New York’s Downtown Siren Hannah Cohen Shelves Modeling for Music, Kills Softly With Beautifully Wounded Debut WRITTEN BY #MSR
I have a hard time writing happy songs,” Hannah
Cohen admits outside a West Village café, with the type of laugh that trails an obvious statement. The air around her is only growing more unseasonably cool as morning slips to afternoon. Overhead, a cloud-plagued sky is promising rain. In fact, it’s the type of perfectly portentous atmosphere lurking through much of Child Bride—Cohen’s gently elegant, and first record. That the doe-eyed singer’s speaking voice is as paper-thin as her breezy croon during that album’s most intimate moments hardly comes as a surprise. But as a result, the weather isn’t threatening our conversation today so much as the tiny but busy intersection nearby; the din of traffic is in constant competition, and when sizeable trucks pass by, her words are wiped out entirely. But Cohen, dressed in a dark top and bright blue pants, rolled generously at the cuff, appears relaxed. Alternating casually on a bench between a tucked position and sitting legs folded, she doesn’t compete. “I never really played music until recently,” she notes, pausing as a diesel engine clears the area. “I still feel like I don’t play music.”
True enough, Child Bride was only released in April, through the indie label Bella Union. (It remains available in the US as an import only.) But then again, most of its songs, Cohen says, came from two or three years’ worth of songwriting. And it’s been a handful of years now that she’s floated within New York’s downtown scene, working as a model with painters and fashion photographers, circulating within generally artistic circles (most recently with Sam Amidon and Julia Stone on tour), and frequenting Brazilian music parties at Nublu in the East Village. It was during this time that Cohen also floated her own newfangled compositions to Thomas Bartlett, a friend of hers known to some as Doveman and perhaps to even more as a supporting pianist for the scene’s prominent names, like Martha Wainwright or Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons. “I would just send him songs before I played them for anybody else,” she says. “It was like this natural progression of picking up the guitar, but also having supportive friends and people who are musicians asking me to come play with them—especially Thomas. He was pushing me.” Bartlett’s support transitioned organically into working with Cohen on
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