Musician Abbie Morin knows full well what it takes to try to make it as a fulltime musician—a lot of part-time, maybe less than satisfying odd jobs. The bills, after all, must get paid. And so Morin, who is 27, has been a pizza delivery lady, wait person and house cleaner. All for the cause of making music.

Her latest project, Hammydown, released its debut EP Pizzaface this summer. It explores, not surprisingly perhaps, the emotional and physical tax of coming home every day from work with sore soles and still feel like a slacker. “I think we all feel this pressure that hopefully whatever fulfills us in life will also make us money, and I just think that we were all super set up for failure with that,” Morin says. “I think it’s rare that actually what you love tends to be enough to be comfy.” The conundrum is disheartening, but its ubiquity affords an opportunity to come together around it. “I think we all forget that everyone’s in the same boat.”

Hammydown may be a new presence, but Morin is no stranger to the New England music scene. Growing up in New Hampshire, she discovered a passion listening to records of Queen, The Beatles, and Nirvana with her father. For almost 13 years, Morin played acoustic guitar. It was her trusty partner through her start as a solo artist; during her almost in a self-titled band out of Burlington, Vermont; and during a four-month tour as an acoustic duo. Morin describes her sound during that time “folk, Americana-style.”

Abbie Morin of Hammydown. Photo Courtesy of Robert Fitzsimmons

After the tour, though, her sound began to change. “Once I returned from that trip, I found myself beachside in Long Beach Island, New Jersey at a family house,” Morin recalls. “I was sort of starting to feel really boxed in by my acoustic guitar in general. I couldn’t play a show without breaking a string, and I just was feeling a little tired of my wistful country love songs.”

So she experimented with her great-uncle’s Gretsch drum kit. “It was exactly the change in energy that I needed to start finding the new voice of what I was wanting to say, at this stage of my life.” she says. “I put down the acoustic and started writing from the drum kit and that’s when the Hammydown stuff started to emerge.” She bought an electric guitar—a Fender Jazzmaster—and moved to Northampton to join her best friend, Hannah Mohan, of And The Kids fame. There, she met bassist Josh Speers and drummer Jacob Burnstein. They began playing as Hammydown this past January.

Whereas Morin’s memories of New Hampshire and Vermont’s bucolic landscapes and lush nature informed her earlier folk music, Hammydown’s unadorned, unpretentious garage-pop “takes place right at the dishwasher or something.” Strenuous jobs, unearthly hours in an unfamiliar town provided Morin space for introspection and reflection on her goals. As she hunkered down in her apartment after work, exhausted, practicing on her electric guitar, she had the space to reflect on “letting it be okay to write about what most people find to maybe be mundane, or just writing about the everyday things in life. I used to kind of feel like I have to write about this huge event, or love, or loss, and this time I was just like this is just where I’m at right now.”

In Northampton, Morin found a community of people at a similar place in life. “New England is such a kindred-feeling place,” she says. “I’ve always felt like my community is around. The states I call home—I like to think my music kind of creates that kindred spirit, like ‘We’re all in this together.’” Hammydown’s music is purposely lighthearted to make it universally enjoyable, in appreciation of the kindred spirit. “As much as we want to get heavy, it’s important to me that it’s something you want to sing along to,” she says.

Abbie Morin, Hammydown. Photo Courtesy Brad Bahner

Despite the strain, there is a net positive outcome to all the work Morin has shouldered through. “There’s always an opportunity to make connections with someone,” she says. “I think I’ve learned that I can’t let my weariness and my exhaustion sometimes make me blind to the fact that even the customers that are coming in—there’s an opportunity to meet people and be close to people and to be continuing to just foster that community.”

Want to hear what Morin listens to for musical inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify channel to hear what’s on her playlist and on the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Abbie Morin–musician, Hammydown
Northampton, Massachusetts
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Top image: Abbie Morin, Hammydown. Photo Credit Kayhl Cooper 2017

The post Abbie Morin: Working 9 to 5 And Then Some appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our April/May 2016 print issue. 

It’s a cold day in January when I speak with Hannah Mohan, guitarist/singer and primary songwriter for the western Massachusetts-based And the Kids, who calls me from amidst a month-long recording session at Montreal’s Breakglass Studios. Friends Share Lovers, the 10-song album they’re crafting with the aid of Canadian producer/musician Jace Lasek, is scheduled for release in June on Northampton, Massachusetts’ Signature Sounds label.

