Many Rooms’ ‘There Is A Presence Here’ Is Dreamy Folk For Your Spiritual Side

Philip Cosores for Uproxx

What if I die and nothing happens? Will my soul decay with me?

When it comes to opening lines, Many Rooms’ debut record There Is A Presence Here goes straight for the heart. 22-year-old Brianna Hunt’s eerie ability to ask deep, precise questions about existence is part of what makes her debut such a stunning work, the other half is the aura of acute innocence that informs the blurry, honeyed production.

Smears of guitar and swells of piano rise up to surround Hunt’s staggering, trembling lyrics, all coming somewhat muted — through a glass darkly, perhaps. The result is a song cycle as vulnerable and charged as the questions themselves, and a body of work that is unconcerned with final answers and is focused instead on the expanse of the mystery.

Hunt’s relationship with Christianity and the responses her religion offers to these age-old existential questions about why we’re here, and how we should be in the meantime, are a centrifugal force in her music, sweeping in from the rafters even on tracks that feel unrelated. But her faith is never an overbearing factor, but rather a tool for deepening her explorations, even when they yield unexpected results.

After initially releasing some songs online as Captain, Hunt found a home in the name Many Rooms, which is a sly Biblical allusion, and re-released her initial Hollow Body EP with Other People Records in 2015. Since then, she worked to refine and add more songs to her catalogue, releasing this year’s full-length this past April.

While it isn’t a sad record, there is certainly a heaviness of spirit that compels Hunt to interpolate something like a clipped cover of Johnny Cash’s own slow-burn cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Hurt” as easily as resonant lines from Old Testament scripture. There Is A Presence Here is an epic and ethereal debut full of impulse and patience, it is a fortress of quiet strength, and an utterly stunning feat of songwriting. It manages to feel simultaneously weathered and naïve, like an old soul encountering new wonders for the first time.

Recently, I met up with Brianna at LA’s legendary Canter’s Deli to discuss how she began writing songs, her current stance on spirituality and its role in her life, and how There Is A Presence found its way into the hands of her current label, Other People Records. Read our conversation below.

Philip Cosores for Uproxx

I read that your mom began playing music when you were a bit younger, and that’s part of what inspired your own interest in music. How young were you when that shift happened?

When I was around five or six, my mom bought her first acoustic guitar. She was a new Christian, she had just started going to this church, and started serving. She tried to do everything she could to be part of the church. They needed a new youth worship pastor or a worship leader, and she said she felt called to do that. She had never sung, never played guitar before in her life, and she just decided to teach herself. I started singing harmonies with her, or not harmonies really, but singing along with her. I was just singing because my mom was singing.

And when did that singing transition into writing your own songs? Were you writing in other ways before that?

Maybe I was third or fourth grade. There was this talent show, and I just had this idea to write my own song. So I wrote this song called “Homeless,” where I made up this story in my mind about this boy in my life and I sang it acapella at the talent show. Since then I started writing poetry — poetry was the thing I really got into. I had this big old book that I had all my poems in, about my made up boyfriends that I never had, breakups that I’d never had. Because that’s the songs that I would hear, and then also some God songs, some really corny worship songs that I made up. My friends were playing shows all the time, and they finally got me to play a show too — my friend booked my first show ever when I was like 14, 15.

Back when you were writing poems, was there a poet that inspired you or influenced you? Or was there something that sort of put that idea in your head?

The first thing that popped into my head was Shel Silverstein. Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree. But I didn’t exclusively read him. I read books a lot. I read Harry Potter, that was my first huge series that I read when I was a kid. But I never liked poets or read poetry just for fun. I got the idea in my head of wanting to be a poet, and I think it’s probably from movies. I probably saw some kind of movie where there was this edgy misunderstood girl who wrote poetry, and I was like, ‘I wanna be like that.’ So I did, but I don’t really write poetry anymore.

You started writing songs instead of poems?

Or I would take things from my poetry and then turn them into songs, and then just add onto them. I’ll write a poem first, and then turn it into a song. Every once in a while I’ll do that now. I’m just bad at writing, honestly. I write like twice a year. And it’s really chaotic, and never structured, never the same thing twice, because I have to be inspired or something emotional has to happen for me to feel like I need to write a song. I can’t just sit down and write something. So I never know how it’s gonna happen the next time I write. I’m trying to get better at that, that’s why I came to LA actually, to write.

It’s really hard when your art is your job, because they’re not the same brain waves, you know? It’s like art is like ‘this should be whenever I feel it,’ and your job is like, ‘you need to be doing this steadily.’

That’s been the hardest thing, the fact that I have had to adapt to! Staying true to being an artist and writing off inspiration and being honest with myself. But also, doing it more because it’s necessary for me to do it more so that I can continue to be putting stuff out to keep people interested.

I love the name Many Rooms, what’s the story of you choosing that name for your work, how did that inspiration come to you?

At that point, I was playing more shows — I’d moved to Nashville and was playing house shows, doing whatever I could. And the name just felt wrong, Captain felt weird. I was growing up, and getting older and maturing, and I realized that name just wasn’t me anymore. So I think around the time that I decided not to be called Captain, I was contacted by my label now, Other People Records. So I told them I was trying to come up with a new name.

