Fana Hues has been making music longer than she’s been walking. “I started singing with my family band when I was two,” she tells me as we sit in the balcony of The Ryman Auditorium before she opens for Lucky Daye. “Granted I was just a two-year-old baby. I wasn’t holding no harmonies, but they had me up there.”
Her newest album, Moth, is a vibey, pop R&B album that shows a mature artist who has put in the effort on her craft. The effort started with not one, but two family bands that featured many of her other eight siblings. “I wouldn’t say it was a rivalry thing, but we would perform with my dad in a band called Black Nation, and then we would perform with my stepdad and songs that he wrote and we had another name, Wild Nation.” She wasn’t writing songs at that age, but she learned how to hold an audience’s attention. “I learned showmanship,” she tells me.
When the bands disbanded after her brother graduated high school, Hues got involved with a nonprofit organization that focuses on teaching emotional literacy though art called AIM 4 The Heart in L.A.. The program helped her creatively process her emotions, but it also put her on deadline. “I started writing songs religiously with that group when I was 16 and it was each week, new song new song new song.” When she finally put a song or two on Spotify she was noticed in a big way. Tyler, the Creator slid into her DMs while he was working on his soon-to-be Grammy winning album, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, and asked Hues to do a feature on the album.
Hues has put all this effort together on her new album, Moth. The song “Rental” is the album’s true banger. The album involves multiple forms of seduction, and in Rental Hues is playing hard to get. “You have to keep my attention in order to win me over. That’s the space that I was in.”
In the very next song she is on the other side of the equation. “I’m gonna be honest,” she says, looking directly into my eyes, “If I like somebody and I feel like I cannot crack their code…it makes me like them more. Cause, like, you like me a bit but what is it that speaks to your heart? What makes you tick? I wanna know.” And I wanted to know. So I asked her. “I like acts of service because it means you were thinking about me when I wasn’t even around. And I like gifts. I don’t like love bombing. Like, PROVE IT. I need to believe you, and I don’t believe these men half the time.”
The album is full of production from collaborators Anoop D’Souza, Josh Grant and others. But between songs, often on the album the production falls from the instruments, leaving them laid bare in natural, unprocessed tones. “On a lot of the album, I’m talking about something sassy but everything that I do has intention and meaning and I want the music to reflect more than anything just being a fun song. I wanted there to be a through line between my emotions because that’s how I feel them.”
The thought, intention and lifelong craft come together in the song “Apple Picking.” It’s a head-in-the-sky love story, like a scene in a Disney movie. It even has birds chirping over violin as she wonders aloud of what this love might be after such a wonderful first impression. It’s a song that, if you listen closely, tells a whole story. “When you’re writing songs, they come from your heart, spirit and all those things, but then there is also a point where I know it’s going to be perceived by people and I have to think of how to keep them engaged in the story so that they want to hear the end of it,” said Hues. So each time the chorus comes along in the song it changes, ever so slightly, to reveal the next chapter in the relationship. At one point the story and the song come to a complete stop, before coming back for a coda. It’s a lifetime of work in one song.