Hannah White began 2023 standing on the winner’s podium at the Americana Music Association UK Awards, as a hugely popular winner for UK Song of the Year with the goosebump-inducing ‘Car Crash.’ But the London-based singer-songwriter is one of those artists who is always about the next thing, and the year will culminate in the release of a completely fresh adventure in her fast-expanding career: the exciting new album Sweet Revolution. The record expands hugely on the outstanding song craft and “Americana noir” ambience of 2022’s widely-praised About Time, of which Maverick wrote: “The emotion she conveys in her vocal delivery gives you chills as her words tug at your heart strings.” Acoustic magazine called White “arresting and wholly believable. A voice you will want to protect and become besotted with,” while W21 Music wrote of “the restraint, the range, the softness, the clarity…a masterpiece.” Indeed, when Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross heard the album’s breezy, country-leaning track ‘Broken Bird,’ he was not only moved to play it immediately on his BBC Radio Scotland show, but to invite Hannah to open on his 2022 solo tour. They became fast friends, and long lines of new converts waiting to meet Hannah and buy her music at each show were testament to her persuasive performing talents. Follow all that, you might say, and she is. The opening single from the new album, ‘Chains Of Ours,’ is infectious with a percussive mood winning comparisons to a modern-day Fleetwood Mac. Both single and album are produced by Michele Stodart of the Magic Numbers, and the full-length, due in November, will delight new and existing fans, including the thousands who will see White with husband and guitarist Keiron Marshall as special guests on Paul Carrack’s autumn UK tour. Ahead of that, she and the band were delighting audiences throughout festival season at Black Deer, Glastonbury, The Long Road Festival and more. All of that is a long way, and yet a short hop, from Sidcup, where Hannah was born and started picking up instruments at an early age. “I played piano and violin,” she says. “I got to learn because our borough gave free music lessons to families on benefits. I first picked up a guitar because my cousin had one and showed me a few chords. Although I couldn’t do much on it, I ended up playing it more than the other instruments because of how portable it was and great to write with.” White remains passionately committed to the idea of music as a force for good, and it’s that genuine belief, which reaches far beyond her own musical ambitions. “Music has such a power over me,” she says. “It’s got me through some of the darkest times and I don’t know what I’d be doing without it. I feel so strongly that if everybody had that opportunity, so many people’s lives could be transformed.” It’s that down-to-earth sincerity that is stamped on Hannah’s personality just as it is on her music. When people talk about her songs, they talk about her combination of autobiographical honesty, social conscience and joyful musicality, and that conversation is getting louder all the time.
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