Under the Radar Redesign

good for me. At my other schools, if you didn’t do a good job on your homework, there was a sense of shame, but because [Saint Ann’s] was all written reviews, we all felt equal walking into the classroom. So I was able to develop a real pride in my intellectual curiosity, in my reading and in my questioning. I almost started to see my aptitude for reading as my revenge against my dyslexia. I started all these book clubs where we read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick—I tried to start one where we would read Lolita, but I couldn’t get a teacher to agree to do it!”

And that brings us to Chaos Angel, Hawke’s most poetic and personal collection of stories to date. While she had completed the majority of the album—collaborating with Will Graefe and Okkervil River’s Benjamin Lazar Davis and her producer and partner, Christian Lee Hutson—before she began shooting Wildcat, the spare, melancholy title track was written while she was absorbed in the making of that film.

“I think Wildcat shows up in Chaos Angel in some of the Catholic imagery that I use. I’m very moved by that imagery. I wasn’t raised Catholic or in any real denomination, but I was raised extremely curious and sort of under the guise of the idea that ‘no religion is the moon,’ and that there’s something greater,” says Hawke, whose maternal grandfather is Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. “Flannery has this quote about how she used to wrestle with her guardian angel—if you watch the movie, it’s in the scene in the train station, where she talks about how she even used to sock at her guardian angel. And from what Flannery’s talking about, I realized that the songs I’d written all captured these moments where I didn’t listen to that voice, or

It was me wanting to heal the inner voice, so that I could heal the outer person. “ “

wasn’t my best self, and trying to go back to those moments and analyze them.

“And what I started to think about was: What happens if your guardian angel is sick? What happens if your guardian angel is broken?” Hawke continues, her thoughts now tumbling out, much like O’Connor’s words onto a typewritten, ink-smeared page. “I then started to personify my guardian angel as this girl who was as confused as I was. That’s where this idea of the ‘chaos angel’ came from. My own guardian angel didn’t know herself, and she had to find herself in order to be able to protect me. Then I kind of strung it back through the rest of the record. I realized that it was already kind of there, and that this sense of me stumbling around looking for answers was actually my inner voice being a little broken. It was me wanting to heal the inner voice, so that I could heal the outer person.”

That’s where the album’s many meditations and mantras come in: “I want you, I love you, I promise, I’m sorry.” “I need you, I need you, I wanna be alone.” “If you’re OK, then I’m OK.”

Hawke explains, “You have these things that repeat in the record, over and over. What I was trying to show through that is that we get stuck in these patterns and it’s difficult to break out of them—but you have to try.”

Chaos Angel opens with the winsome childhood reflection “Black Ice” and its circular, self-soothing incantation: “Give up, be love, give up, be loved.” Hawke says that song and the title track—which, interestingly, is the final track on the LP—are the record’s most vulnerable. “I chose to bookend the album with those two songs because in some ways, they’re inverted—‘Chaos Angel’ should be the first song, and ‘Black Ice’ should be the last

song, because ‘Black Ice’ is the conclusion that I came to. But I put it first because people listen to first songs more than they listen to last songs, and it’s more important to me that people get the peace and the optimism that I feel in that song. Then in ‘Chaos Angel,’ they get the pain. But I think people are shown lots of pain all the time right now, and being shown a path toward peace and acceptance is less common. It mattered to me more that people saw the solution before they saw the problem. And ‘Chaos Angel’ is sort of the problem. It’s really raw, because it’s confessional about my difficulty in relationships and the struggles that I’ve had.”

Aside from skirting any queries about Stranger Things spoilers, of course, Hawke’s only brief moments of reticence come when she’s questioned about specific, relationship-centric stories behind certain lyrics—like the aptly titled “Dark,” which begins with the gut-punching lyric “I don’t want to cry in your T-shirt ever again,” and which is described in a press release as being inspired by “a major anxiety episode following a soul-shattering breakup”; or the transactional-analytic therapy-speak recitation “Okay,” which Hawke wryly refers to as her codependency anthem. “I think that’s a question more for a shrink than for an article,” she chuckles.

But soon the floodgates crash open once more, as Hawke explains that while making Wildcat, “I was trying to stop the pendulum from swinging so wide. I think I was swinging between, ‘Oh my God, I need to ground myself—I need a home base, I need a place to live, I need a singular partner, I need to know who I am!’ And then I would get myself grounded and feel so stuck and suffocated that I couldn’t breathe and I needed to escape. So then I would escape and be free and there’d be this moment of relief. But then I’d feel chaotic again. I was swinging on this pendulum between suffocation and chaos, and I

was really looking to find more equilibrium within myself, and more patience.

“So I think that was what I was looking to do: take the pendulum and narrow its swing. And I was really on my way by the time I made this record,” she continues, noticeably brightening. “I was communicating differently. Really, the big key for me was just no more lying—not even white lying. I was never a compulsive liar or anything like that, but I was trying to control too much of my life and control the way people thought about me in relationships—getting into relationships and in the beginning being like, ‘Yeah, I’m totally, exactly the person that you want me to be!’ I could sustain that for a while, but then I’d crack and wouldn’t be able to keep it up. So I started being really honest about what my expectations for myself were and who I was, and that started to change everything. Because it’s not the other person that’s suffocating you. It’s the version of yourself that you created, that you think that other person wants, that’s suffocating you. And the only way to find out if that person really likes who you are is to start being who you are. By the time I was recording the album, I was already on my honesty train, and since then, I’ve been catching up with the honesty train and really starting to see the positive ramifications of that in my life.”