“We’re in the studio only during Mercury in retrograde,” Mohan notes, referring to the astrological phenomenon that’s customarily associated with confusion and delay.

“Isn’t that crazy?”

Part of the reason the band is recording in Montreal is that keyboardist Megan Miller is Canadian and had the unfortunate experience of being deported from the United States a while back. New York native Taliana Katz, who had just begun playing with the band when they performed for National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Concert series last June, has assumed bass duties and was unceremoniously tossed into “the mom van” for two North American tours with the bands Highly Suspect and Ra Ra Riot, including a stop at Austin, Texas’s requisite South by Southwest rock roundup in March.

“I had just gotten back from India and moved up to western Mass. from New York,” Katz says of her whirlwind induction by fire. “When I got there, we talked about Tiny Desk and decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to play it because I had just started. But when we went to the label to do a preview of the concert, we tried it as both a trio and a Hannah-[and]-Becca-[Lasaponaro] duo, and [Signature Sounds] decided that it would be all three of us. It was a pretty surreal experience!”

When I ask if the band has considered moving to a big city like New York or L.A., their answer is appropriately adventurous.

“We are constantly considering every city we go to,” Mohan laughs. She says she’d like to stay in Montreal but admits that the non-Canadian band members would then likely have similar problems to the border woes Miller has suffered. “Yeah, we already decided—no more deportations.”

The group came together at the Institute for Musical Arts (IMA), a nonprofit music education facility in the hills of Goshen, Massachusetts, dedicated to supporting women and girls in music. The camp was cofounded by Ann Hackler and June Millington, the latter a Filipina musician who fronted the trailblazing early ’70s all-female band Fanny. After Mohan and drummer Lasaponaro dropped out of high school, they were encouraged to see what the place might have to offer them.

And the Kids | Photo by Pierre Manning

“Our parents sent us to the IMA to make sure that we were actually doing stuff,” Mohan chuckles. The band’s name stems from a Peter Pan-ish tale of teen rebellion and resourcefulness that brought Mohan and Lasaponaro together during their wayward youth.

“It used to be ‘And the Kids and the Pirates,’ ” says Mohan. “We had a group of friends, and we all lived on this island [in the Connecticut River] for one summer. We built a huge fort out of all these tarps and just…lived on this island,” she laughs. “Sometimes we’d go out for supplies. To everyone else we were just ‘The Kids,’ but to us, we were ‘The Pirates.’ ” The name was eventually shortened to keep it simpler.

The band’s music is, like its musicians, unusually original and not at all constrained by any conventional pop sensibility. Buoyed from a young age by a strong network of supporters, they’ve been allowed to grow artistically in a way that is rare in the music biz—a way that is perhaps aware of the commerciality of the medium but not at all beholden to it or even that interested in it.

Frontwoman Mohan is a striking individual who’s remarkably confident and comfortable in her own skin—skin that’s been customized with unapologetic, unconcealable tattoos including a solid black line that dramatically splits her lower lip and gives her a tribal aura, and the words Folk the System emblazoned across her upper chest.

Her voice sirens in a mellifluous, elfin vibrato from the upper octaves, a sound that makes your spine tingle a little in a rare way, like the first time you heard Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow.” Mohan’s singing has been compared to that of ’80s punk/new wave icon Siouxsie Sioux, though she points mostly to more contemporary artists like Feist and Arcade Fire as influences and even some much older favorites like Buddy Holly and Jimmy Rogers.

“I grew up listening to country music. Oddly enough, my parents were really into pop country. And then I met Rebecca, and I started listening to ’60s rock. That’s kind of where I think the structure comes from, and then…I don’t know, I like noise music…a lot of different stuff.”

Lasaponaro has added to the mix some interesting percussion—another quality that gives the band a unique sound—including sleigh bells and glockenspiel, an instrument she describes as “what I imagine magic must sound like.”

She adds, “I think the percussion instruments add a little ear candy to the music—something people are maybe not expecting to hear, and when they do, they’re like, ‘What was that?’”

https://andthekidsmusic.bandcamp.com/

And the Kids – Hannah Mohan, guitar/vocals | Rebecca Lasaponaro, drums/percussion | Taliana Katz, bass | Megan Miller, keyboards
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Photos by Pierre Manning

The post The Kids Are Alright appeared first on Take Magazine.