“Notice Me” Fana Hues

Fana Hues has released a new video for her current single “Notice Me.” The track is now available via via Bright Antenna Records. “Notice Me” was produced by Drumkitchen and the video directed by Amira Hadiya and conceptualized by Hues herself. The visual is a stirring and visually-striking tribute to her family starring her parents and all her siblings. Fana is one of nine children, mostly sisters, and the strong matriarchy she comes from is at the core of her music.

Fana Hues on the video for “Notice Me:”

“I was really happy and optimistic about life when this song came about. I wrote and recorded it the day before I went to London for the first time, I had found a sound that truly felt like me, so I was extra hyped about everything. I was rooted and reminded that all the things I doubted myself about, all my fears were ‘just an unpleasant dream.’ Just like my mom had said. At every turn of my life that I find clarity and meaning, I go back to the truest form of faith that I know, which is my Family. So when I shot the video, I just had to have that moment with my people.”

As a child, illness took away Fana’s voice for almost five years. “I had scarlet fever, tonsillitis, and strep throat at the same time,” the 25-year-old from Pasadena, CA recalls about the years she spent yearning to sing—years her mother, a dancer and healer, spent concocting natural medicines and elixirs that would eventually restore her voice. A challenging and humbling experience, Fana’s period of near voicelessness, led her to appreciate both the power of healing and realize her purpose as a musician at a young age.

Fana was raised within a large, musical family. Her father, a bass, guitar and piano player, taught her and her sisters how to sing. “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t learning harmonies,” Fana remembers, illustrating a home environment built to foster her passion. “Music is literally in the fabric of our family [and] our bond as a family,” she says about her relatives, who make appearances in the form of memories in the self-conceptualized video for single, “Notice Me”. Her family is also the inspiration behind the moniker Hues, named to reflect their surname Hughes as well as Fana’s intention to be innovative in her approach. “I want to capture all the different shades of one idea,” she explains about bending and twisting R&B, and bringing elements of herself to the genre.

Fana trained in violin lessons for eight years, and after inheriting a bass from her father, taught herself to play. In school, an English teacher encouraged her poetry writing skills, and by the time she was a teen, Fana was writing her own songs. “It was one of my favorite things to do for a long time,” she says about trips to San Quentin State Prison, where she participated in writer’s workshops and emotional literacy programs with inmates as a part of a local community organization, Aim4TheHeart. It’s where Fana says she developed her voice as a songwriter, and rooted her musical practice in service to others.

Theatre has also been a really important part of her life that has shaped her as a writer. “Theatre specifically calls for a more traditional and broader approach to conveying emotion,” Fana notes, “I was taught never to move without purpose in acting and I try to incorporate that in my writing and everything I do really. To have intention behind every word I write or move I make, makes for a better artistic display.” More recently Fana was cast in a musical biographical exploration of Elvis Presley’s early days. Fana shared, “I got to sing some of the blues and gospel songs he ‘borrowed’ from black artists, but being in the production, and repeating the same track every night for over 9 months allowed me to discover my voice in an entirely different way.”

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