And so, with a remarkable body of work both on record and onscreen, Hawke has little to hide or prove anymore. “I don’t feel very fixated on that at the moment. I’m feeling very excited about my life. I think we always have these different fantasies about different versions of our life, and I’ve got a rich fantasy life, but I love my life and I love my job, and I’m not pessimistic about all the chapters I have ahead of me that will look different,” she says. “I’m in a very optimistic mood.”

The Lineup

and maybe no one came to my show, or I’m like this song sucks, why did I even write the song…everything happens for a reason. It’s such an all-encompassing thing to say and actually does help with keeping that perspective with everything going on.”

Initially embarking on a staggering commute, his sojourns between Australia and Sweden on the journey to establish Hazlett soon meant it was time to pack up for good and head to Europe. “It was like I was working on mine or something,” he laughs. “I’d go in for a couple months, go back home for a couple months, save up money. Go back for a couple months [then] we tried working online but I really don’t like that,” he says disdainfully.

While taking to Sweden felt natural, there were some caveats. One culture shock in his new homestead was humour. While missing “that Australian connection – sarcasm doesn’t go down that well in Sweden,” he also found a dual facet to his new countrymen. “Swedes are the nicest people in the world, they’d give you the shirt off their back and invite you to coffee at 1am. But that’s when they know you, and if they don’t know you, they’re very to themselves. No one really talks on the train and people think I’m weird if I say good morning. That was a bit of a shift.”

Moving in the early stages of 2020, when the lockdowns eventually came in, isolation took hold, But it was at this time fate offered up another hand. “It was a very introspective time, too,” says Hazlett. “I spent a lot of time just in my room writing and recording and things like that. So I think it’s almost become a bit of a pressure cooker being over there. Whereas I might have had the safety blanket of being back home in Australia and watching and waiting between being productive and things like that. Whereas moving up here is all I had was this.”

For all his grand movements in embarking on this adventure, stepping forward to his place at the front of the stage didn’t come naturally. Admitting he used to get “very sick and nervous,” before singing in public no matter the size of the crowd. As time passed he found that the more authentic he was in the songs he was writing, the calmer he felt. His moment of clarity in regards to “connecting with people more because it started being from a more honest, authentic place, as opposed to writing what I think people could relate to,” was pivotal. While his earlier material, stretching back to 2016, presents Hazlett’s rawest ambition, it wasn’t until Bloom Mountain that he could confidently say “It’s the first thing that I’m genuinely happy with.”

Last year’s single “Please Don’t Be” was an important step for Hazlett in this realisation. Referring to it as a moment he found his voice, “that song was the first where, I didn’t yell per se but I wasn’t trying to be timid.” As he puts it, “trying to be funny and imitate someone while I was writing that song,” was the catalyst for his confidence to build beyond just his voice. “There’s a few people listening, so maybe I’m not doing as bad as I think I am so yeah, the confidence was growing to some extent [but] it’s a constant battle.”

Stood at the back of the stage in his previous life, it was here that story-telling and picking up on the nuances of life came to fruition. “Just collecting information, basically, like collecting stories,” he says, “as cliche as that sounds from a singer-songwriter. With all the things that I write about, I wear most of my influences on my sleeve to some extent.”

Hazlett’s sound is an emotional culmination of experience and exposure. Songwriter types such as Bruce Springsteen are gently prevalent – who his mum introduced him to – while his own discoveries of the likes of Bon Ivor and The National gently mould the authenticity into a putty of harmonious deliverance.

Honing his sound from the standard fare acoustic guitar and love-lorn worldview into something hued with dewy electronica came from his first sojourn to Sweden. The initial idea was to test the waters with various songwriting partners. But it was the first name that he coupled with that stuck, one Freddy Alexander. “He comes from a different world,” Hazlett gushes. “He’s produced massive pop songs…he’s done everything. And he’s just like a very clean producer who likes to tune everything to the nth degree, and everything’s very

slick in that production.” This was a fateful meeting that uncovered Hazlett’s truth. “I didn’t want the music just to be a guy with a guitar playing singer-songwriter songs, I feel like I want it to be a bit more than that.”

Music is made up of songwriters and a production-savvy counterpart who brings the vision to life. On his current partnership with Alexander, Hazlett motions that “It’s hard to describe, it’s a chemistry thing that’s so hard to find in someone else. Like I love Bruce Springsteen. I could meet Bruce Springsteen, and we could have horrible songwriting chemistry, and that would make me cry myself to sleep for a week straight, but it kind of is what it is at the end of the day. And I guess that’s one of the biggest hurdles that I had to overcome in the past few years of writing and trying to write with more people was that you’re not gonna click with everyone musically.”

There is a certain agency you have to remove when embarking on a musical career. From those partnerships that wind up changing your entire trajectory to traversing the globe, be it touring or for more permanent fixtures, all anyone can do is live by that timeless sentiment printed upon that tattered birthday card. “I think most artists have days where they’re like, why am I doing this?” Reflecting on those still in the ad agency business who are all finding their own success, the greener grass sometimes seems appealing, especially in the reality of “standing outside a cafe using free Wi-Fi to make a phone call,” as he is now. But, some things in life are more important than stability and income. “When I look back, I wasn’t exactly happy, which is what my mum picked up on.” And that’s Hazlett’s charm. He hones in on the minutiae of life and can turn the reality of not wanting a lover to leave, or to embolden senses into something impossible to ignore. “I think in the end, I’d much rather be doing this and seeing where it takes me,” he ends, because after all, everything happens for a reason.

Make youproud

Jensen McRae makes music for main character moments. Solo midnight drives with passing neon lights; unsent texts and beginnings without endings.