Photo: Emily Danielle Jones

When we hear the sound of birds singing, we are usually eavesdropping on some important conversations. Someone is wooing, another is sounding a note of alarm, an aggrieved party is hollering at a rival. Indeed, the birdsong is largely a utilitarian phenomenon, serving to spread vital messages amongst the fluent. Yet, birds also appear to sing for the sake of singing. In the early dawn chorus especially, songbirds chirp and squeal and whistle and bark for the joyous cause of being alive one more day.

When an old friend from home in East Tennessee shared that information with Hannah Juanita, the musician understood something about herself in a new way, and it stuck with her as she began thinking about a follow-up album to her successful debut, Hardliner.

Juanita wrote a song called “Tennessee Songbird,” and made it the title track on the new record, released last month—and when she sings lines like, “Deep inside she is moved to sing//Wants to say out loud she’s alive and free,” she is conveying something autobiographical as well as ornithological.

Juanita came to music as a trade later than some of her peers who are together driving a sparkling revival of traditional country and folk music. She didn’t start in earnest until her mid-20s, but she wasn’t new to music either. Like the songbird, she’d been singing her whole life.

“I was always torn between pursuing music and something more stable. My dad wanted me to be a pharmacist,” Juanita recently told me. “When I finally did form a band and committed to playing and performing, it was because there were a group of friends who were asking me, ‘Why are you not performing? Why are you not singing? Why do you not play music out? Why do you not have a band?’ I’m eternally grateful for those questions because they really made me ask them myself.”

She eventually summoned the confidence to start singing and playing guitar in public, wrote an album’s worth of songs, moved to Nashville, recruited a band, recorded Hardliner, waited out the pandemic, released it in 2021, toured, and all the while became a regular on the Nashville Honky Tonk scene, collaborating with Sierra Ferrell and others. Juanita’s music career was unfolding in a manner consistent with the themes of Hardliner—with resolve, perseverance, and a willingness to keep pushing forward, ever onto a trail unblazed.

The songs on Tennessee Songbird were written in late 2022 and early 2023, as life was starting to feel something like post-COVID. As she hunkered down to write, she reflected on the existential threat the pandemic had represented for big swaths of the music community—including her friends, herself. The streaming model had made touring and playing in front of live audiences essential. It would have been easy to quit—pharmacy school might have looked appealing by comparison. But the songbird exists to sing, even if no one hears, or understands the song, and she chose to keep going.

“I felt like I was doubling down with music and committing to it. And so that’s what came out on this record,” she said. The refrain on the title track, “Tennessee songbird longs to sing, her sweet melody//Whether we listen or not, the songbirds sings,” sets the tone on an album filled with her views on music, and expressions of her dedication to it.

She covers the Joe Nixon song that Vern Gosdin brought to life, “Mother Country Music,” which feels like a hymn in Juanita’s voice. “When I’m deep in disappointment, and cannot face the night, your music lifts me up, takes me closer to the light.”

The song “Honky Tonkin’ for Life” could be considered the record’s anthem. It is a rollicking, affirming love song to music, a celebration of a specific style with which she has become synonymous: “When the music starts I feel it in my heart, singing is the life for me, I’m a Honky Tonk Angel, for that I’m so grateful, wouldn’t trade my wings for anything.”

On “Peace of Mind,” Juanita lays bare the path that awaits anyone who chooses to pursue a career in music. Every verse is the lived experience of young musicmakers in the independent country community—or anyone who pursues their heart’s desire over the safer path. “This ride I’m on cost everything, got to pay to follow a dream//It sure ain’t cheap, but peace of mind is mine to keep.”

The song is at once brilliant, vulnerable, confessional, emotionally resonant, and a fortifying balm, a testament to the strength that exists deep inside us all. It is, in other words, a song that gives expression to the term hardliner—a word that was not only the title of Juanita’s first album, but is also a moniker of sorts for her, and even a description of her style of music.

The term has become so associated with Juanita that she chose to carry it over to this record too, making “Hardliner Blues” the opening number. The song, written by her long-time collaborator Mose Wilson, who also produced the record, is a banger that introduces us to the kind of bad ass narrator familiar in Juanita’s music, and foreshadows what’s to come. “I’m a Honky Tonkin’ baby, with the hardliner blues//I’m a Honky Tonkin’ mama with the hardliner blues//Gotta draw a hardline, oh what’s a country girl to do.”

With “Loose Caboose,” Juanita pays homage to one of the genre’s most enduring traditions, the train song. And even here she uses the occasion to create a metaphor of an empowered person tired of being pulled around in service to someone else’s route.  “She’s a loose caboose operating without a plan, she’s a loose caboose and you never know where she’s going to land.”

“Blue Moon” is maybe the most hardliner of all the hardliner songs on the album. The slow, sultry tune has the feel of a love song, with notes of yearning for a bygone lover, and hints of the broken heart examined in the iconic song with the same name. But as Juanita’s version unfolds, we hear her unmistakable resolve, and the sound of freedom that comes when the songbird, no longer caged by self-doubt or someone else’s expectation, soars on the strength of her own wings:

Over time I learned that I was strong, moving on didn’t take very long.

You became a dusty memory, tucked in a corner of my mind I hardly see.

Well it must be a blue moon ‘cause I’m thinking of you, I’m thinking of you tonight.

You never cross my mind, a dream gone with the morning light, it must be a blue moon tonight.