Later, I was hanging out with some friends and we were sitting and talking about it. Band names and song titles are the things that I’m the worst at. I can’t come up with something just on my own, I’m terrible at it. Or it just takes me forever. So I was getting my friend Sam’s help, and he went to the bathroom, then came back outside and said: ‘What about Many Rooms? Because there’s a Bible verse that goes, ‘in my Father’s house there are many rooms’.” And I loved it, so did my label and everyone I told.

How did you end up in touch with the label you’re currently on?

I was living in Nashville at the time, around November 2015 I moved there from Houston, for a boyfriend at the time, but also because there was this thing called Come and Live that I wanted to be part of. It was a non-profit music label where they have bands go on tour, but it’s also a mission trip technically. And they were based in Nashville, so I thought it could be my opportunity to get connected with them, but also because I was dating this guy.

We broke up pretty quickly after moving there, and I had to make my own friends. So I had this one friend of mine asked me to go to this show with her so she wouldn’t have to go alone and I decided to go last minute. At the show, she was talking with some guys in the band Souvenirs, and I was just standing there kinda awkwardly while she talked to them. Suddenly she tells the vocalist, ‘Hey Bri sounds like Daughter.’ So he asked for a CD and a few days later she hit me up asking if he could send my music around?” I said of course, then a week or two weeks later, Other People contacted me — they’re his label too and he had shared it with them. The rest is history.

And then they put out your first EP in 2015?

Yes, I re-released the Hollow Body EP, and a few songs were already written for the full-length earlier that year, like in January, February. So they’ve just been floating around for three years before I could record them and put them out. And then two songs I wrote in the studio maybe. But yeah, because it takes me so long to write a song, it’ll be over the span of three years that I can get it fully together. I have friends who are like, ‘I have 50 songs.’ I’m like, ‘How is that possible?’

Philip Cosores

So tell me about recording the album.

I spent two weeks in the studio with Randy Labeouf and lost my mind. That studio normally does bands like Knock Loose, Incendiary, Left Behind, all these metalcore, hardcore bands — and then there was me. But it was awesome, because Randy is perfect, he just got it. I was in a really weird mental state when I went there. I was dealing with depression, and I had just canceled a tour because of my mental health — I canceled a tour because I was just kind of going insane.

So when I went into the studio I was still not doing very well. And the studio was super isolated, when Randy wasn’t there it was just me. And I legitimately was going crazy, I was really, really sad. And it was hard for me to have ideas … Or to have structured ideas, and Randy kind of would just help me along, and guide me, which is sort of a thing that a good producer does. So that was probably the hardest two weeks of my life, but it was fruitful, it was really good.

On the record, are you the only one playing instruments?

No, Randy does piano and a lot of the record has him in it. I definitely want him to play with me live someday soon, when I can afford it. And I don’t really wanna work with anyone else. ‘Cause he was on my wavelength, he would understand whatever I was trying to say when I couldn’t really vocalize very well. He just got it. And that’s hard for me, I have a hard time trusting people helping me write, I’m very territorial.

So much of the record grapples with spiritual themes, I wanted to ask you how you would characterize your relationship with spirituality and religion now? Based off the record, it feels like it’s been a journey for you.

Absolutely. The last tour that I went on, every single night after playing a show I would talk about my songs and why I wrote them. Every single night I had someone come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t know, I had no idea anybody else felt this way.’ I grew up believing you do all the right things, then you’re a Christian. You love God. But there was a switch in my life where I realized that I don’t want to do the “right things” in order to receive love, I think that you love God so much that you want to do good things. And I had this idea in my head of God being sort of an angry, or judgmental, or just condescending guy.

It was in 2016, when I was on my tour with this band Tradewind, that I had this sort of loss of faith, and then rebuilding of it. I realized that I didn’t know a lot, as opposed to saying that I did, or believing that I did. It was a slow process of me slowly not believing in the things that I believe anymore, I was on tour with these guys who were not Christians, or believers at all, and they asking me questions that I don’t have the answers to. I was also reading this book called Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl by N.D. Wilson. He talks about spirituality and he talks about atoms, what they’re made out of, and the fact that everything is made up of something else. When you get to the core of what atoms are made out of, quarks and leptons, the thing that scientists say quarks are made out of, is “push and pull,” not matter.

How does something that’s not matter create matter, and create everything around us? N.D. Wilson believes it’s God’s voice. That’s what he believes, in the book that’s what it talked about. God’s voice commands things to exist. As I was reading that, and then I was on this tour, and I was doubting. I remember driving up California, and it was my first time in California ever from Arizona, and there are all the hills, and the sun was rising, and it was beautiful. I remember looking out at everything and thinking about atoms, and quarks and leptons, and thinking about how everything is alive, and moving, and made up of cells that are alive. I was thinking about spirit, and how it exists and everything. I was like, ‘Whatever I believe, I know that God is real.’ Whatever gets taken away, God is there, he’s gonna stay there. And that’s the premise of the record, is there is a presence here.

There Is A Presence Here is out now via Other People Records. Get it here.

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