Wicklund brings grown-up rock to Music Farm

When Lowcountry native Hannah Wicklund hits the stage to kick off her national tour supporting her sophomore LP at the Music Farm on Feb. 8, it will have been six years since she last played her home state — and just as long since the wunderkind singer and guitarist has released an album.

A lot has obviously happened in the intervening years, but the 26-year-old from Hilton Head (and current Nashville resident) is chomping at the bit to showcase her musical and personal evolution with the songs on her new album, The Prize.

Wicklund was a child rock prodigy who cut her teeth on the tourist circuit in her hometown as a teen, and her vocal and instrumental talents garnered strong industry interest before she could legally vote. The gap between records, she said, was far from intentional.

“I pretty much wrote all these songs the year after I released my last record,” she said. “It took a long time to find the right producer. I had lots of different [producers] who either wanted to do a more singer-songwriter, kind of mellowed-out version of me or who really wanted to just amp up the rock elements and kind of cut out of the soul, in my mind.”

She finally found a sympathetic producer in the band Greta Van Fleet (GVF) — bassist/keyboardist Sam Kiszka, who along with GVF drummer Danny Wagner took the live-wire, garage-tinged classic rock and soul of Wicklund’s debut and gracefully added elements of both classic ’70s pop-rock (think: Fleetwood Mac) as well as tasteful bits of psychedelia to the mix.
It’s a fun pivot for Wicklund, whose bluesy Janis Joplin-style wails and brash guitar-hero stylings had previously steered more toward White Stripes-esque simplicity.

“I think I worked on this recording for like a year,” she laughed when describing the process. “Every other experience I’ve had in the studio, it was like, ‘We have 10 days to record 10 songs and make an album.’ This time was vastly different.”

She likened the relaxed approach and sense of exploration to being more like painting (Wicklund is also a skilled painter), and it went along with some of the more forthright and emotionally vulnerable songs on the new record.

“I think for a long time I had confidence on stage, but I didn’t quite have the confidence in myself as a human being and as a woman, separate from the stage,” she said.

Finding her groove

While she has songs from her earliest days that she loves (and is even planning a kind of archival release of many of them this summer), she notes that on songs like the plaintive ballad “Songbird Sing,” her personal and artistic identities are finally coming into their own.

“I think now I am a much more assured version of myself,” she said. “Back then, I wasn’t writing songs with the message that young women needed to hear because I still needed to go through my own [journey].”

That includes, she notes, embracing her femininity on stage and ignoring the overly masculine edicts of traditional rock ’n’ roll scripts.

“I was wearing my art as a custom dress on stage wearing a tiara playing a pink guitar during that European tour with Greta Van Fleet last year,” she laughed. “If you had asked me if I would ever do any of those three things on stage when I was 18 living in Charleston, I would have laughed at you because I was very uncomfortable. I was very uncomfortable with expressing or embracing my femininity, especially in a music venue where women have to know their shit and be twice as good as a guy in order to be respected half as much.

“So it was very empowering and full circle to be to be fully myself on stage, where the rock ‘n’ roller was paired with the girl in me that did ballet and had a castle painted on her wall and loved pink and purple. I kind of lost that along the way.”

Her backing band itself has also evolved beyond her tried and true power trio, with a touring keyboardist on board to recreate some of the parts from the new album.

But Wicklund is clear she’s also not dismissing those early, formative years — she still thinks of her time in Charleston quite fondly, for instance, and is pointedly opening her tour here as an acknowledgment that it’s the place her musical journey really started.

“I owe Charleston a lot,” she said. “My song ‘Strawberry Moon,’ which is also what I named my record label, was written at and references my place out on Stono Drive on James Island, the first place I lived on my own.”

Wicklund takes the stage at Music Farm Feb. 8. Show starts at 9 p.m.; doors open at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door.