artwork for "CANNIBAL CRIME," the first single off Hani Zahra's ALONG THOSE LINES

interview by Lance Heybrock | words by Michael Todd

Hani Zahra is onstage for the first time without his guitar.

He's years and miles away from the Norfolk, Neb., coffee shop where he first played publicly. After college at Arizona State and a bit of time spent in Nashville, it had occurred to Zahra that if he didn't make it in New York, he wouldn't anywhere. So he decided to move, and now hopes to conquer the city, calling it his own game of Risk.

But to ensure he wins the war, he must first be vulnerable. And so, it's here on a New York stage that Zahra stands, holding the mic stand. Worst part? Actor Jesse Eisenberg is watching from the corner of the room. This first step toward becoming a frontman, one who could focus on lyrics, tone and delivery, was how Zahra started to return to his roots: those that extended back to his earliest years.

"I’m trying to tap into the rambunctious little kid I used to be once I could start walking until the age of 10 or 11, and self-consciousness started to seep into me," he says. "Before then, I’d just fuckin’ run around and do whatever the hell I wanted. Run on top of things, go under things, push stuff around. That’s probably the most joy I’ve ever experienced, so I’m trying to bring that back."

Now more than a month after the release of Hani Zahra's debut album, ALONG THOSE LINES, the pieces of his Risk game are continuing the battle. We spoke with him to learn more about his roots in Norfolk, his blues beginnings and what he wants to accomplish as a musician.

Hear Nebraska: When did you start playing music?

Hani Zahra: When I was 15, I started playing guitar.

HN: How did that work out at first?

HZ: Actually, I had tried many times to learn guitar, and I kept failing at it. Then a guy named Randy Ambroz really knew how to play guitar, and I wanted to learn how to play efficiently as him. So I asked him for lessons. He started giving me lessons. We pretty much did that compulsively through the summer, just played guitar. That was the summer I turned 16. That was when I started and didn’t stop.

HN: You guys started playing pretty consistently then as a duo, right? I don’t know if you played many shows.

HZ: We didn’t write anything because of the nature of what we were doing. It was all improvisational blues. So we could get together with his brother or another drummer. We’d improv off the same 12-bar blues. It was easy enough to play a show anywhere, throw out the key and just play.

I know we played at The Depot once, which I don’t remember because we drank a bottle of Jager before that. I remember being on stage, but that’s it. It was funny, we played one of the Christian gigs. It was downtown, Kensington or something. It was a private, non-alcoholic event for some Christian youth group. And there were just bean bags in one room. I remember they were watching movies. In the other room, there was a stage.

But I’d say the first actual place I played, what I consider me playing in public, was the downtown coffee shop.

HN: Right. So for the most part you started out playing blues. Was that what made you want to get into music, the blues?

HZ: Well, blues was the framework for improvisation, which is all I wanted to do. I didn’t want to look at a songbook. I didn’t want to have to memorize anything. I just wanted to play things off the cuff. Play in any key, do whatever. So that’s what I used the blues for.

But I got introduced to Led Zeppelin and The Who then going into college I got into these strong phases. I would get into these long, drawn-out phases where I would just play one artist for a really long time.

It’s funny, I think the first artist that I tried to emulate was Santana, just to be able to play guitar like that. Then when college started, I was heavy into Pink Floyd. I really only listened to one artist during each phase, whether it was Neil Young, David Bowie, that was pretty much it.

HN: Are those still your guys, or have you moved past those periods, maybe bands you’re seeing locally?

HZ: Yeah, definitely more modern bands now. That’s part of the reason I came to Brooklyn, the new music and the scene here. I think it was probably three, four years ago, when I was in Nashville, that I was really into all the classic rock stuff. It gave me a good framework for songwriting.

And with The Beatles, that’s when I started to write songs religiously, studying their book and working off that. Now I just reference it every once and awhile. I don’t go out of my way to not listen to the older stuff, but it’s not as much of an interest of mine. Whenever I’m confused or don’t know what to do musically, though, I’ll reference a Beatles album, go back and listen for specific parts.

HN: Did you go and see a lot of shows when you were living in Nebraska? Local acts and touring bands?

HZ: No, I didn’t much (laughs).

HN: Did you know many people in bands? You mentioned Randy Ambroz and his brother Tom, who played drums in UUVVWWZ.

HZ: I don’t really have any more connections with people that are active. Tom, I’d say, was the last real connection I had musically with Nebraska. I think now he’s done with that.

HN: Yeah. Have you guys been doing any touring?

HZ: No, we haven’t gotten close to that. It’s actually funny because I recorded the album last year, starting in May and continuing for six or seven months. I started the band in October, at least trying to assemble everyone. We started rehearsing late October, November.

