Hannah Frances // Nested in Tangles
A body of chamber-folk compositions that turn solitude into symphony, where every dissonance becomes a kind of grace. Intricate and fearless, Nested in Tangles unfolds as a study in self-reclamation and quiet revelation.
After a period of reckoning and renewal, Hannah Frances returned to Vermont to record with longtime collaborator Kevin Copeland. You can sense that homecoming in the sound and its balance of solitude and expanse, rooted and reaching. Her follow-up to Keeper of the Shepherd feels less like a sequel than a deepening, turning toward what hurts and finding light within it. Across nine songs, Frances maps an emotional terrain that is both intricate and immediate. Her open-tuned guitar ripples in percussive patterns while strings and horns move around her like weather, shaping a sense of motion that mirrors her process of repair. At the center of it all is her voice: solitary, searching, unmistakably human. It quivers and steadies with conviction, tracing the fault lines of memory and the fragile beauty of trying again.
“Nested in Tangles” opens with a declaration of selfhood: “I am fragmentary and whole at once.” From there, the record deepens in tone and color. “Life’s Work” and “The Space Between,” co-produced with Daniel Rossen, pair her intimacy with his precision, finding a shared language of restraint and release. Midway through, “Falling From and Further” becomes a hinge, suspended between descent and lightness, where Frances lets go just enough to see what remains. “Surviving You” makes peace with what cannot be forgiven, and “Heavy Light” closes the circle in quiet affirmation: “I am the heart I’ve needed, and I feel it all.”
In the end, Nested in Tangles sounds like healing made audible. It moves between folk, art-rock, and avant-jazz with uncommon grace, its pulse steady and searching. What emerges is music that restores without erasing and beauty that grows from the knots that remain. A perfect listening for the impending fall and the restoration that can be found looking within.