By Michael Dwyer
The Sydney Morning Herald | July 26, 2019
You get the feeling Hannah Harding would rather not do this. The long pauses. The sighs. The effort of her conversation sounds like it’s filtering a parallel inner monologue that crackles just out of audible range.
‘‘I’m sorry about last night. I fell asleep,’’ she says of yesterday’s missed interview. ‘‘Yeah. I fell asleep because I’m so tired. I thought, OK, set that alarm and let’s do this. And I guess I just slept through it.’’
It’s not implausible. Her in-demand alter-ego, Aldous Harding, is on a few days’ break from a gruelling world tour that will run to about 70 dates by December, including three Australian shows in August.
Evening here is morning in Cardiff, where the enigmatic 29-year-old singer-songwriter from New Zealand lives, in rare downtime, with her partner and collaborator, Welsh musician Huw Evans.
‘‘I suppose I’ve been learning Welsh while being here,’’ she says after due rumination. ‘‘It’s beautiful. It’s a lot like the south of New Zealand, in parts. The people are similar. Sort of quite kind, and stoic.
‘‘Anyway. I barely know how to talk about my own music, let alone the country of Wales.’’
The up-front disclaimer reveals a common if rarely spoken affliction. Though most artists have made peace with the inconvenience of constant interrogation three albums into their careers, that only underscores a distinction in Harding.
‘‘‘Greedy’ is the wrong word,’’ she says. ‘‘But I think it stems from greed. You know, trying to find somebody’s root, somebody’s core, is a very intimate, personal thing even between two people, let alone …’’
She stops short of invoking the eagerly eavesdropping masses that adore her.
‘‘I’m safe, because my intentions are good,’’ she says. ‘‘It’s more that, you know, feeling like there has to be this story attached to the stories … It’s not really something I feel that comfortable sharing all the time.’’
In Designer, her latest album of ghostly eccentricity channelled through her many extraordinary voices, there’s a story that tells itself to the imaginative listener. Between the opening song’s blissful anchor of a folded photograph and the vertigo of isolation in the breathless last track, Pilot, it’s not hard to read the last few years of Harding’s ascent.
‘‘I don’t really remember a lot of my childhood,’’ she claims, though she has sometimes indicated that from her first recording at the age of 13, her life in music was more a default possibility than a burning goal.
From 2009, there’s an amateur video on YouTube of a perfectly poised teenager singing that song, Exactly What To Say, with her mother, emigre Canadian folk singer Lorina Harding, at a Wellington pub.
“I am so much like my mother,’’ she says. ‘‘When we’re in a room together everybody always comments on how spooky it is. I would say I get most of the musicality from my mum – and my dad, but I think my dad is the poet, you know.”
Gifted with a voice of fearless agility, Harding was in her early 20s before she grappled in earnest with the guitar he made for her. A series of ‘‘discoveries’’ by Christchurch artists Delaney Davidson and Anika Moa set her ship sailing. Four- and five-star reviews have since been the norm.
From her self-titled debut to the world-storming Party and now Designer lies an increasing disconnection from the indie-pop streams that wash around her in the global festival cycle. The oft-levelled ‘‘goth-folk’’ undertow could easily be gone in an album or two, as her surreal flights of imagery and strange, ingenious arrangements blossom in their own light. The mischief in some of her more conceptual videos – here she’s a Playboy cowgirl, there some kind of Quaker in a phallic hat – provide the humour that’s not often evident on record or stage.
“I don’t have necessarily good taste,” she explains of her wide embrace of ideas. “I have some really good taste and I have some really awful taste. I don’t see the difference, because when you use them together they can work. I remember being a teenager and feeling the need to … you know, catch up on some level, but I didn’t really buy it.”
The peer pressure ‘‘to discriminate about things that sounded perfectly fine to me, that was strange. I understand why we do that. I just didn’t really believe in any of that shit. Nothing really sounded bad to me because I could see how they got there, or why they would think that would work, so I try not to put too much pressure on being anything or sounding like anything in particular.’’
And for those easily distracted by her blood-red ensemble on the wiley, windy moors of her Fixture Picture video, ‘‘Look, in all honesty, I could name probably four Kate Bush songs,’’ she says. ‘‘Like, she’s great, but I don’t really follow people around. Because I know what that feels like.’’
She’s not likely to forget it soon. Reviews aggregator Metacritic currently has Designer listed as the world’s seventh most critically acclaimed album of 2019.
“It’s a scary thing, to be somebody like that,” she says. ‘‘I never thought I would. I knew I had a lot of feelings but I never thought that they would be useful to me. I really do feel like an unremarkable person trying really hard, openly, to do something interesting and to make something of value and pleasure. That’s all it is, really.”
From over here, that little mission would appear to have been accomplished. How the ripples are working at her end of the line is less easy to quantify.
“It’s treating me really well although, you know, I’m a human being, so it doesn’t always feel good. It’s funny, I was thinking about that just before when I was making breakfast. I was thinking, you know, I am good, I just don’t feel good all the time. Does that make sense? I also say there is no difference between being lonely and thinking you are.
“‘That sounds a lot grimmer than it is,’’ she concedes. ‘‘It’s just … you asked.”
Featured Image: Aldous Harding: “I was thinking, you know, I am good, I just don’t feel good all the time.” (Photo: New York Times)
