Jessica Thompson, singer and guitarist for the Athens, Georgia-based band Hotel Fiction, is laughing just a few minutes into our interview, after I described the band’s music — especially their recently released album, Staring At The Sun, as having a certain “blurriness” to it.
“I’ve never heard the word ‘blurriness’ to describe our music,” Thompson said. “I think that’s cool. I really picked up what you put down there.”
But the truth is that blurriness is a big part of what Hotel Fiction does. Starting with their 2021 debut album, Soft Focus, the band has created music that is both ethereal and grounded. Thompson’s guitars are drenched in reverb and delay, giving them a distinctive dreamlike feel.
And Thompson and her musical partner, co-lead singer and keyboard player Jade Long, are very conscious of creating that feel.
“I think that one thing we both appreciate about having an ethereal feel in our songs is how it places a song in a specific setting,” she said. “A dreamy, held out note can really place a song somewhere and take you out of the room you’re listening in. We enjoy that sort of imaginative way of thinking about it.”
Then there are the vocals, often shared by Thompson and Long. Put simply, they’re gorgeous. The two voices mesh and weave around one another like DNA strands. Adn there’s an innocent sparkle in those harmonies, even when the two are singing about darker subjects.
“Sometimes life feels blurry and dreamlike in a lot of ways,” Long said, “A lot of our songs are about mental health, dissociation, or what is going on in your brain, things that you can’t really fully conceive. The music feels like you can get lost in it. That’s something that inspires us at the moment.”
Growing confidence
That ethereal inspiration has been there since the beginning. Thompson and Long met at the University of Georgia back in 2019, while both musicians were working on other projects. But there was an instant connection that neither could deny.
“When we met for this first band practice, we had a lot of musical chemistry,” Thompson said. “So we kept writing together and we’ve been a band ever since then. There have been other members, but the two of us have been constantly in it, writing and recording and touring and performing.”
As for the vocal harmonies, Long said the duo discovered them early on, as well.
“I think we started singing together right off the bat,” she said, “and as we’ve grown in confidence, we’ve also grown vocally, and I feel like our harmonies have just become stronger and stronger.”
The band’s new album, Staring At The Sun, displays a newfound confidence in Hotel Fiction’s sound, especially in how to best use a recording studio.
“Our first record was us figuring things out,” Long said, “and it was a lot of fun, but now we know so much more about recording and what we want out of our songs, and we can even envision it while we’re writing it. So when we go into the studio, we’re not really afraid of anything.”
The new album has 10 tracks on it, and more than half of them were played live before the album was even recorded, much less released. But Thompson says that over their six-year career, they’ve become known for slipping new material into their shows.
“I think people are really excited about all of them,” Thompson said of the new songs. “It’s a theme in our band that we play a lot of songs that we’ve written before they’re even released, just because we’re excited about them and they’re what inspires us. And this album kind of grew out of people at shows asking, ‘When is this coming out?’ which is definitely a compliment to us. We’re just excited that the songs are all out now and people have gotten the chance to become familiar with them.”
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