THE LOCKDOWN LOWDOWN ~ HANNAH FAIRLIGHT

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Live music and touring are on lockdown right now and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we sat down for a fun Q&A session with Hannah Fairlight!

1. 5 albums that changed your life.

Dan Fogelberg – Age of Innocence

The Beatles – White Album

Elton John – Tumbleweed Connection

Fleetwood Mac – Tusk

Tori Amos – Under The Pink

Paul Simon – Graceland

(I know, I know. I couldn’t settle for just 5)

2. 5 artists that influenced you as a musician.

Tori Amos

Elton John

Ani Difranco

Paul Simon

Patti Smith

3. Your 5 favorite live albums

17-11-70 – Elton John

To Venus and Back – Tori Amos

Before The Flood – Bob Dylan/The Band

Ben Folds Live – Ben Folds

Pack Up The Plantation: Live! – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers

4. Life on the road; 5 of your craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories

1. Venice coming from Vienna and Prague – I had taken an all-day bike ride around Prague, then hung out at this Mexican restaurant there speaking Spanish with the bartender, who then ultimately convinced me to go out to a disco tech with them that night instead of catching my overnight train. So on no sleep at 5 in the morning I had to bang on the hostel door to get my things, foggily catch a train to Vienna, where I wound up sleeping out in a big lawn near the grand art museum most of the day (I had gone into the art museum to shake off a stage 4 clinger from the lawn, but had a little fainting episode on account of exhaustion and heat. The museum personnel gave me a coke a cola and contact info if I should need any more help, haha, oops. On my overnight train that evening to Venice I wasn’t very clear about when I needed to get off the train (or else I’d skip straight ahead to Rome) and I was also nervous about waking my train-car bunk mates – a big family from Bulgaria with young kiddos, So I made a spontaneous guess, and wound up on a deserted Venice train platform alone at around 2 in the morning. I had to wait until about 4 for 5am to connect with my housing contact to come collect me… it was pretty dangerous and I spent the night vigilantly “resting” on my backpack and guitar case on a stone bench in the dark.

2. Memphis? (Band: Electric Dana) my drummer and I had played this kind of unkempt bar on the edge of town and had been crashing in our van through the tour. It was just a minivan, nothing spacious or fancy, and it was winter. Luckily, we made some friends that night even despite the quirky venue, and a friendly couple basically forced us to come crash at their place instead of sleep in the snow and freezing temps in our van. I remember both of us waking in their place completely disoriented, dogs barking, them having gone to work for the day. but grateful it’s beautiful when people are so trusting!

3. Harmony, Maine for “Hempfest” – my duo partner Raelyn Nelson and I went to headline the festival with our acoustic duo “mmhmm”, and they put us up in a cabin near the festival grounds. It was a really wild hippy scene, and though you cannot sell weed in Maine, it’s legal to grow. We were given such large copious amounts of cannabis in all forms and did not even know how to consume it all in the time we were there. We tried some savory edibles we had never had before that we didn’t think were working (but they definitely were) and shot a crazy music video for one of our songs out in the sticks near our cabin. We had some very interesting encounters and offers on this trip. It was memorable but we did stay safe.

4. LA playing the Whiskey A GoGo and Hotel Cafe – we basically pledged to spend as much time as humanly possible at The Rainbow. We went there so many times it was borderline ridiculous. We also had so much down time before our show that we watched footloose in its entirety in the green room at the Whiskey. We were not in the best *ahem* sobriety during that show. But it was still a wild, great, memorable time.

5. Atlanta, GA limping in the van – we were playing a tiny but awesome dive bar called Elliott Street Pub. We thought we had allowed plenty of time, but the van started acting up and dying every 20 minutes or so on our way down to Atlanta. So we wound up having to push our showtime three hours the crowd and venue was forgiving, but they told us next time to just rent a car we had to limp all the way back to Nashville, including one long stop by the side of the road right across from Opryland Hotel, not far at all from where we live. We made several audio recordings of stupid songs we made up during this trip including a parody of the Jay-Z song which we dubbed “Big Limpin’ “ and a song that later became our theme song -“Everything is Awesome and Everything is Great.”