Singer/songwriter Hannah Dasher is becoming quite the talk of the town, well when I say town, I really mean the UK. One of the few acts at Country 2 Country Festival this year who played music that was more on the traditional side of things, Hannah wooed her audience with her southern sass, natural wit and wickedly cool music from her albums The Half Record and The Other Damn Half.

Hannah has a voice that turns heads, gets ears pricked and stops you in your tracks. Each show she played at C2C was full to capacity and her storytelling and at times witty tunes had everyone laughing and singing.

We caught with Hannah a week or so after C2C Festival when she was back home! We really hope that she will come back to the UK soon as not only do we want more Hannah Dasher shows but dang it, we want her to do some live cooking videos too! Black Deer Festival, I’m looking at you to get her on one of your live cooking experiences at next year’s festival as well as playing live music!

Hannah is fun on and off the stage. Someone you could talk to for hours, Hannah is an absolute hoot and full of so much experience and is incredibly inspiring.

Hey Hannah – how are you?

I am great thank you! I hear you’re one of the C2C OG’s?

Well yeah, I have been going since its first year! I remember people being quite skeptical about it and wondering whether it was legit. It wasn’t even close to being sold out! People who were country music fans back then in the UK didn’t really know anyone else that was a country music fan and now look at it! C2C is huge and so many people have made friends through it!

I think it’s wonderful! They treated me like Loretta Lynn and I needed that too. It’s so easy for talent to get lost in the shuffle over here and I feel that you guys really don’t care as much about genres than about what you love. If you love it, you love it and not just because you are told to love it! I really respect that!

Yes it’s true. We are a fiercely loyal crowd!

I can’t wait to bring the band over and do one of those late night shows with you guys, I am looking forward to getting back over there! I hope I can do it before the year is over!

I really hope so too! You have been a name that I have heard of a lot from C2C Festival attendees and one artist that they want to come back! How were the shows?

They were so much fun! Before I started travelling with my band two years ago, it was just me and an acoustic guitar. The Cadillac Three were the first to really take me out on the road with them and that’s kind of what made me an entertainer. To open up for a country hard rock band like that with an acoustic guitar will make an entertainer of you. So it’s been a while since I have got back into that sequence. I couldn’t hide behind my telecaster and my pedal steel but it was fun to walk out on stage with just me and my acoustic guitar and connect with the audience. They were so genuinely appreciative and they laughed at my Hannahisms, my jokes. I try to keep things upbeat as a rule anyway but they were genuinely just appreciative. We had a huge turnout at the Barrellhouse, a huge turnout in the rain and every show I was just blown away that they kept coming!

Well you will have to keep coming back!

I will and that was my first trip to Europe actually.

Did you manage to see anything whilst you were here?

Oh yeah! I checked a big thing off my bucket list. I’m a rock and roll fan and so I reached out to the owners of Hedley Grange and they were fans of what I do. They heard my Bob Harris piece and oh my gosh that was another bucket list meeting Bob Harris and doing a BBC thing with him. Anyhow, I got to tour and visit Hedley Grange and see where Zeppelin recorded Zepplin IV and Physical Graffiti – where Bad Company cut Bad Company. It was so surreal and such a recharge for me as a creator and I am still on a high! Instagram has taken my video down because I got some Zepplin in the background and some of that record is no longer available on instagram. It was great!

It did look great at as I saw your post. Did I also see that you went and did the whole Abbey Road crosswalk thing?

Of course I took the cliché photo that everybody does but I didn’t get to tour the studios. I had my sister travelling with me and my tour manager and they wanted to hit some places so we did Windsor and some things like that. Tower of London I really enjoyed. I love history so it was a lot of fun to see that! The Hendrickson handle, I tried to trace as much rock and roll history as I could in the little time that I had!

Let’s talk about the music because you’ve got The Half Record and The Other Damn Half. Why did you decide to split that into two?

