Grown-woman anthems

Sacramento-based singer-songwriter Hannah Jane Kile is 23 years old, and she has already written and recorded four albums. Two of those recordings are actually dropping this weekend, and Kile says that listening back to the earlier albums—Becoming Someone and Little Blue Heron—today is like reading snippets of her teenage diary. They also mark how much she’s grown as a musician.

“Some of the lyrical choices were funny and random,” she said, “and I do like to listen back to how much my voice has changed. I’ve moved forward, especially with these new albums. I feel like I really found my voice this time. Basically, it feels like I have the same voice, but there are more tools in my tool box now. … I have a lot more ways to make myself emotional.”

Arranging and recording two collections of music was a huge undertaking that consumed most of Kile’s spare time for the past two years, and it was also a valuable learning process. “I better understand how to serve a song not just as a vocalist, but as a guitarist,” she said. “A lot of what I learned is about staying out of the way of a really good song. You don’t have to put a bunch of stuff on top of it.”

Kile is celebrating with a double-album release on Friday, June 1, at Chico Women’s Club. She’ll be backed by a nine-piece band.

Originally from Auburn, Kile is a familiar face in Chico’s music scene. She’s performed extensively throughout Northern California and now lives in Sacramento with her boyfriend and drummer, Corey Morgan Strange.

Much of Kile’s music is classified as Americana, but she also touches on jazz, blues and more theatrical styles of singing. The first of two new albums is They Almost Got Away, a relatively loose collection of songs Kile wrote as a teenager that don’t share a common thread. The other, Broken Girls Anthem, is more of a concept album, exploring themes of family, growth and practicing self-love.

“We didn’t sit down and say, ‘This is going to be a concept album,’ but I wrote all of these songs at a similar place in my life—getting out of an abusive relationship, finding myself again, falling in love, being with my family, realizing how lucky I am to have the family I do,” she said. “The whole album is about self-acceptance and forgiveness, joy and sadness, and it’s all centered around love.”

Kile wrote the album’s title track on a keyboard she’d received as a Christmas present. She’s struggled with anxiety for most of her life, and recalls feeling particularly low at the time. One source of insecurity is working in an industry that tends to reward artists based on fitting a cookie-cutter standard for physical appearance.

“I just cried and cried because I felt so awful about myself,” she said. “Then I heard from my friend, and she said, ‘If you could see you the way I see you …’ and that kind of flipped the switch for me. I started thinking about all of the women in my life and my best friends growing up—who I think are some of the most beautiful human beings on this planet, inside and out—and watching them pick themselves apart.

“It was damaging for them and also for me,” she continued. “I want to set an example for other young women, and especially young artists who don’t fit the mold.”