Skipping across both musical genres and categories and trying to combine them into meaningful and listenable music is a challenging and arduous task that not only requires knowledge and experience but quite a lot of inventiveness and musical sense.
Hannah Schneider, an acclaimed singer-songwriter (also a member of AyOwA) has already taken that route in her musical career, but with Ocean Letters, her first solo album in seven years, she is able to confirm that she has knowledge, experience, inventiveness and musical sense to cross all musical borders with ease and come up with more than credible music.
Schneider roams the musical territory inhabited by unique talents like Jane Siberry that don’t constrain themselves to any musical canon taking harmonies, melodies and rhythmic patterns from all over the place and arranging them in a process that they find suitable and logical.
This time around, Schneider found her inspiration in the mysteries of nature and the oceans. Schneider explains: “I wrote those songs in the middle of the heaviest time of the pandemic. All background noise was gone. It felt like it was a crucial moment in history – almost as if it was the end of it all. I came to think of the earth’s long history, and that it all happens over millions of years – all the way back from the time the amoebas decided to go up on land, and became animals and humans. We are just part of the long haul, and in a way, that’s a consolation!”
Actually, she was able to transfer that feeling and words into some very credible music.