Well to release the Whole Damn Record which is what I wanted to follow up the Half Record with, I would have had to purchase my masters from the label and that was like £160,000 ish. I am self managed so it was too expensive to buy those masters from the label so I thought “well, let’s out The Other Damn Half”. A lot of consumers don’t know how expensive it is to release music. The recording process alone is like 50-60k and then you think about hiring up a publicist and doing the artwork, the photoshoot and the press that goes behind promoting it, it’s a very expensive process – It’s 6 figures. I had to build my bank up in order to let me do that and it was a labour of love. I wanted to release some songs that I had been trying out on the road and I don’t watch algorithms because algorithms are fickle but people are real. I know I have a good song when I am performing it and y’all are singing that chorus back to me by the second chorus! Those are the songs that I chose for this record, ‘Redneck Ass’, ‘That Thing You Like’, ‘Cryin’ All The Way To The Bank’, y’all sing every word and so those are the songs that I wanted to put out!

I can’t stop singing ‘Cryin’ All The Way To The Bank’

I love it!!! I hope I get more spins there (UK). My first night out when I was there in London, some young folks out drinking and one of the guys recognised me and said ‘can I get a picture?’ And so we hit it off and one of the guys in his group worked for the country charts in the UK and I asked him “what’s the difference between the US charts and the UK charts?” And he said “US charts are all paid for”. So I love you guys already!

And we love our female singers over here, we play women on the radio.

I love that! some of my heroes have broken in the UK before they broke in the US like Tom Petty, Kacey Musgraves, Blackberry Smoke. I am excited! I’ve got some dates coming up in April with Blackberry Smoke that will be a lot of fun!

Oh it will, and you’re right, many country artists break here first. In fact, many say the UK is the first time that they have heard their songs sang back to them! Maren Morris for example says C2C Festival was the first time an audience sang My Church back to her.

I love it!!!

I love the fact the album ended up in two halves, I think it stands out more! The first half was 2021, so were all the songs from The Other Damn Half already written and ready to go as was originally going to be one album, or where some new and added nearer the time of The Other Damn Half?

Some of the songs had been written. It’s a dating game here in the US with an artist relationship to a record label relationship. I couldn’t get my label to come and sit down with me and have a glass of wine and listen to some music. I had songs like ‘Redneck Ass’ that they didn’t want me to release but they (fans) were singing every word back to me and I felt like with the right streaming strategy, it would blow up and do really well you know? I couldn’t play ‘Cryin’ All The Way to The Bank’ because I couldn’t get their attention. So I tried to blow up my TikTok channel so they could know that I was around. ‘That Thing You Like’ was written after. ‘Ugly Houses’ was already written – a lot of these songs were already written. ‘Country Do’ was written with Steve Wilson JR and was written towards the tail end of my record deal.

I didn’t know that I had to continue to release music to build upon my listening audience because I had a big listening audience when I released The Half Record but again, it just takes a lot of money and as a new artist, I didn’t have that kind of money to continue to fire out songs. So I just had to build the bank up and that’s what I have done. I have a great band and we went on my first headliner tour last year to support that record and tried to earn some of that money back. Anyway, now I am trying to build that bank up and put out some more music.

You mentioned ‘Ugly Houses’ and that is actually one of my favourites. I love the meaning behind it, it’s beautifully sad and a beautiful way to describe women who feel that way about themselves. It’s so common to feel that way!

Thank you! For me, it’s a beautiful thing! It’s kind of like breaking point, it’s saying “ok God, my way’s not working! I’m imperfect, I’m a messed up joker! But you make all things new”. So the hook says “Lord, if you buy Ugly Houses, I’m taking down my for sale sign”. What the song is saying is “no house is too ugly for God to buy, God is in the real estate business but he is also in the renovation business”. He can make all things new and all things beautiful. I have been on a weight loss journey and I always try and encourage my audience. I always tell my girls to embrace their curves. I have always been shapely, I have always been heavy but it wasn’t until I really started heading the words to that song that I started doing some self renovation that my exterior really started to really take better shape and my relationships improved, my musics improved and my physical appearance as a result.

