"Hangin On" opens with Julia Appleton's voice alone in that reverb, breathy and close, and within seconds the harmonies start stacking around her like walls of fog. Slow build. A mid-tempo pulse underneath holds everything steady while the synth pads open wide. I wasn't expecting it to feel this big.
Seattle-based producer aaronn (Aaron Campbell) builds something lush and spacious here, warm acoustic textures sitting inside a mix that sounds almost dreamlike, wet and expansive... like sound traveling a long distance just to reach you.
Appleton's lead vocal sits dead center, breathy and controlled, and there's a moment early on where her phrasing stretches across a note and barely holds at the top of her range. That's the whole song in one second.
She wrote this after helping her boyfriend sell his childhood home. You can feel that. It's not dramatic grief. It's quieter, the ache of packing up a place full of history, standing still while everything else keeps moving forward without you.
She said it herself: "I've always been better at writing songs than pretending everything's okay." Yeah. I believe her.