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Indie pop rock has an inherent buoyancy to it. The bright guitar sheen, the punchy drums, the vocals often held in high harmonies—there’s a kind of careless optimism in the sound, felt or feigned. In Hannah Glavor’s case, the playful fun coming through the Portland songwriter’s new album, Hold On, Hold Tight, is hard earned.
Those who’ve been around the city’s music scene might know Glavor’s name from years back. The musician moved to Portland in 2007 and quickly established herself in the local indie folk world. “It was kinda the Lumineers days,” she says.
There was fast momentum—releasing EPs, putting together a band, opening several shows and touring the country. By 2016, though, things were paused as bandmates left the state and Glavor herself had taken a full-time job as an art director.
She was ready to kick things off again in 2017, heading to New York to play a few shows in celebration of her 30th birthday. During that trip, following a string of severe migraines, Glavor discovered she had a brain tumor lodged in her pineal gland. The tumor was in the center of the brain and considered inoperable, but not to operate meant Glavor would die. She went for it and, miraculously, she lived. “All the work that I’d put into jumping back into music and continuing as a songwriter turned to recovery and survival,” she says.
The recovery was no small feat, but music played a large part in it. Glavor was scheduled to sing for a friend’s May show at Doug Fir, just a couple months after her March surgery. “That was my beacon,” she says. “I couldn’t do anything during my recovery. I could functionally walk, but it would lay me out with a migraine for an hour. But I was like, if I stay true to [recovering], maybe I can sing one song, and maybe if I sing one song, maybe I can do music again. That’s what got me through.”
Slowly, she made her way back. Glavor put together a collection of songs and eventually released a full-length debut, So Far, So Long. But then came another unexpected challenge—the album came out in early 2020.
“I was like, I can do it, I’m alive!—and then the world ended,” she laughs. “Honestly, the pandemic felt like being trapped in my body while I was recovering from brain surgery—there were a lot of parallels. You’re quarantined, you can’t go outside. There was a lot of rehashing—what would I want to say if I could never say it again?”
What came from those big questions would be her newest, Hold On, Hold Tight, which arrives Sept. 26. The album, co-produced by Glavor and Cameron Spies, is an exploration of letting go, and just living. That self-acceptance comes through, as in the single, “Ghost of It,” which pivots between an airy beat soaked in Glavor’s verses and more torrential, electric swells that reflect the album’s rock-leaning sound. The delivery is confident, especially in Glavor’s vocal performance, which feels both looser and more nuanced, like a stream rippling between stones. While past albums were about perfecting, this one was made to enjoy.
“I was like, if I’m gonna die, I have to get everything done, and it has to be perfect because I might not make it, and that misses the whole point,” she says. “I want to take that into performing and this release season. I am enough, having fun is enough—remembering to live.”
It isn’t just rainbows from here on out. Glavor still experiences long-term side effects from her surgery surrounding sleep and sensitivity to light (not the easiest thing for a musician and production manager). But she’s making progress, both within herself and her sound. “I made perfectly fine music before, but I really feel like I’m saying something as if it’s the last thing I could say, for the first time,” she says. “It’s unfortunate it took me that long.”
SEE IT: Hannah Glavor album release show at Polaris Hall, 635 N Killingsworth Court, polarishall.com. 7:30 pm Thursday, Sept. 26. $15. 21+.