You'd never know it to see her on stage, but Hannah Hooper wasn’t even a musician when she first hooked up with the folks who would become unhinged indie-pop quintet Grouplove. She was a visual artist who spent long hours working alone in her studio.
“I was a full-time, totally reclusive painter in New York, trying to make these enormous paintings by myself and hopefully, one day, show them. And I had never studied music, played music, dreamt of being a musician, it just kind of happened. And now we just got into Nashville from Salt Lake City – we’ve had a really, strangely long travel day,” she sighs.
So how does a band with a name like Grouplove do in the single most Mormon-filled place on the planet? Furious record burnings? Or did they applaud the band’s implied stance on polygamy?
“It’s actually pretty funny: we played a radio festival there and there were a lot of girls wearing T-shirts that said ‘I love Jesus’ and stuff, but we brought a great crowd, so we’re excited. It ended up being really, unexpectedly fun.”
No record burnings, then?
“Not that we know of,” she chuckles. “I just don’t know how any of us would have reacted to it. Would we have joined in? Would we have picketed ourselves? I don’t know.”
There shouldn’t be any ambiguity with the band’s reaction to their forthcoming tour of Australia. Our country fell in love with the US quintet very early on, and the feelings are mutual.
“The love we are getting from Australia has been so encouraging,” she rhapsodises. “Any time we have a bad show and are second-guessing what we are doing, we just look towards Australia.”
The band are touring behind their debut album, Never Trust a Happy Song. “The recording process was remarkably similar to doing an EP except for the fact that we were officially a band cause when we did the EP we were just friends recoding, which is so weird to think about now, we’ve been into Ryan [Rabin, drummer]’s basement studio which is actually not as nice as the studio at his parent’s house that we recorded the EP in.”
Rayan’s dad, you see, is Trevor Rabin – best known as guitarist with prog superstars Yes. Still, the smaller digs allowed the band to “figure out how we wanted to introduce ourselves from what we had, and we just ordered a lot of pizza and had a lot of late nights. But I think it was very nice for me specifically, because I’m not used to working with people. It was really nice being able to collaborate.”
The whole existence of the band sounds like it’s been a series of casual accidents, basically. “It’s eerily fated, that’s the way I like to think about it,” she insists, reminiscing about the band’s serendipitous meeting at an artists' retreat on the Greek island of Crete. “Everyone was at a crossroads, everyone was deciding ‘am I supposed to go back to school and do law? Am I going to be working at a sandwich shop trying to pay for my studio? What’s going to happen?’” she laughs. “And this happened. And all together, we really work well as a unit: separately we are kind of these oddballs. We don’t really work without each other. We’re very misunderstood individually.”
So if not for the band, there’d be five very peculiar people doing day jobs? “Five failures! It’d probably be five semi-depressed individuals making art in their own weird way, but never being able to share it. And at the end of the day it is really encouraging to have people respond to you, no matter what. We’d all still make art, but probably not so vigorously.”
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