and your commitment, and you want to be committed to what you are involved in. You don't want to do any band a little bit. So it's been difficult for me to find the balance between my own project and Birds Of Prrrey because I love their music so much, and we're also friends. I want to do them justice and it's the first time I'm just playing guitar for a band. In Lucy's Delirium, I was composing and singing as well. That was my only project, and so this time I’m hired to write guitar lines and play guitar live. It’s a challenge for me to also be responsible for composing lead guitar. I haven't done that in a while, and for that genre, so that's also quite new. They've got a lot of genres going on. Some songs that are really alternative rock. But then they've also got super old school rock, Chuck Berry lines going on. I was really surprised by them and the sophistication of their music. We came from a similar scene. Now playing with them, I was listening to their lyrics a lot more than I had before, and they're so political, well written, and thought out. I really think they've evolved in just such a cool way. That makes it easier for me to connect because I'm a very lyric based person. My focus in my own band is first and foremost songwriting and poetry. It's so cool to have connected a bit more with that side of Birds Of Prrrey.
You mentioned watching videos of Ringo Shiina’s performances. Do you watch those before playing with Birds Of Prrrey or back when you were in Lucy's Delirium? Or is that only when you play with your band?
I think it's more for my own music. She's an artist that I admire so much because I feel like she has a very strong world around live performances that are very distinct. I really want to do that as well. P. J. Harvey, I also watched a lot when I was in Lucy's Delirium. I'd watch her live, and even now, she's also someone who walks on stage and just commands the energy in the room. She has such a strong presence. I kind of study these solo women on stage and just try to see how they get into that headspace because it really is something that doesn't come automatically. I feel like it's something I have to consciously inhabit. I can't just walk up there, smoke and just start playing. I'm not Bob Dylan. He really puts on a persona as well. His is just so well crafted that people think it's really him, even though it is not. There's parts of you in it because you're doing it, but it's a very well thought out persona that I think bleeds into his music and real life as well. I think in my real life I'm completely just myself, and then on stage it's a bit more of a performance. There's some artists where there's not really a distinction anymore and it's kind of a way to protect yourself. Because I'm folky at heart, I love artists like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, who are very unfiltered and completely themselves. It doesn't seem like an act. I definitely find when I was just doing solo folk stuff, my shows were very different. A lot more vulnerable and bare, because you're just there with a guitar, and there's not much effects on or anything, and you're alone up there.
You have released a few music videos, including one for your song "Battery," and it's really cool because it truly feels like you're telling a story with the music video. How important is it for you to release actual music videos?
I think it's really important. I want to do more of it. I want more of a budget for it because I want to make music videos that are fun and have a narrative. The “Battery” music video was made by a good friend of mine, Ariel. She's a director based in Montreal now, but she worked with a small production company that she started with her friends called Brouillard Films, and they've made some music videos for Truck Violence as well. She directed and made that video. It was so important for me that that song had a kind of sympathetic touch because I'm a woman writing it. I'm very careful that the songs aren't too gendered as well. I want it to be relatable for anyone who's going through that young doomed love and first love kind of thing. Ariel could see right away that we need to put teenage guys in this. It was a cool contrast between a very vulnerable song with personalities and characters that usually aren't associated with vulnerability and emotional depth. All the boys in that video are actually my youngest brother's friends who were so sweet to just participate in the video. And while we were making it and talking with them, there were so many struggles when you're sixteen, seventeen that you can't even tell your parents because there's so much going on emotionally. Music does become one of the main ways you channel and understand love and change at that age. You hear lyrics that resonate with you and make you feel seen in ways that sometimes you can't talk to adults about. So that video was also a lot about that, the loneliness of being a teenager and the community you find with other teenagers. I want to explore that more also perhaps from the point of view of girls because that one was very much an all boy cast. The recent one I made with Ariel was kind of a homemade one for "Stay By The Beach”. That one felt like a snapshot of me and my best friend Franky’s friendship. It was a lot less rehearsed and we were shooting that whole day. That was a totally different approach but I liked it. I wanted to bring a visual to the EP that was nostalgic.
Your favourite interviewer and enjoyer of various music genres,
Ariane
LINKS TO FURTHER DISCOVER AND SUPPORT HANAKO
Comments
Post a Comment