Her third album MOTH runs the emotional gamut
By Jeff McCord
Just a few years back, Fana Hues was trying to get her music career started. She had only two songs on streaming platforms. Yet among the few people to hear them happened to be rapper/producer Tyler, the Creator, and here he was reaching out to her.
“He found me on Instagram!” Fana says, excitedly. We’re chatting over Zoom the day after her Austin show and Studio 1A appearance. All this happened years ago, but she still barely contains her enthusiasm. “A few people had sent him my music. And he really liked what he heard!”
Fana was prominently featured on the hit track on Tyler’s hit track, “Sweet/I Thought You Wanted Me To Dance”. It was just the kick start her career needed. She quit her job in a Vegas musical and never looked back.
Fana is still only 29, and she has just released her third album, MOTH (Matters of the Heart). Yet embryonic metaphors don’t apply here. She already sounds like an artist in full bloom.
LA-born into a large musical family (Fana is one of nine children), she doesn’t recall a time when it wasn’t clear to her what her path would be. And on MOTH, her music is assured and in control. Fana’s vocals glide, layer and percolate on lyrics that still aren’t quite sure about things. Sleek and modern, her R&B glows with hints of vintage divas like Nina Simone. The musical swells with emotion and release, and the production of MOTH has the feel of being carefully curated.
“I was working on it pretty intensely for a year and a half. I didn’t really have any breaks,” Fana says. “I did most of this one with my producer Josh Grant. Josh has his own studio, in Highland Park.”
And Fana would use the isolation of the studio not just for recording.
“It’s really funny,” she says,”because the way that I like to write is, you know those deprivation tanks that people get into? I like to go into the booth with no sound, pitch black. I like to take away all my senses except for my mind, my thoughts, so that I can write. It’s therapy, because I’m a very bubbly person. I’m very surface level because I don’t like to necessarily dive too deep with people around me all the time. I don’t want to burden them with things that I feel are my problems. But I do it in my music, I burden my listeners with the things that bother me in my life; the things that I don’t have the answers to. I’ll write about them.”
So MOTH explores not only musical moods but emotionally vulnerable ones, admitting mistakes, impatience and insecurities. “Was it all for fun?” she cries in the opener. Elsewhere, “What we are won’t be defined / Still I need you to say ‘You’re mine baby.’”
“Matters of the heart never looked so strange,” she sings. “Focused on the things I cannot change.”
What are those?
“Other people, honestly. Sometimes I definitely focus too much on how…” Fana trails off. “One thing that I have a little bit control over is how I affect other people. But I still can’t control it completely. That bothers me a lot. Even though I put a lot of my heart and my emotions into my relationships, whether it be with my family, whether it be with a romantic partner, whether it’s my friends, I definitely wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m very vulnerable and honest with the people that I love. And I cannot control the outcome of how they receive that. I can just try to do my best to be a good person.”
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