“Do you remember getting older? Can you tell me what it’s about?” Hana Vu asks on “Airplane,” a Killers-esque pop-rock anthem from her sumptuous sophomore album. Romanticism, out today via Ghostly International, is an album that asks more questions than it answers. The 23 year-old singer songwriter, named “LA’s indie-pop prodigy” by the Los Angeles Times, questions and recontextualizes everything: her past, her place in the world, and what it means to be young.
Sitting on a concrete bench at a noisy intersection in Koreatown, Vu tells Teen Vogue she discarded her usual rigid thinking and wrote this record by looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. “I really tried to think about putting things in different contexts,” Vu elaborates. “Changing your perspective is like a choose-your-own-adventure of how you're supposed to live and feel on any given day.”
She describes herself as “naturally downtrodden,” but looking back at the album now, she’s surprised that “it wasn’t as sad as it could be.” Things have shifted for her over these past few years. “I feel like a pretty optimistic and hopeful person. I didn’t think that was a part of my personal narrative, but I think it is a part of me that I have realized after listening to the record.”
Vu speaks with the wisdom of a world-weary elder, even as she playfully asks me what adulthood is like: “Your frontal cortex is developed, mine isn’t,” she notes. On the anthemic ballad “22,” she sings in her contralto croon,“I'm just getting old. I'm just 22,” which can be interpreted earnestly or sarcastically — just how she likes it. “I don't even feel that young anymore because of TikTok,” she adds wryly. "I'm not the youngest person alive anymore."
She’s been described as an “old soul” all of her life; it’s a term that she doesn’t particularly like. Spending lots of time alone with her thoughts and being naturally introspective and morose can be a bit alienating. “I don't belong in any generation. I don't belong as a human on this planet. I'm from somewhere else,” she says. And with a smirk — “That's the Aquarius Moon in me.”
At 17 years old, Vu released her 2018 debut EP How Many Times Have You Driven By, but by that point the San Fernando Valley local had been cutting her teeth at scrappy SoCal venues — most notably the infamous Smell in Downtown L.A., a bastion for young talent. Vu wasn’t interested in making the garage music of her peers; she toiled on her laptop with a rudimentary knowledge of production, cutting tracks that would meld perfectly on any “indie chill,” playlist. Looking back she cringes a bit at some of her production choices but harkens back to the Joni Mitchell quote — “Songs are like tattoos” — and adds “what is a record other than my truth?”
Romanticism, her second full length album, is miles away from her teenage EPs. It’s the kind of album she’s always wanted to make. From a production standpoint it’s big, hooky, and not the least bit subtle. “I’m not really interested in being obscure,” she says with confidence.
She does have a fondness for classical art and aesthetics. She chose to replicate the striking baroque painting Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi for her album cover (with Vu as a stand-in for Holofernes) and cites The Eternal Drama, a Jungian analysis of myth, as an inspiration for Romanticism. But as we wander outside the gates of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, a place she’s been fascinated by mostly because it stands out amidst the corporate buildings that surround it, her youthful rebellion kicks in. Annoyed that we can’t enter through the locked gates of the Renaissance-styled structure, she cooks up a plan to lie to a security guard to get us inside. The scrutinizing guard quickly denies us. “Now I really want to sneak in,” she says with a playful mischievousness.
The transition years between teenagedom to adulthood are a dissonant time marked by mixed messages of how one should act and feel. On one hand they’re supposed to be “best years of your life” and on the other they’re dampened by the struggles and pitfalls of self-discovery.
“As [I] get older, [I’m] more aware that love is fleeting– everything is fleeting,” Vu explains. “There is great sadness when you come into contact with other people and you love them.” Romanticism grapples with that grief and discomfort with guitars and grace. On album opener “Look Alive,” Vu sings about the disappointments of growing up: “There's no song in my heart. Like I thought there was when I was young and I fell apart.” But her melancholic feelings of lost innocence come with some guilt. She retracts her grievance, apologizes to the listener. “I’m sorry ‘bout the way I am. Please move along,” she sings dejectedly.
The singer-songwriter finds herself straddling two worlds: she mourns her youth as she lives through it, observing with the detachment of an outsider. It’s something like the Gen Z answer to Lena Dunham’s Girls: she’s unafraid to depict the cringy, joyful, and painful moments of her generation devoid of the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia that comes with age. Paradoxically, Vu admits she’s an incredibly nostalgic person. “It doesn't really matter what age I am. I'm nostalgic for things when I was 10,” Vu says. “And I'll probably be nostalgic for things, like, forever.” There is a comfort in retreating to her memories especially in a world with so much stimuli. She notably doesn’t carry her phone with her on our walk around Koreatown. “I'm just worried about the prevalence of the phone,” she says. “As we ingest more incredibly stimulating content, the actual world seems kind of mid.”
As our interview winds down, Vu asks me point blank: “Are you afraid of dying?” I admit that I am afraid. I don’t think I’m ready to go just yet. “Are you afraid to live?” she presses. Vu tells me she’s not necessarily scared of dying but fears life might get redundant. “I feel like probably at a point where I'm 60 or 70, I'm like, ‘I'm fucking bored.’ You know?” I can’t hold back my laughter —it seems impossible for someone with such a creative mind to be bored of what life has in store for them. I prompt her to explain to me what she’s learned as she’s gotten older since that might provide some insight into this idea. She replies bluntly, “That nothing is real. And the only thing that matters is love.”
And much like the curiosity and uncertainty found in Romanticism she retreats a bit. “Then sometimes I'm like, ‘what even is love? It's made up.’ And then I'm like, ‘Everything's made up,’ And then I'm like, ‘Why am I here?’” In many ways Hana Vu has answered her own question in “Airplane,” about what getting older is all about — a never-ending quest to define and redefine our place in the world, and realizing that not everything has an answer.
