Following her critically acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet Hannah Frances returns with Nested in Tangles. With this distinctive body of work, Frances solidifies herself as an artist of insurgent emotional clarity, committed to personal truth and self-actualization. Here, she narrates complex stories of familial estrangement, emotional trauma, and a deepening of her own sense of trust, through a collection of intricate, dizzying, and large-scale compositions. Nested in Tangles spans the realms of progressive rock, avant-folk, and jazz, but remains anchored throughout with Frances’ signature vocal leaps and percussive, polyrhythmic fingerpicking. 

Almost immediately following the completion of Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances wrote Nested in Tangles throughout 2023 and 2024, deeply inspired by her continued experimentation with open guitar tunings and the healing work she sought out amidst a tumultuous resurfacing of familial trauma. Frances returned to Arlington, Vermont, to record with her longtime collaborator Kevin Copeland. In addition to horn, wind, and string arrangements contributed by friends, Frances brought on Daniel Rossen of Grizzly Bear to produce and arrange “Life’s Work” and “The Space Between”. As a longtime admirer of Rossen’s work, Frances was incredibly excited by the opportunity to collaborate, and the process proved to be easy and natural between them as their expansive creative instincts are akin. Bookended by instrumental pieces woven through with spoken word poetry, Nested in Tangles is a raucous and jubilant circus. Strewn with billowing orchestral arrangements, each track investigates the nuance of contradiction and multiplicity. A paradoxical whisper and shrill, we’re volleyed between intimacy and the expansive maximalism of her inner world. Nested in Tangles surprises in its dynamics and compositional detours, born from an expanded range of musical influences including contemporary avant-garde composers such as Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, as well as 70s progressive rock bands Gentle Giant and Yes. 

True to form, Frances incorporates layers of nature imagery – blue herons, birds in murmuration, sandcastles, a body of water’s lapping edge, smoke drifting, roots, nests, and wings – alongside cuttingly lucid interrogations of her own grisly histories of familial manipulation and abuse. On “Life’s Work,” Frances aches for her younger self, singing “Reconcile the child through hostile family/rupture is tradition, born into dissonance”. And on “Surviving You,” Frances remembers a past of harm, lamenting “How you hurt us to feel stronger / in the wrong, doing the wrong / smoldering as the rage lingers longer”. Nested in Tangles probes the edges of memory, entanglement, and estrangement. Through each track, ideas of both the nest and the parent are reimagined and reshaped. Frances bravely reveals the ways she’s learned to re-parent herself and care for her inner child in an attempt to emancipate herself from her past of entanglement. “I am fragmentary and whole at once,” she declares on the opening title track. “I am tender heart and jagged hand / I am a bird, and a stone, and a fragile bone, and I am here to listen, and love the child I have always been.”

The album's climax arrives with “The Space Between”, a sweeping exhale of recognition of life's cascade between heaviness and light. Frances sings, “I don’t forgive, I let it live in the space between / what’s gone and what’s given / if there is another way let it move me, if there is a way out let it be through me”. Frances asks herself what healing looks like outside of forgiveness. If the harm is too big to forgive, where does freedom emerge from? 

The answer proves to be here, in the space between, present for the love and care that remains, and with a resolve to actualize a new narrative. Frances disentangles herself from the vicious cycle of generational trauma and maladaptive patterns. She chooses light, and in her choosing, teaches us all a new way of unburdening, a way to transfigure our pain and fear into a new embodied wholeness. On the final track, “Heavy Light” amidst a flurry of strings, gentle guitar and a sound sample of children playing, Frances’ somber resolve is made clear: “And I will keep reaching”, she promises. “To live here, in the heavy, in the light / I am the heart I've needed, and I feel it all.”

WRITTEN BY TASHA VIETS-VANLEAR