Singer/Songwriter Hannah Bethel: On The Verge

Hannah Bethel
Holiday Express Hotel Lobby
920 Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee
January 12, 2019 

For a singer/songwriter, Nashville is the first stop toward recognition, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the last stop before you press the dream like a rose between the pages of the Nashville phone book. A nameless busker, you sing everywhere…anywhere in search of the possible…airport terminals, street corners, taverns, bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies. 

 

You want to breathe the air of Music City USA, uncork the bottle that will release the genie and spin your straw into gold. If you’re not driven and don’t have the long view, stay home.

 

You’re singing to an audience of two or two-dozen, unfazed by an audience with faces in their phones or watching the plasma TV blaring in the corner. You’re singing from the deep uncharted place in your psyche, following your North Star, singing from a manger and hoping that the three wisemen, one of whom who’ll tell a cousin in the industry about the fabulous singer he just heard, will pass your name along.

 

Right now you’re the only person in Nashville who believes in you. 

 

Setting foot in Nashville is the secular version of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that you have to take, one foot in front of the other, on the road heading for stardom. Singing on that chair in the corner is the moment that counts. You’re singing from your guts, grateful for a smile, a tip jar filled with folding money, a smile of acknowledgement, any small tokens of appreciation until lightning strikes.

 

Willie Nelson couldn’t break through the Nashville ceiling in the early 60s. In a few hours, at the galactic “Willie: Tribute To An American Outlaw” show, 18,000 fans will fill every seat of the Bridgestone Arena. How’s that for inspiration?

 

That’s why Hannah Bethel is perched on a high backed chair in the corner of the Holiday Express Hotel at 5:30 PM. Guests are grazing appetizers in the lobby. To most of them, she’s acoustic wallpaper. In her mind, and to my ears, she’s singing for a full house. 

 

A request from the audience… Kris Kristofferson's “Help Me Make It Through The Night.”

 

The atmosphere in the room turns on a dime. The guitar chords are bare bones. But the voice… supremely supple, original pacing and phrasing, emotive cry breaks, tenderly evocative, focuses an imaginary spotlight to her corner of the lobby. By the time she hits the final chords, people have stopped chatting mid fork. I swear that some nights she must sing herself to sleep with the lyrics. She kills the song. VIDEO

 

Most guests are passing time in the lobby before heading to the Bridgestone Arena for the “Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw” tribute show. Kristofferson, one of the original  Highwaymen back in the day with Willie and Waylon and Merle, can’t sing that song with more genuine soulful depth than Hannah Bethel.

 

“I moved here from Michigan ten years ago,” Hannah says as I put folding money in the tip jar and ask for her web site address. She’s been paying her dues for years, dove headlong into climbing the ladder, trying to gain altitude at roadhouses around the country. 

 

Bethel's web site notes her recent successes but I was surprised by the two songs on it. In that little hotel lobby she was a woman with a voice and style that set her apart from the crowd. For me, "Train" and "Witchy Woman" are too much Nashville and too little Hannah. The purity of her supple voice gets lost in a Nashville-ized version of  her best feature...just sayin'.

 

This song of Kristofferson's? Bethel’s voice lilted, skimmed, and caressed the lyrics with a style all her own. Conversations stop in mid-sentence. Her range, depth and tonal purity, it’s all right here, in one tender, evocative, emotive, vulnerable song, with sub-strata of conviction, not desperation. Anyone who can sing with such conviction can survive. 

 

She’s got the goods.  Will she thrive?  If one of her pared down originals leads off the samples on her web page, she’s got a running start. 

 

 

Hannah Bethel, Holiday Express Hotel, Nashville, TN

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Sing with conviction, hold nothing back, no matter where, no matter when...you were born to be here right now

Photos, videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Comments

[KB Jones]

Wow you had me with this line: "the last stop before you press the dream like a rose between the pages of the Nashville phone book" and didn't let go. This is a good and powerful piece.

[Clif Doyal]

Hello Paul,

I am Hannah's manager and publicist, I am pleased to let you know that her next single and music video, "Rhinestone Rodeo," features her vocal in a more stripped-down setting and it showcases the beauty, passion and depth of her voice, as you have so well-articulated in your piece. I think you will be pleased with the results. Please look for the single and video in mid-May. Thanks for your kind words for Hannah. She is indeed an artist worthy of a long and successful career in this business.

Kindest regards,
Clif Doyal

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. aka PT from Boston]

Hi Clif,
Thank you for this update. I realize there is more than one way to climb the mountain and that the two songs on her current web site are a couple of pitons Hannah hammered into the mountain as she scales her way up it.

I love Hannah’s voice and style and boy oh boy am I ever happy that “Rhinestone Rodeo” will give the world a good dose of the vocal shadings and lyricism that are her strengths.

i loved the full bore heart-on-her sleeve singing from her core that night. I’ll bet that some singer/songwriters would have mailed in that performance in a hotel lobby… not Hannah… hers was gutty, exactly what was necessary, she gets it, and I wanted her to know that she added a fan to her list that night.

I’ll get on her mailing list and look forward to “Rhinestone Rodeo” when it comes out.

Cheers,
Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.