Hannah Wicklund is ready to speak her truth. The singer-songwriter and guitarist certainly has been through a lot in recent years. Now, with a new album, War on Women; Calling All Good Men, and a new print media platform, Strawberry Moon Tribune, Wicklund is doing her most to address and explore the hurdles she has cleared over the past few years.
There is a full and complete story that Wicklund, herself, will tell someday. She talks about writing a memoir. Such a notion may seem premature for someone in only her late-twenties. Yet, Wicklund’s artistic journey started early. As a pre-teen, the guitarist and singer-songwriter cut her teeth in the clubs around her hometown of Hilton Head, South Carolina. By 16, she was prepping her first indie release, Looking Glass. At 20, she had migrated to Nashville and issued her official debut, Hannah Wicklund & the Steppin Stones, in 2018, with its flashy single, “Bomb Through the Breeze.” To date, that song, alone, has racked up over seven million streams.
Here’s where the twists of her tale turn capricious. Her long-awaited follow-up, The Prize, took six years to surface. Produced by her then-boyfriend—Greta Van Fleet bassist Sam Kiszka—it was an album that Rolling Stone Brazil rated the best of 2024. Wicklund toured hard in support of the LP, including a slew of opening slots internationally for Deep Purple, Yes, and Greta Van Fleet. In March of 2025, she turned out a live record documenting a triumphant date at L.A.’s famed Troubadour.
But all was not well. The more closely she examined her career, the cloudier the reality. She had battled to make The Prize. She felt that her trusted circle was steering her away from potential success.
Emotionally blocked, she put down the guitar and pen. “I didn’t write a new song for five years,” Wicklund says. “It was too painful.” Instead, she painted, renewing her love of the visual art.
By the end of 2025, she cut ties both with Kiszka and her management, then returned to Hilton Head. There, she found smiles and hugs, and a community that made her feel special, and seen. The songs came back, too.
“I don’t think I would’ve felt safe enough and empowered enough to write this album but on the beaches of South Carolina,” Wicklund says.
For four months, the creative current flowed. Wicklund put the patriarchy on notice, death threats and duplicitous deals be damned. While she took concerted aim at the men around her, she also called out broader injustices.
First up was “Evil Is A Corporation,” written on a mushroom-enhanced trip to Folly Beach. She cut a demo of the corker, and shared it with engineer and friend, Devin Vaughan, at his 100Watt Studios in Charleston. The pair decided the unvarnished take was best as is; live, raw, and real. The recording sessions would follow suit.
On a hair-thin budget drawn from sales of her artwork, Wicklund and a band Vaughan pulled together knocked out a baker’s dozen of piercing indictments. The colluding and conspiring men of the music industry, love gone bad, religion, the ecology, even Harambe—a gorilla shot at a Cincinnati Zoo in 2016—roused her ire.
Wicklund wasn’t interested in simply shouting into the void. She wanted to affect actual change. She knew the album’s title could be deployed as a provocative and vital recruitment slogan.
The roots of the record’s titular track, “War on Women,” trace back to 2016. Wicklund began writing it after hearing about Larry Nassar and his abuse of women at USA Gymnastics. Ten years later, her chilling and stark, multilayered vocal impeachment opens the album. The bookending closer, “Calling All Good Men,” was the last song written for the collection, just prior to wrapping up the session.
“We have an opportunity, as women, to band together,” Wicklund says. “But, there are still places for men at the table. This is not an anti-men record. There is a future and we are all part of it.”
The thirteen songs of the set are reinforced in drama. Imagine stitching Tori Amos with Led Zeppelin. Always revered for her string prowess, Wicklund’s guitar builds barricades around her lyrical vulnerability and dispenses torrential sheets of shred. Her solo on “Cowards & Kings,” she says, is her best work ever.
The album is a certainly a statement piece, kicking down the exit door of the industry’s power room. Yet, touring is a necessity, as well as a pleasure, for Wicklund. That means, she says, “dancing with the big monster.”
She’s already scored a victory with the behemoth promoter, Live Nation, in pressing for the elimination of merchandise commissions at venues. Inspired by Wicklund, Live Nation instituted an On The Road Again program that not only removed the fees on merch sales, but provided gas cards and cash directly to touring musicians. Said then-COO of Venues, Tom See, “Hannah’s ability to advocate for the music industry is second to none. Change only happens when someone is willing to drive the narrative, and Hannah did exactly that.”
Wicklund will drive the narrative, as well, with a new venture. In tandem with “War On Women” as the album’s first single, Wicklund launched the Strawberry Moon Tribune. Issued in both print and digital form, the Tribune is a female-centric arts and culture magazine whose themes will coincide monthly with the release of the record’s thirteen tracks as singles. Wicklund serves as the mag’s Editor-in-Chief.
Too, she is anxious to get back onstage. She enjoyed much of October on tour again in Europe; not coincidentally, Wicklund is considering relocating to the Continent. A more expansive world trek is in the works for 2027.
“It would be so lovely to be in a place where I didn’t feel like I had to look over my shoulder,” Wicklund says. “I think I needed to make this record, and I think I’m the only person that could have. I definitely wouldn’t trade or change anything. I’m incredibly proud of this record.”
There’s a line in her song, “Strawberry Moon,” Wicklund wrote in the 4 a.m. lunar glow of a Nashville morning, back in June of 2017. It’s become, she says, her personal mantra. “Baby, I’m fine. I’ve got dreams to be thinking of.”
