And the Kids Vocalist Hannah Mohan to Release Debut Solo LP, 'Time Is a Walnut'

After nearly a decade fronting indie-pop band And the Kids, Western Massachusetts singer and songwriter Hannah Mohan will release her first solo project.

The album also comes amid the longest stretch Mohan has spent in one place since she left home at 16 to hop freight trains and hitchhike across North America. Making music has been at the center of Mohan’s life ever since, even as other circumstances have changed—sometimes radically. A long-term relationship crumbled in 2019. Then the pandemic arrived, bringing an end to her band. After writing a batch of new songs taking stock of her situation, Mohan asked Alex Toth of Rubblebucket and Tōth to produce them, the latest installment of a longtime friendship and occasional creative collaboration. During the heart of the coronavirus lockdown, they spent a week recording in Mohan’s basement in Massachusetts, with subsequent overdubs at Toth’s place in Brooklyn. 

"We worked so hard that week that I don’t think he slept the whole time,” Mohan says. “It was a lot. When he left we cried, because when we finally stopped, there was so much emotion.” 

Although Time Is a Walnut is a breakup album, don’t go in expecting tearjerkers. Mohan draws from a richer palette here, with themes of messy eroticism on the sultry “Soaked,” altered consciousness on the buzzy rocker “Heaven and Drugs” and confounding expectations (including your own) on “Rebel.” Lady Lamb, a fellow icon in the queer community, guests on the deceptively sunny “Hell,” and Mohan vents her anger on the tightly coiled “Peace Be the Day” as she seeks to make sense of her breakup. Throughout, the songs showcase Mohan’s powerful voice, prismatic melodicism and distinctive lyrical sensibility as she processes major events in her life.

“I'm still just trying to figure it out, you know?” she says.

Mohan has long been adept at making her own meaning. She left home in Northampton when she was 16, and spent the next five years crisscrossing the continent, busking on the street for a living and learning songs around the campfires she shared with other traveler kids on the road. Though she doesn’t talk much about the experience, it was obviously formative.

“It really made me who I am,” Mohan says. “For one thing, when I had to live off busking, it taught me to really project my voice and sing loud. I had to learn what would make people turn and stop and look at me and put $1 in my guitar case.”

That knowledge served her well when she came back to Northampton in 2012 and started And The Kids with a friend from middle school. The group released three LPs between 2014 and 2019 and toured hard across North America before dissolving in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. As she emerges back into the world with Time Is a Walnut, Mohan is ready to embrace whatever comes next, even though it’s not always clear what shape it will take.

“I think it’s about accepting the gray space, of being in that space of not knowing,” she says. “You know all those little seasons of your life where you’re riddled with anxiety? It’s just about accepting the chaos, sinking into it like sinking into a couch.”

Time Is a Walnut Tracklisting

 1. Time Is a Walnut

 2. Therapist

 3. Soaked

 4. Heaven and Drugs

 5. Problems

 6. Hell

 7. Runaway

 8. Peace Be the Day (Focus track)

 9. Upside Down

10. Happy or Sad

11. Rebel

12. Saturn

Photo Credit: George Rae Teensma

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