HULA HI-FI

Hula Hi-Fi makes a kind of music they’ve taken to calling ‘Hawaiian Noir’. What is Hawaiian Noir? More of a feeling than a sound, it's tropical intimacy turned into notes and chords. The shiver you get when the sun sets after a day on the water. The sleepy embrace of a dreaming lover beside you, the sun not yet fully risen, on the day you’re supposed to fly back home. It’s what Brazilians call ‘Saudade’: a nostalgic, melancholic longing for someone beloved and lost. It’s something dangerous and blissful, that feeling you get leaning over the edge of a cliff to see the waves crashing below. It’s vibrating strings, the warm hum of an upright bass, the soft pluck of a ukulele, and a lilting lap steel guitar that backstrokes through the empty space between them. It’s Hawaiian music deconstructed into a film soundtrack, a film about how beautiful the world is, even when it’s burning. Formed in 2015 on the sun-drenched beaches of Nashville Tennessee, Hula Hi-Fi is introducing themselves to the world with a collection of covers that span every decade from the 1940s to the 2000s. A trio of seasoned musicians who’ve worked and continue to work with artists at the apex of just about every genre (including Sugarland, Amos Lee, Maren Morris, Butch Walker, Slow Runner and a host of others) Josh Kaler, Annie Clements and Sarah Bandy are currently recording ‘The Isle of Forgotten Dreams,’ a collection of all original material to be released in 2017. Their goal is to brush the sand off of the beautiful music of Hawaii and drag it into the darkest corners of the mainstream, breathing something fresh into it in the process.