WUD Music Presents: Lomelda with Free Range

Lomelda: Lomelda is Hannah Read’s musical project. In swampy, sweaty, Silsbee, TX, she first formed the band with her high school best friends. Throughout the next decade, Lomelda made a habit out of stretching to fit new friendships and shrinking down to solo strummings. Four albums and a never-the-same live show chronicle these shifts in shape and sound. Lomelda’s fifth, upcoming album is called Hannah. The album stretches and shrinks into many of Lomelda’s different forms, from expansive “Wonder” and rock band “Reach” to meandering “Stranger Sat By Me” and finger picking “It’s Infinite”. Through this range of moods, Hannah sings stories of strangers, suns, dogs, moms, brothers, favorite bands, “oh god!”s and big shots as well as herself, by name. She rejoices and reviles her god-given name and then flips it around to name herself Hannah once again. It is an album of confession and transformation made ultimately singable.

Free Range: To build something new, you have to let the old things go. That spirit of reinvention is essential to Chicago indie folk project Free Range, the brainchild of Sofia Jensen (guitar, they/she) that came together at a time when the world seemed to be falling apart. Live and in the studio, Sofia is joined by collaborator and producer Jack Henry (drums, he/him), who helped Jensen fill out the skeletons of songs she composed in the solitude of quarantine. Bailey Minzenberger (bass, they/them) sat in with Jack and Sofia for a series of late night sessions during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and before long, the three musicians had rerecorded an entire album’s worth of material. Free Range is a departure from Sofia’s previous work as a rock ‘n’ roll bandleader; they “wanted to turn the electric down, and the acoustic up” for this new project.