HANNAH HAUSMAN NAVIGATES THE LEVELS OF APATHY, HEARTBREAK, AND CLOSURE IN MOODY NEW MUSIC VIDEO FOR “WILL I EVER FEEL LIKE THIS AGAIN?”

ABOUT HANNAH HAUSMAN:

You know how in the movies it’s always the wildly appealing but all-too-human heroine that comes thiiiiiiiis close to losing everything, but then miraculously defeats doom, soars to victory, and, if that wasn’t fantastical enough, also learns the true meaning of life? Well, fantastical, unless you’re Hannah Hausman, the small-town Tennessee beauty queen turned indie pop songstress who nailed over one million streams with her first release ever and then, after a brutal (pre-Covid) virus that attacked her vocal chords, lost her voice for a year, so painfully and completely that she couldn’t even hum. There were days in that period when Hannah thought she might never speak again, let alone sing. But always a competitor, both in sports and on the pageant stage, she never stopped fighting her way back, working for hours each day on her own and with a vocal therapist in Nashville. Her voice was gone, but her dream was not. “When it got very hard,” she says, “I would think about two random sisters driving down the highway, jamming to my song, feeling alive and in the moment, the way my sister and I did listening to our favorite artists when we were growing up. I wanted to give people that joy, the way it had been given to me.” Writing poetry was Hannah’s first creative outlet, with her first attempts starting at seven, and growing into a passion by the time she entered middle school. Her parents were not musical, but encouraged her to take piano, which eventually led to guitar lessons as well. During high school, Hannah focused on sports, in particular running, and competed in the Miss Tennessee and Miss Teen Tennessee USA pageants, where her talent for the judges was singing. It’s hard to imagine now, hearing her intimate delivery, but to conform to pageant standards, she got on stage and belted out Broadway show tunes. “It never felt right to me. My voice is naturally soft and indie and that’s just not what the judges wanted to hear in pageants. I tried to sing in a style that didn’t fit my voice, and after I got off stage the last time, I was like, ‘I’m not good at singing. I’m never going to sing again,’” she recalls. Enrolling at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2014, Hannah studied communications, thinking she might merge her love of writing and music with a career in music journalism. But her senior year, a sports injury and subsequent surgery put her on crutches for several months, and laying in bed one day, as she recalls, she picked up her guitar with the thought, “Maybe I can sing my poems. Why not?” With that awakening, song after song poured out, and as soon as she was able to walk, Hannah left for Australia, where she spent a year attending Hillsong College’s songwriting program. While there, an old friend from high school who had become a producer saw her singing on Instagram and invited her to lay vocals over an EP he was making in Los Angeles. It was in that studio that “lost in brooklyn” was born. But it was also on this trip that Hannah caught the virus that stole her voice, and all at once, the excitement of building on her early success gave way to a daily battle — mind, body, and soul. She admits struggling with depression, and turning her despair into poetry and songs. “I wrote a lot of songs that I couldn’t record. I would just write them down and then sing the melody in my head and hope I could record it later. Or sometimes I could sing it once without it hurting me and I would record a little voice memo,” she said. “I didn’t give up because I had this restlessness inside of me the whole time. I just had this belief that my voice would heal and that one day I would be able to do it.” She’s also writing more and editing herself less. “I wasted so much time and energy hiding my passion for singing because I convinced myself I wasn’t good enough. After losing my voice for so long, I learned how precious of a gift it is, and that it could be taken away from me at any moment. It made me less hesitant to get out there, trust my intuition, and let others in.” Her new approach is both touching and inspiring, and Hannah says it reflects her inner optimist, the part of her who now sees only good in her year of struggle. “It’s crazy backwards, I know,” she said, “because at the moment I was so sad about it. But I realize now I had to lose my voice to find my real voice.”