Another song that I am liking, as I was a teenager in the 90’s is 1990’s Heartbreak!

Thank you! I wrote that song with Neil Mason of The Cadillac Three. That song was ahead of its time. That song is maybe 10 years old this year! I was having to wait my turn as an artist for the music that I loved and the music that I wanted to make to make its way back around. I wanted that nostalgic 90’s pedal steel guitar in my music, I wanted everything that I loved, that I grew up with, the Alan Jackson, Travis Tritt and the Reba style, I want to accomplish that in my music but I had to kind of sit out and wait for my turn. That song got me the record deal and when I played it the record label all went round saying “hit”. They never released it, they had Walker Hayes by that time putting out a song about the 90’s and then Lauren Alaina had one about Ladies of the 90’s.

Well that’s a shame because I love that song more!

What would be on your 1990’s heartbreak mix tape?

Ah, oh gosh, well you know I actually have one. (Hannah fetches her cassette carry case which anyone in the 80’s/90’s knows exactly what it looks like!) when I first released that song I made a little cassette tape. Let’s see. 1990’s Heartbreak Songs (shows me the tape) I’ve got Brooks and Dunn ‘Working On My Next Broken Heart’, I have Travis Tritt, Reba, Alan Jackson ‘Wanted’ would be on there.

I love that you still have that, I have lots of my cassettes still!

I still have my cassette tape walkman, my parents are old school, I never show these in an interview haha. I hated to read as a child. My parents are old school, they bought cassettes cause they were old school and I would read these lyrics so I knew who Keith Stegall was and to find out “dang, he’s (Alan Jackson) from Georgia just like me” it made me want to do it too. It got used so much (shows me worn cassette inlay) as I read these lyrics so much because Alan Jackson, man he means a lot to me.

That’s really sweet! I used to read the inlay back to front too otherwise I would get the lyrics wrong! I am terrible at remembering lyrics! My husband is always telling me off for getting the words wrong.

You must write an article on that haha, ‘lyrics I have got wrong over the years.’

Yes maybe I will haha! I of course can’t think of any now. Ooh one, albeit not country but is The Pussycat Dolls ‘When I Grow Up’. Ok so the words are “when I grow up, I wanna see the world, drive nice cars, I wanna have groupies”. But I thought it was “I wanna have boobies” That made sense to me right?

(Hannah falls over laughing! ) you’ve got to write that down I love it!

That’s all you’ll hear when you hear that song now!

(Later I sent Hannah the song to which she replied “She’s totally saying boobies”.)

Garth Brooks, one of the songs I messed up as a kid was a cover of Billy Joel’s Shameless. On the bridge he sings “It’s out of my hands, I’m shameless” I always thought he was singing “the size of my hams” because he had thick thighs so I am with you there!

Hahahahaha

Oh I need to send you all these mistaken lyrics.

The size of my hams and I wanna have boobies

See, there’s a country song right there!

Haha

Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote and is it out there in the world for all to hear?

Yes and no it’s not out there in the world! The first song that I ever wrote was to the tune of Sweet Child of Mine! It was about some boy I had a crush on. I was in high school. It wasn’t that I was robbing the melody, I am glad that I went there naturally because it taught me phrasing and metre and measure. Like a pocket and pockets something that I love as a songwriter. Roger Miller was great at that, Eric Church, his camp are really great at that and I write with a lot of guys, Jerry Steinberg, Michael Heeney, Jeff. I am drawn to good lyrics and good pocket.

You have a twin sister is that right?

I do!

What’s her name and what does she do if that is ok to ask?

Her name is Brittany. She sells insurance for our dad and flips houses. She can sing and does a really good impersonation of Cher and Naomi Judd. She doesn’t get up in public to sing, that’s not her thing.

What song of yours is a family favourite?

Oh yeah, I really don’t know!! Maybe Ugly Houses? My step dad is a fan of that one and he likes Redneck Ass. My mother doesn’t really approve of Redneck Ass but I think she likes it!

Thank you so much Hannah – I really hope to see you back in the UK soon!