We played our show first week of December. We’ve pretty much been playing since then, and it’s been picking up pretty well. We sold out our album release show the first week of April. And we’ve got a couple good shows lined up for this summer. But touring right now, it’s just not feasible.

HN: Are you guys wanting to put out another album before you consider that?

HZ: I’ve kind of put touring in the back of my mind. I haven’t thought about it in relation to the next album, but if anything, I’m thinking about when I’m going to release the next album, when I’ll start prepping for that.

What we do is we play eight out of 10 songs off the album and then a handful off the EP. That’s what we’ve been doing, and it fills out about an hour of time. And that’s pretty much the bulk of the material. We have a little more we could cover, but it’s just too early to stop promoting.

My guess is probably we’ll start off with an East Coast tour. It’s easier with transportation and everything. Because it’s so far in the future, though, depending on what we do, it’s possible. We might start traversing across the U.S. If we’re not doing any kind of East or West Coast thing, we might just barrel through Texas and hit Nebraska along the way.

HN: OK. And as far as your timeline goes, you grew up in Norfolk, but were you born there?

HZ: I was born in Iowa.

HN: Born in Iowa then moved to Norfolk pretty early. OK, then you went to school at Arizona State?

HZ: Right.

HN: Then did you make the move after graduating out to New York?

HZ: No, actually, me and a buddy of mine, who ended up moving into my apartment, we ended up writing a lot of music together. He had his own material, and I had mine. We ended up recording through a friend of mine who was engineering in Nashville. We were just going to record a few songs, but I ended up smashing an album’s worth of material in three days or so.

We were all really excited about that, and I was graduating college, so it’s like, well, where do we go now. I didn’t want to go to any kind of conservatory or continue school for music. I did audition for Berklee School of Music, but then I decided I didn’t want to, figured I would just go to Nashville.

So I did and we started a band there. We tried to promote this album. I think we got 1,000 copies of this album printed off. But whenever we got close to doing anything, the band just fell apart. We lost a bassist, and we tried to replace him. We lost the guitarist.

Then I decided to just pick up and leave to New York. It just occurred to me. I remember exactly where I was, just playing the piano doing my vocal exercises, fantasizing about New York. I’ve always thought of New York as a place that was too big of a deal. I thought to myself, “If I can’t do it there, that says something.”

HN: So you had to try it. Like you said, if you couldn’t get it done there, maybe that’s not what you should do. But it seems like things are working out well. What was the process of you showing up in New York and putting together a band and such?

HZ: The person I’ve been working with since college is Jared Dymbort (guitar). He’s someone who has pushed my music along and motivated me from the start with my songwriting and recording. I’ve learned a lot with him with regard to songwriting. We’ve been on and off, going from one project to the next. He’s always trying to get me to do some other project, trying to keep it going, but I usually end up getting bored.

We tried doing a small, condensed, electronic version of the band that was in Nashville. We were playing songs from there, but we had a couple new ones that we wrote together. Another buddy from the very first college band that I put together, he was doing synth, so it was just the three of us.

Yeah, we played a couple shows. I just wasn’t feeling it, and I stopped. Then I started another one, and I was tired… If you don’t put restrictions on it, when you play live, it’s a bitch. You’ve got computers on stage. You try to recreate these digital sounds that you do in the recording. So I was, like, “Fuck this. I want to do a stripped-down version that can’t be hard.” We can just go on stage and the soundguy can say, “What’s your setup?” We say, “Guitar and bass drums. That’s it. One vocal.”

So we did that. That was really fun. We played for awhile and then (laughs), again, I got bored with it. Actually, the way that band started out, I don’t know if you’ve seen the bathroom sessions I was doing. My roommate is a motion designer. He’s gotten pretty handy with his camera. He does some good film work, too.

Me and Jared were sitting around, and I was playing a song on the floor. I’m, like, “Get over here and film this real quick. But actually, the acoustics are better in the bathroom.” So we go in the bathroom, and he films it. It turned out kind of cool.

We did another song in the bathroom, then after that, we started going around to different bathrooms and doing that. That evolved into adding a drummer.

HN: For the most part, with your songwriting, are you composing a lot of what we’re hearing then telling people, “You’ll play this,” or is it more of a collective songwriting session? What’s the process?

HZ: Well, with this project, I decided I needed to stick with a project and just stay with it. So I figured I would use my name because my name doesn’t sound like other names. People don’t even know that it’s a person’s name. I’m, like, “I can use this, and you can’t fuck this up because it’s your name. You can’t get bored with this. If you get bored, change it. Do something else. You gotta keep moving.”

