Artistry infused with green vision

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/01/2020 (2368 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the Free Press calls, avant-garde pop artist Hannah Epperson answers her phone from Chicago, where she has a long layover between trains as she travels by rail from her adopted home of New York City to Vancouver, where she spent much of her youth.

“Train travel is the way of the future. It’s the way of the past, it’s gotta be the way of the future,” laughs the 32-year-old Salt Lake City native and Canadian permanent resident who is keen to limit her travel by air and car.

Epperson, whose musical work is most recognizable for her art-pop-influenced usage of violin and implementation of loop pedals, has been building up a strong following since the release of her debut full-length, Upsweep, in 2016.

On that record, she created songs in two distinct voices — Amelia and Iris — one of which focused on minimalist orchestral arrangements while the other is more experimental pop. Epperson continued this tactic on her 2018 sophomore release, Slowdown, which brought her to Winnipeg to perform at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival that summer as the opening act for headliner Tune-Yards.

This week is Epperson’s first time back to the ‘Peg since that summer of 2018, so the Free Press caught up with the Winterruption headliner to chat about touring Slowdown (the term given to the sound of a specific iceberg grounding on the seafloor, which was recorded in 1997), potential new music for 2020 and the difficulty of being a touring musician as well as a staunch environmentalist.

Erin Lebar: Slowdown has been out for more than a year now; do you find these songs are taking on new life as you continue to play them live over and over again all over the world? 

Hannah Epperson: Definitely. Especially because I’m a solo performer, I don’t have… I’ve found that not having bandmates makes me a lot more eager to collaborate with the individual spaces that I play in, if that makes sense. Sounds, we don’t think of it as taking up space but it’s a very special phenomenon. And the way that sound moves and takes on its own life in a different space, I’ve become so sensitive to that because I’m not listening to other bandmates. I’ve definitely found that maybe the songs themselves taking on a different life would not be an accurate way to describe it, but I’ve found that my I guess adaptability to playing different spaces has become much more alive and that’s taken on a life of its own which has been really liberating and exciting. 

Erin Lebar: Does that mean you’re working on new stuff? Is there an album on the horizon for 2020?

Hannah Epperson: Yeah, I’m constantly working on new stuff. A lot of it isn’t typical, album-related things. I’ve been developing a feature-length piece with a dancer and choreographers who I met in New York… that’s definitely musically creative but requires a different, more comprehensive creative vocabulary.

I do a lot of stuff with dance and film and live productions and constantly I’m playing on other people’s records. For 2020, I have such a backlog of actual songs that aren’t there, but they are there, I just need to sit down and do it. So I think 2020 will be a pretty epic year for getting some new songs onto something people will recognize as an album.

Erin Lebar: Will you continue on with the Amelia/Iris compositional techniques with the new stuff?

Hannah Epperson: I don’t think so. That was a really important project for me during a particularly tumultuous time and was a wonderful experiment, and I don’t know how exactly I’m going to reconcile the fact I do feel like my music comes out in many voices but I think Amelia and Iris, that was a finite project and that’s probably why it’s been easy to say yes to other people’s projects instead of forging on with my own, because I’m not totally sure what character the next album is going to be.

Erin Lebar: I know you are a very socially/environmentally aware artist, and the environmentally unfriendliness of touring has been a hot topic of conversation recently. Coldplay has said they won’t tour until they can find a “carbon-neutral” way to do so, which is fine for them because they are already millionaires sitting on a huge fan base. For an artist such as yourself, who relies on touring heavily to financially support yourself, how do you reconcile the need to tour and the negative impacts of that need?

Hannah Epperson: I mean it’s pretty crippling, actually, just mentally and probably one of the most talked about issues in my circle of musician friends… it’s been really difficult to be on a path where it does feel kind of impossible to be able to perform music for the communities I want to without relying on some degree on transportation.

Being in Europe is amazing because they have incredible and comprehensive train services, I did an entire three month tour entirely by train and it was a really lucrative summer for me, by independent musician standards. One of my big goals in the next probably two years is to set up… I haven’t done that much touring in North America, actually, and I’ve been following the progress of this really cool initiative that’s converting all of these unused railroad tracks into a giant continuous bike trail that goes across America. I really want to sit down with someone who is more logistically inclined than myself and figure out a way to do a bicycle tour.

Erin Lebar: That sounds interesting. Challenging, for sure, but also liberating in a way. Not to mention the physical mobility aspect.

Hannah Epperson: Yes… there’s the environment of the globe and the environment of yourself and I feel a lot of touring musicians get so sick and decrepit and injured because you don’t take care of your body when you’re cramped in a car all day, so the tour by bicycle for me is kind of a no-brainer. I also just, to be totally forthright, I don’t feel ambitious about my music career. I don’t envision myself playing on big stages, that’s not what I want, that’s not consistent with my worldview, so the idea of playing smaller shows in smaller communities and reaching out to those kind of people is very achievable by bicycle and by train.

It’s really tricky to figure this all out, because I have benefitted so much from travelling internationally… there’s these crazy trade offs that are complicated and fall in the spectrum between good and bad. Things very rarely can be tidily put in the good-versus-bad pile. It’s a work in progress!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel