Heavy Mettle | Singer-Songwriter Hannah Kaminer

Asheville singer-songwriter Hannah Kaminer has established a pattern of processing and naming the heaviness in life through her music. On the heels of her previous album, “Heavy Magnolias,” comes “Heavy on the Vine,” a new collection of lush music underscoring lyrics born from personal turmoil and evolution.

Today, Hannah guides us through her departure from organized religion and her societal observations born through song. We’ll also talk about tacklung her anxiety by studying and performing theatrical improv. And we’ll preview cuts from a record before anyone else hears them. Hannah launches “Heavy on the Vine” with a January 4 show at The Grey Eagle.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: One of the things that struck me about your record is that it also has heavy in the title, along with the last record was Heavy Magnolias, right? Yeah. And this one's Heavy on the Vine. Huh. Is that, what is the common thread of heavy there for you?

Hannah Kaminer: Oh, man. I Think that just sort of pending, emerging kind of emotion that's about Something's about to happen and you're in a transitional or a liminal phase.

" Heavy on the Vine" comes from Kate Wolfe and her song "Here in California." And I think she probably got it from "Grapes of Wrath." 

Matt Peiken: Oh. John Steinbeck. 

Hannah Kaminer: Yeah. And I didn't really realize that. I just knew it came from Kate Wolfe but I think I did have a little debate with myself like, is it okay to have two albums in a row with the word heavy in them?

And then I realized the only person I had to ask was myself and she said it was okay. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. And you and you produced yourself for this record. I did. So you had nobody else you had to answer to. Was your heaviness coming from a different place with this record as opposed to Heavy Magnolia, which was, correct me if I'm wrong, that was five years ago, six years ago.

Hannah Kaminer: It came out in 2018. Yeah, so yeah, so if my 

math is right, five years ago. Yeah, I would definitely say that there was heaviness from a different source. When I did "Heavy Magnolias," it was really about love and what does that mean and Relationships and, if things are wildly abundant in the summer, is it absolutely inevitable that they will decay in the fall?

That kind of thing. Which I guess, spoiler alert. Yeah. But I think that you can celebrate that kind of heavy Magnolia ness of summer anyway. But with "Heavy on the Vine," a lot of the heaviness and the gravity for this album had more to do with a big transition that I was making personally, which was to step away from church and step away from religion.

Explore a different way into spirituality and you can see that in the track " Everlasting Arms." And then in the track "Childish Things" as well. 

Matt Peiken: Talk about that, obviously it was profound enough for you to have it underscore your new music. How important was the church or organized religion to you up until relatively recently?

Yeah. Absolutely. 

I

Hannah Kaminer: would have considered it my family, so pretty important. 

Matt Peiken: What was your faith and where were you attending? 

Hannah Kaminer: I was going to a small Presbyterian church and it doesn't exist anymore, and then when that closed, I went on a search to find a new, what they call, church home cause they have a lot of parallels with church home, church family, and I didn't find it. I found a lot of wonderful people on that journey. But ultimately I felt like my beliefs that I've been holding to for 25 plus years fell out of the back of my head and I was unable to intellectually assent. And that was super disturbing, like it was a super disturbing thing to happen, because if that is what your connection to your family rests on, then it's a sort of a choice between you or your family. 

Matt Peiken: When you say your family, you mean your literal family. 

Hannah Kaminer: No, I mean the chosen family. Your chosen family. 

Matt Peiken: I think it's interesting that it took the closing of your church for you to find this out for yourself. That if the church hadn't closed. You might not have been in that questioning phase.

Hannah Kaminer: I think I was already headed down that path, but that certainly accelerated it. 

Matt Peiken: How did you not finding your people, after the closure of the church, how did that translate to you? questioning religion? 

Hannah Kaminer: I think I had always questioned religion. I had always not been the most comfortable with some of the doctrines, and I let people know and they just accepted where I was at, at this little church that I was attending until it closed.

They were fine with a little bit of gray area, and then When I left, that was actually what I couldn't find again, was the acceptance and the gray area.

Matt Peiken: You mean you couldn't find it from another church? 

Hannah Kaminer: I think I could no longer hold all of these things in tension in my mind, things that I disagreed with, things that I could no longer See evidence for and at first I just took a break and then I decided okay, maybe this is a bit more than a break. Maybe this is I need to look around and see what other people are thinking about God and the universe and our purpose here in that sort of thing.

So it was a big rupture for me though because I think even though I'd always been someone who questioned and had doubts, this was the first time that there were no longer other people I could rely on to hold all of that together and say it's fine, it's okay to have it be a little bit more complicated.

And the people I met on that journey as I was like trying to find my new place were great. They didn't have answers and they couldn't bring me back to this place where I was really happy with something really simplistic and an easy black and white version of the world. 

Matt Peiken: I'm surprised that you held a black and white version of the world, from what I know about you.

Hannah Kaminer: I don't know that it was super black and white. I've tried, I think about the people that were In that period of my life and a lot of them had a lot of space. And I still have a ton of respect for my friends who have stayed in. But I needed to be a little bit more honest with myself that I couldn't believe everything anymore.

Matt Peiken: So you went through this sort of audit, this internal audit. How disruptive was this for you? It's one thing, you know, you leave a church. I know that's a very personal thing for everybody their sense of belonging and community there. What did this well up in you emotionally? What were you feeling and how did you process it?

Hannah Kaminer: I took about four years to write "Everlasting Arms" and it was an old hymn that we had sung at this church leaning on the everlasting arms. Iris DeMint has a really beautiful version of that, which, if you've ever seen True Grit, the movie, it undergirds the entire soundtrack of that movie. I think that song, I had a piece of it in 2019.

I was leaning on the everlasting arms. But I don't know where they went, and I couldn't fill the rest of the song out. I couldn't, it had, it was just so shadowy. But I think a sense of, to answer your question, a sense of loss, big loss, and the reason that faith is so powerful, and it gives people answers and solace to some of life's hardest questions.

And what happens when we die? Is there such a thing as When something bad happens, can you mend it? Can you forgive it? Can you work through it? It's like the problem of evil and the problem of death and, those are things that then, I didn't know where to take them after that, except that I couldn't stay in the church space, and so actually, part of where I went was to this community garden in West Asheville, and there was a really, wise woman there who helped me work through some of these questions, and actually, the garden was a place where I found a lot of solace, because it's very cyclical in nature, and so if you can accept that life does have loss, just this idea that everything comes back again in the spring and everything, even things that get uprooted and composted, they lend their nutrients to the next cycle.

Matt Peiken: You're using that as a metaphor for hope, in a sense. Yeah. And uplift. 

Hannah Kaminer: And she taught me to plant bulbs for tulips and things like that in november when it's bleak and I realized this was a really defiant act of hope in the face of winter to say, no, this is coming and I'm going to be ready.

Matt Peiken: You mentioned sense of loss. You can see the sense of loss from the opening song the sense of loss of the Asheville that you know. And there are other songs of loss around that. Did you make those connections yourself around that? 

Hannah Kaminer: I think that wrestling with loss is what I want to do with my music and so not to sort of be passive about it. I think even in my song "Heavy Magnolia's" from the last album. I say oh time What have you done to me and I now see that as a very passive way It's still legitimate grief, but I want to wrestle and I think that's obvious in that first song "Asheville" because it's not really clear exactly what's happening to Asheville, but we know it's changing and we don't know how to fix it. But it hurts to see it change in negative ways. 

Matt Peiken: You write very specifically about some of the things that a lot of the artists in this town feel and what they're witnessing. Sure. They may not know exactly why has it come to this, but you can see and you're spelling it out there as clearly as any other artist has, I think, locally.

Hannah Kaminer: I think that I just want to give a little bit of voice and space to I just want to pay my rent, and I just want to live, and I want to, feed my family, or feed myself, And I think that is, if we become this paradise to visit, but it's not a good place to live anymore, I think that's a big problem.

Matt Peiken: Were you writing many of these songs, and do you write in general from a space of kind of solitude and feeling Even whether it's self imposed isolation or it's isolation you're just experiencing and I think back to what you're talking about when the church closed. I can't help but think that you felt some sense of being isolated.

Hannah Kaminer: Yeah, I think I definitely write when I have grief, but in terms of my writing process, as soon as I finish, A song, the first thing I want to do is take it to other songwriters and play it for them. 

Matt Peiken: Really? Yeah. Okay. I know a lot of people do that. I'm surprised that you do. You seem very, and particularly with this record, independent and like this is my voice. This is what I'm going to say. Yeah, I'm surprised that you would seek out. 

Hannah Kaminer: What has surprised me is that I think for years the sort of voice of the church that I heard whether or not people were saying this was if you leave you'll be isolated and I wanted to leave I wanted to regain my own sense of my own compass and my own voice.

But I think it was actually surprising to me what I'm going to do with that independence and voice and feeling of strength in myself is I want to go connect to people. And so I'm not much of a co writer in terms of my songs, but in terms of doing the arrangements, I love working with my band.

And in terms of getting feedback on the song, the song lyrics itself, I like to take them to my songwriting circle whether that's an online circle or one that I attend locally and just get feedback. 

Matt Peiken: That's interesting. So you use a songwriting circle and oh yeah. What feedback were you getting in these sessions that affected what ended up on the record?

Hannah Kaminer: Kelly McRae is a dear friend of mine. She's a Texas based songwriter. She was the one putting together this group. It was actually a Zoom meeting songwriting feedback workshop that we did for weeks and weeks during winter, which is the best time to have creative nurturing.

One of the things they pushed me to was how many words do you need to say this with? Do you have to clarify everything until there's no mystery left? And I think I have realized that you need to use vivid enough language to stir up people's Emotions and memories, but you don't need to fill out all of the pieces so that there's nothing left for them to imagine.

And I think as a writer, that's a tricky line to walk. 

Matt Peiken: In my first reading of the lyrics on this new record, you're more specific now in some ways than you were previous. Were you intentional in that? Were you wanting More specificity and certainly in light of the feedback you were getting from other songwriters, maybe specificity is more required when you have an economy of words.

Hannah Kaminer: Yes, I think so. And I think that I needed to use as much specific imagery and concrete language as I could in order to write about things that were, like, okay, so for example, in "Wish We Could Talk," I'm writing about how polarized our politics are, our country, our families, and being more specific, about some of these things, and writing about Asheville, if I could be more specific than I thought Maybe it could disarm people a little bit, because I think people get really angry about these things.

And so I want to wade into the conversation and say maybe there's space to have this conversation. Let's not shut each other down. But boy, people, and including me, we have a lot of feelings that are very spiky, and I think that metaphor and specific language can sometimes sneak around our defenses.

Matt Peiken: How have what's happening in the world, the pandemic happened to everybody, but you mentioned politics. How much of that has played into the unrest that you had brewing inside you around the time of writing this record? 

Hannah Kaminer: I think a lot. I think "The Silence and The Song" is a pandemic song that I wondered, is this even going to be relevant when I put this out?

Cause I wrote it in 2020 and now it's 2023, it'll come out in 2024. For me at least, at the beginning of the pandemic and during the George Floyd protests, there was a rawness that laid a lot of things bare, a lot of inequities bare, and I feel like there was a nakedness to reality during that time, and I think that made us all think harder and made us all think, what are our commitments to each other as communities or as a country?

And how well are we doing with those? So I think that was a ripping off of the band aid of old wounds, but for old wounds to heal, We have to reopen them. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you mentioned how you really relied on these songwriting circles for feedback, yet you produced the record yourself.

And that's a bold move in a sense because having a producer is having an objective ear to tell you, Oh, this works or maybe try it this different way. Why did you decide after having deliberately seeking out feedback for the writing creative process when you actually went to record? Why did you not seek that out?

In a way I did so this time going into the studio, I set up 12 weeks of practice with my band. 12 weeks? Or 12 practices. Okay. It was a lot of practices. Weekly, 

12 weekly practices. 

Hannah Kaminer: It was a lot of practices. Okay. And so that's where we dialed in the arrangements. And A really wonderful longtime collaborator of mine is Jackson Delaney.

He always has fantastic ideas on arrangements. A new person who I've brought in is Kevin Williams, who plays with Honeycutters, several other bands, on keys and synths. Both of them and everyone else in the band, Melissa Hyman from the Moon and You and Ross Monsinger from Multiple bands. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you had a very pregnant Melissa Hyman in the video 

Hannah Kaminer: all of them Had ideas about how things should go and sometimes like for example and with the song "Irene," I had one idea coming into the practice of how it should sound and then we were just horsing around Ross was playing this sort of motown beat and I was pretending to sing it in sort of an R& B sort of way, but I would never, presume to do that style.

And so it completely changed the way that we were doing that song. And so, they really were my production team. And so I felt very much connected and supported. And like, all I had to do was curate their best ideas. And my best ideas and make a big soup out of it. And then bring it to the engineer in the studio.

Matt Peiken: I wanted to ask you when you went out for improv when you started doing improv and I've Been doing improv for a long time I was thrilled and surprised to see you step out to take classes and graduate and perform what inspired you to take On improv?

Hannah Kaminer: Well, aS many artists are, I'm terribly anxious in my natural state, and I have to work against it to stay healthy and to stay, a pretty balanced person, and it, I manage it well, but that was something I had read about, actually, and improv, I had read about these classes that were taking place in the UK that were being prescribed to people for their anxiety, and so I didn't know if I would like it, but I kept going because I felt like it gave me a freedom internally to say what was on my mind, even if it wasn't exactly aligned.

Part of that is a freedom from this crippling worldview of, you must be aligned at all times with orthodoxy in your religion. That's fundamentalism if you can never stray from anything. I think that whether or not various communities that I've been part of taught that is what I got from some of the places around my faith journey. And I really internalize I must always be right. I must always be a good girl. And improv set me free from being so tied up in that. And I realized that the worst thing that can happen on stage is not that you forget a chord. It's that you accidentally tell a really offensive joke. Really? Yeah. I was like that happened and that was so embarrassing and now I have a lot of apologies to go make. And there's freedom for people to, to mess up and fix it and improv, which I really appreciate. And. Yeah, I just, I felt so much more comfortable on the stage after taking those improv classes.

Matt Peiken: Yeah, I really enjoy you as a performer. I was, I was disappointed not to see you continue actively with it, or at least I haven't seen you. Yeah. Continue with it. What do you plan to get back into it? 

Hannah Kaminer: I'm taking a few workshops here and there, but I don't know what the next thing is really. I 

Matt Peiken: I was just wondering if it's something that you see as wanting to continue, is if or if it served its purpose, it helped give you strength to speak your mind. 

Hannah Kaminer: It did give me strength to speak my mind. I can't say I have any plans to continue it right away, but I'm sure it'll come back. 

Matt Peiken: I know a lot of singer songwriters who produce their own music. I see them sometimes still doing brewery gigs and playing three to four hours with a couple of breaks and working in some of their originals, but doing a lot of covers. Are you more deeply committed to only performing your own songs with maybe a smattering of selected covers here and there?

And is that going to dictate the kind of gigs you do? 

Hannah Kaminer: Probably yes. Every time I learn a new cover I get, I'm learning from the artists and I'm learning from their recording. And I really value that as a learning tool.

And I also, and I love covering some of my favorite artists. I've already got a couple in the works for the album release show, a Patsy Cline song, of course. But I am pretty committed to Playing my originals and figuring out what's the best that can sound and so those brewery gigs a lot of them do allow for original Music and those are any breweries that you know, they'll pay for a certain, they have a guarantee But if you're playing for tips, you better be playing Covers in my opinion.

Are you 

Matt Peiken: playing for 

Hannah Kaminer: tips? No, right? No, and I've gotten a lot better about saying here's my minimum. I'd love to be there let me know if you can meet my minimum and That means that you don't get to take up every opportunity and I still let myself take You know, the most meaningful things that I want to do regardless. But I feel a lot of freedom to choose the things that make sense for my music. And, to let go of the rest. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. Are you going to look to take the band out for much of your touring? Or are you prepared to do solo? To reinterpret these songs as a soloist? 

I 

Hannah Kaminer: play solo a lot. So my goal for 2024 is to get the band out as much as I possibly can. I feel these musicians are stellar. And every time I play with them, I learn something. And even just because I love them so much. I love the camaraderie and I'm learning so much. I want to take the band out as much as possible. So that's pretty much the main booking I'm doing for 2024. 

Matt Peiken: A question that just occurred to me, but we're talking about faith. What did your family, your born family, think about your departure from your church?

Hannah Kaminer: My older sister, I have three sisters, my older sister had already left.

My youngest sister was in the process of leaving, and then the other middle sister besides me was about to leave and my mother eventually also deconstructed. Various of them still consider themselves some sort of Christian some sort of faith. But they all I don't think any of us attend church anymore, and that's a really, I would not have thought that, even five years ago. And my dad is still in the religion and probably thinks I'm a little bit of a heathen. It does make for a very vivid real life example for that song "Wish We Could Talk."

There's just this chasm between us that we cannot seem to cross, is what I wanted to say in that song and I want to cross it You know, you still have that longing to connect with your family member when you disagree heartily with them. 

Matt Peiken: Has your family heard that song? Has your dad heard it?

Hannah Kaminer: They've all heard it. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, have they responded? 

Hannah Kaminer: I don't know That they have responded specifically to that song. My family is full of independent, opinionated people, and so they have a very high respect for that's your view and I wouldn't do anything to change it because that's your view and it's valid.

And I feel a lot of respect from my family for that.