New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Australian-born, LA-based musician Hazel English has shared "Nine Stories," her first single since 2020's WAKE UP produced and collaboration with Jackson Phillips (Day Wave). The single, a blissed out jangly guitar song with airy vocals and simple, pulsing beat creating an idyllic swirling teenage dream, is accompanied by a brilliant self-directed official video.
Hazel English's brilliant and bold debut album WAKE UP technically-speaking was only released in 2020, but her story has grown in the hearts and minds for much longer. It was 2016 when her breakthrough single 'Never Going Home' shimmered into being with an unstoppable magic that's seen it being listened to over a mind-boggling amount of times. An EP followed, then that by another (compiled into 2018's 'Never Going Home/'Just Give In' double EP), which consolidated Hazel with status as one of the most talked-about new indie-pop artists around. The whole thing was produced by indie sensation Jackson Phillips (Day Wave) after a chance encounter at a Bay Area book store blossomed into a creative collaboration of pure synchronicity.
After exploring collaborations both with songwriters and producers on WAKE UP (produced by Ben H Allen and Justin Raisen), Hazel and Jackson -both by now transplanted to from Oakland to Los Angeles- reconnected once again during the pandemic's localising parameters and began collaborating, sending ideas back and forth to their neighbour amidst peak lockdown. "Jackson and I have such a great flow when it comes to working on music that it was easy to essentially pick up where we had left off. Our process together is very quick and fun, no second guessing," recalls Hazel of their rekindled creativity.
"I also think the pandemic and time at home got me thinking a lot about my past and remembering high school experiences and those kinds of feelings that were so vivid at that time. So I found myself writing lyrics that were inspired by some of those experiences and then I kind of created a whole new story out of it."
The bittersweet 'Nine Stories' began as a track which Jackson started on his popular Twitch channel and then sent to Hazel to record the melody and lyrics. "'Nine Stories' is Part One of a series of interlinking narratives that make up one bigger story," she explains.
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