Positivity in a pandemic: Hana Bryanne on making an EP and going viral on TikTok

In a time of great uncertainty for all, Hana McElroy, or Hana Bryanne as she’s known online, uses the changes happening around her to her advantage. The 18-year-old California native was a high school senior when the pandemic hit, and she used the remainder of 2020 working on her first EP, Holy Ground, which she released in December. With more people flocking to the internet for entertainment and comfort, McElroy began posting on TikTok, and what initially began as making fancams of Dr. Fauci morphed into documenting her music-making process. She recorded a video showing the early stages of a song she had just begun working on, and to her surprise, it went viral. 

This video launched into the sights and “For You Pages,” or FYP, of many. One such person was me. That video popped up on my FYP the night she posted it and I followed her immediately. From that point on, I wanted to know more. She struck me initially with her raw lyrics and obvious songwriting skill, but from the time she greeted me through the screen for our interview, what remained was her unabashed excitement for everything she had to talk about. 

I had the chance to chat with McElroy, during which she described her young self as “such a country music kid” who spent time singing, playing the guitar, and putting on backyard shows with her sister, all the while idolizing Taylor Swift: “I don’t think that if I hadn’t been, like, such a fan of hers, that I ever would have written a song…. Loving her music gave me an outlet that felt all my own, and so, that transformed into songwriting.” She went on to talk about the spiral-bound notebooks decorated with nail polish that hold the beginnings of her songwriting career dating all the way back to fourth grade. 

Though Taylor Swift is a big part of McElroy’s songwriting even today (she even nods to Swift’s 2010 hit song “Mean” in the title song of her EP “Holy Ground”), she pulls a lot from the music that was played around her house growing up. She cites Joni Mitchell, Guns N’ Roses, Norah Jones, Patty Griffin, and Bruce Springsteen as some of her influences but admits that it didn’t quite feel like her music. During middle school, she was “blasting Panic! At the Disco” and Bleachers; she describes this time of her life as weird because she had this fixation with music, but not yet the technical knowledge to back it up. 

McElroy remedied this by applying to a music production summer program at New York University when she was still in high school. She spent the summer between her junior and senior year in New York City, living in the dorms and taking classes with other students who were equally as passionate about music as she was. This laid the foundation for her future music-making, and it’s a good thing she went when she did because the pandemic hit halfway through her next school year. 

In those first few months of quarantine, she started working on a song that inadvertently encapsulated the next year of all of our lives. The song is called “What a Year Today Has Been” and is one of three songs that show up on Holy Ground. To create the EP, she combined that song with the aforementioned title song that contains “religious imagery juxtaposed with queer themes,” as well as a third song named “Call It a Favor” that was written after a bout of writer’s block in her junior year. She recorded this EP at Tool Shed Studios and put it on music platforms before the year was up.

Though McElroy was pleasantly surprised at the response the EP was getting in the first month after its release date, she saw an obvious increase in listeners after a TikTok of hers went viral. She says that she wrote the song, recorded the video, and then went to sleep right after, waking up to find that the video had garnered 15 thousand views by morning. The recognition grew from there; she has since been featured on Tom Rosenthal’s “Rosenthal’s Relative Unknowns” Spotify playlist, and the video now has almost 340 thousand views and 103.6 thousand likes. The viewers of this video loved it so much that McElroy posted a follow up TikTok last month that added a few more lines to the initial song. As mentioned in the caption, the response she received expedited her recording process and encouraged her to book studio time so that the song can be released as soon as possible.

The song that brought on all this attention is untitled, yet McElroy was able to channel what she calls a character of her fifteen-year-old product-of-the-internet self, saying that the song is about “being super angsty and not feeling like you have a real identity; Grasping at straws trying to figure out who you are, but also who you are is changing so quickly that you find a foothold and then it’s gone.” Perhaps the viewers resonated with the song so much because of the change the pandemic has forced everyone to embrace. McElroy recognizes, too, that the pandemic altered her fundamentally and is grateful for that: “It demanded something of me that I didn’t know I had and had to figure out how to have…. I’d like to think that I’m an entirely different person than I was a year ago, and I’d like to think that that’s for the better.”

Her appreciation for the circumstances that enabled her to produce her EP and gain this recognition does not negate the fact that, like many of us, she cannot wait until the day it is safe to experience live music again, and she would especially like to perform her music for a live audience. Maintaining her optimism, she has a goal of completing an album sometime in the next year or so. Until then she will continue to use TikTok, which she appreciates not just because of what it does in terms of helping her gain popularity, but also the community created there. She points out that there’s no other app that you “could see Malala [Yousafzai] calling Mia Khalifa ‘bestie.’” She closed out the interview by giving me a few songs everyone should listen to:

“Ambrosia” by Rosie Tucker (which McElroy described “as close to a perfect song as I have heard in a while.”)

“Something to Believe” by Weyes Blood

“party 4 u” by Charli XCX

You can keep up with her on TikTok and Instagram, both under @hanabryanne. Her EP, Holy Ground is available on most streaming services. Everyone should experience Hana Bryanne’s excitement and energy for themselves. 

Article by Baylie Raddon

Photos by Cat Dinh 

Art by Harper (@ophanims)