Jeff Hanson.
Waking up on this cold, dreary Sunday morning to learn of the death of Jeff Hanson is almost impossibly sad. I cannot say, unfortunately, that I knew the man personally, but his music has been a presence for as long as I have lived in Minnesota.
I first heard him in 2005, right after I had arrived in Minneapolis. I was very tenuously dating a snotty, fairly chic MCAD sophomore I’d met at an art supply store, and she often played his self-titled album in her car. Like many people hearing him for the first time, it was the voice that struck me. “Who is this?” I asked. “She has a beautiful voice.”
“This is Jeff Hanson,” she said in that irritated tone that snotty, fairly chic MCAD sophomores often use when confronted with any sort of an attempt at conversation. She didn’t even bother to correct my pronoun.
Years later, I barely remember that art student, but Jeff Hanson has stayed with me. (How often does your love for a piece of music or art outlive the relationship from which that love originated? Think of all the music you enjoy as a result of mix tapes your former no-good ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends made for you, and say a silent word of thanks to them.)
The otherworldly quality of that voice on songs like “This Time It Will” perfectly matched the experience of being alone in a strange new city. His music was the soundtrack for many nights spent driving around the Cities at night, exploring the neighborhoods of my new home and staring off romantically into the middle distance.
I had spent the first half of my mid-20s reflexively snapping up any record that the Kill Rock Stars label put out, and the second half reflexively snapping up any worthwhile record that a local artist had put out. Jeff Hanson was a part of both of these worlds, and so I could think of him as a sort of bridge between two parts of my life, as creating a sense of continuity. He was part of a world I understood well, and he belonged to a world I was just joining.
