The Colby Echo

Issue date: 4/20/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Courtesy of Hanna Pickwell

"And I'd risk some broken knuckles just to feel his features crack..." Singing these words with incongruous sweetness at the Sierra Leone benefit concert, Hanna Pickwell '10 officially had my attention (fun fact: she actually carried out said feature-cracking against a disloyal high school boyfriend, and was subsequently suspended for three days). Recognizable from last semester's "Slices of Life" short play festival and Powder & Wig's The Foreigner, the tentative anthropology major/Chinese minor from two and a half hours outside of Boston is also a founding member (with Ben Bernstein '10 and Sei Harris '10) of folk band The Headrights, in which she sings lead vocals and plays the banjo.

Pickwell, as talented an actress as a musician, told me in an interview that she does drama "more for the social reasons than for any artistic expression." But of her love for music, she related after some contemplation: "I like the way it can evoke emotions and ideas outside the realm of personal experience. I love that there are so many aspects artists can play with to portray a certain idea, from lyrics to melody to instrumentation to time signature and rhythm. You can do anything with music!"

Her introduction to it was (despite her prophetic, pun-begging surname) the piano, for which lessons were a tumultuous affair: "I would take them and quit them and take them and quit them, because it was easier for me to play by ear instead of reading music," she recalls. "I would always cheat, and have my teacher play the song for me and I would remember it and just practice it that way." This went on until the music got too difficult to learn by ear alone, at which point she gave up on lessons entirely. Pickwell went through this with many instruments as a child, eventually setting music aside.

Years later at thirteen, walking down the street "kind of bummed out, I noticed something flashing in the corner of my eye," Pickwell wrote in an e-mail. "I walked over to the curb and found a CD, like someone had thrown it out of their car or something." A compilation simply labeled "ROCK," it was almost entirely "really terrible." The one song that jumped out for reasons she "couldn't quite put her finger on" was Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." Inspired by lyrics of "a different breed," Pickwell taught herself guitar, "wrote some awful, angsty songs at the beginning of high school," then stopped writing but stuck with guitar and piano.

Continued...

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