Finding Hope Whitelock
If you’re wondering why the hell Hope Whitelock is here again in such a short amount of time, don’t worry. Or worry. One of the hardest things about being a journalist is maintaining impersonality when you become a fan of your interviewee. Even more difficult is when you become friends.
Not that I ever consider myself eligible to earn the Whitelock seal of friendship, but something happens around her that makes us want to stick around. Something that starts with the confessional tone of her lyrics and ends with a random chat via DM on your instagram.
And most impressively, as she calls herself on the new single, a “BAD PERSON”, I guess she has no idea how cool, affable and beautiful she really is, along with her cat or hiding behind face-shields (yep, she also study physics). The fact is that, unlike the theorems of physics, Hope’s compositions are not complex at all: they speak of the daily struggle for self-acceptance and a certain discomfort in relation to her place in the world.
A discomfort that she disguises very well with her sarcastic lyrics, like the sweet “Kafkaesque”, in which she recounts how she deals – or doesn’t deal – with her own guilt before the society of toxic positivism. Hope also owns a soft and at the same time firm voice, very similar to singers like Leigh Nash (Sixpence None The Richer) or even Natalie Merchant, being her indie-folk based on singers that, as I said here, we both idolize, like Phoebe Bridgers.
Although she still has few singles, most of them produced during the pandemic period, Hope is a great promise of indie-folk. If life, until now, has not been competent in showing that she is pretty much a good person, perhaps success will do the job.
About me? I’m taking my chances.