So I started a studio, which is conveniently a few blocks from where I live. I started to amass recording gear through this job I was contracted for, just to save up enough to do that. I started then to get back into my recording. I used to always record. I recorded an EP that I ended up throwing out. While that EP was being mixed by my friend, I recorded something else in three weeks. That turned out to be something I enjoyed a lot. I called it the Hani Zahra EP.

So immediately after that, I thought I’d do the same thing, but just extend it to 15 songs and cut it down to an album’s length. So I started doing that, and by the time we got finished, I thought I’d put together some musicians. I pulled together some people who I knew from one project I was going to work in, and with Craigslist got a couple more people. I started showing them the parts, and they adapted. What you hear on the record, it’s a different beast.

The live show is a lot of creative adaptation that each band member adds in. The basslines are kind of restructured to live drums. The drums in the recordings aren’t live drums. It’s a sample of real drums. The live show has different creative elements.

HN: Is each live show different from the last? You learned to play by improvising, so do you allow for a certain amount of that leeway to happen in the show, or is it pretty strict?

HZ: We stay pretty strict. Also, I don’t play any instruments in any of the shows, which was a conscious decision for this project because I finally wanted to just focus on singing. Also, I’m getting really bored with bands that are all preoccupied with their instruments. They’re not playing the audience, they’re playing themselves, and I wanted something to give that extra thing.

It’s still taking some work, and I’m working on it. But I’m really excited about that aspect of it. Maybe if I were playing guitar, I could see how things could be a little more improvisational. But for the most part we stick to the music, measure-to-measure.

HN: Was there much fear of letting go of the guitar and focusing on the vocals? If you’ve got the guitar, you can get lost and not feel so naked. It’s just you and the mic now.

HZ: It was kind of a hard decision. People around me thought it was a bad idea: “What are you doing? … No, no, no. Don’t do that. Part of it was that you’d spent years and years playing guitar. I don’t know why you won’t show anybody your chops.” Then the other was just, "I don’t think this is going to work. You’re too quiet to be a frontman.”

And I am. I am really quiet. But I thought there’s just so many times when the songs have suffered because I was too busy forgetting lyrics and remembering parts. I have a horrible memory. So then trying to focus on getting the tone out the way I wanted to: Sometimes you just can’t hear yourself, so I wanted to be able to put 100 percent focus on vocals. It’s freeing.

HN: Have those people who weren’t sure about the decision come around? Are they saying, “Oh, that was a really great idea”?

HZ: Oh yeah. My roommate, James, in particular, he can be overprotective, and he’s a very aesthetically driven person. He was just, like, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.” Then he didn’t see the first show, where I was just holding on to the mic stand the entire time, not doing anything. That was the most terrifying thing to me because Jesse Eisenberg was at our first show in the corner of the room. So I was just, like, “Why is this happening?”

But then James ended up seeing the second show, and at the second show, I somehow was able to get really loose. To me, it was groundbreaking. I told myself, “You can do something. You don’t have to hold on to the mic. You can take it out of the stand. You can use your hands to express yourself,” which I still don’t do enough. It was the first time I could turn around, look at the band and just enjoy the music, inside of it and singing on top of it.

Hani Zahra-Tamed 12.2.12 from Hani and a Thief on Vimeo.

HN: You seem conscious of the persona you can portray with these movements because you’re freed up so much. Is that something you’re constantly working on, building up this lead singer persona onstage?

HZ: To me, it’s not like I’m trying to build a persona because that would be harder. I don’t think I know how to do that. But it’s almost more therapeutic because I’m trying to tap into the rambunctious little kid I used to be once I could start walking until the age of 10 or 11, and self-consciousness started to seep into me.

Before then, I’d just fuckin’ run around and do whatever the hell I wanted. Run on top of things, go under things, push stuff around. That’s probably the most joy I’ve ever experienced, so I’m trying to bring that back. I can’t do that now. If I run down the street, people would be, like, “What the fuck’s he running from?” You have to just walk to do things.

Being onstage and a frontman has allowed me to bring back a more free version of myself.

HN: So your plans for the summer are to play shows locally and support the most recent release?

HZ: We had a couple invitations to go outside of New York. One of those was Philly. We were considering starting to get out of town a bit, but right now I consider New York City as a battleground. I’m trying to conquer New York City.

It’s like Risk. I want to put all my pieces in New York City, and once I can say that I can come away with a piece of it, then I’ll start moving around. I just don’t see why I should need to go outside of New York.

It’s like when most people tour, they make their way to New York. I fuckin’ live in New York, so I’m going to play shows here.

HN: Build a territory.

HZ: Yes.

Lance Heybrock is an outgoing Hear Nebraska intern, and Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska's managing editor. Reach them at lanceh@hearnebraska.org and michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.