For Hannah Frances, summer meant Chicago. As a kid brimming with creative energy in the suburbs of Philadelphia, she’d get “shipped off” to her extended family in Wilmette for a few joyful weeks, attending summer camps at the School of the Art Institute and hanging out with her “cool” uncle, a cartoonist. So, when the pandemic began and a long relationship ended, the singer-songwriter and self-taught guitarist knew where she wanted to be.
Frances moved here in 2020 from New York and began rediscovering the city of her youth as a mature musician — slowly, she concedes, owing to the freeze on live performances. It’s still as close to a creative home as she’s found, though she’s since made her actual home in southern Vermont, in remote Putney (population 2,600). That duality — between metropolis and rural America — fuels “Keeper of the Shepherd,” the album she released earlier this year.
Frances recorded it with musicians drawn, in part, from the city’s creative music and free jazz networks, like reed player Hunter Diamond and cellist Alex Ellsworth. She’s since built the group out into a larger, seven-piece band of Chicago collaborators she calls the Hannah Frances Ensemble, lending “Keeper’s” songs an orchestral sweep. She unveiled the group at “Keeper’s” March 8 release show at Constellation and appears with them again for her biggest local booking yet: Frances opens for Whitney at Thalia Hall this weekend.
“I’m always delightfull.