Alice Hasen: A Genre-Defying Musician with an Environmental Message by Aaron Brame

Alice Hasen, a multi-instrumentalist songwriter and violin virtuoso, uses her music to advocate for an environment under attack. And with the water source of her very community—Memphis, Tennessee—under threat from both corporations and an adversarial state legislature, her songs tell of the urgent need to protect the rights of our natural resources.

“I have been lucky to experience the beauty of the outdoors as a major part of my childhood,” says Hasen, who was born in Vermont and studied music at Yale. “In my adult life, I started to realize how rare and fragile an unspoiled environment really is.”

Though the streets of Memphis may seem far different than the mountains of Vermont, they sit atop a hidden natural treasure of their own: the famed Memphis Sands aquifer, which provides the city with pristine, 2000 year-old drinking water, the “sweetest water in the world.”

Advocating for Water Rights

Hasen’s sound blends elements of rock, pop, and delta blues, but whether she’s performing solo, as the leader of the high-energy Alice Hasen and the Blaze, or accompanying other talented artists like Rachel Maxann or Josh Threlkeld, everything she plays exhibits her classical foundation and years of training.

When writing her own music, she finds inspiration in her love of nature and passion for conservation. Her first album, Violintro, featured a song entitled “Memphis Sands,” a haunting track warning of the ever-present threat to Memphis’s natural water reservoir.

In late 2019, Plains All-American, a corporation based in Houston, Texas, announced plans to build a pipeline through the Byhalia section of Memphis, a predominantly Black neighborhood.

“The line had the potential to leak oil straight into a drinking water well field in the Southwest Memphis community,” Hasen says, “poisoning both the local water source there as well as leaching into the larger aquifer.”

Protect Our Aquifer, a non-profit working to protect the source of Shelby County's drinking water and to improve groundwater management in the area, led a grassroots rally to protest the pipeline’s development. Public pressure was strong enough to drive Plains All-American to scrap their plans and leave Memphis, but the Tennessee state legislature soon passed a law making it much easier for the next oil company to succeed.

“Thanks to this legislation, our local leaders have even less power to stop pipelines from being built through our community,” Hasen says.

In an unrelated incident, last month the affluent Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tennessee experienced a diesel leak that contaminated 4.2 million gallons of drinking water, leaving residents unable to use their tap water for a week. The city's tainted supply was later flushed into the Wolf River, a vital tributary of the Mississippi River.

“It really makes me wonder how such a basic human right, the right to clean water can be ignored.”

Hasen donated all of the CD sales from her album release for Violintro to Protect Our Aquifer. She has similar plans for the release of her next EP, Dream of Rain.

Upcoming Plans

Hasen recently played an Official Showcase at Folk Alliance International, and is releasing an EP with guitarist Josh Threlkeld this August. She also frequently collaborates with friend and musical companion, Rachel Maxann, on whose Black Fae she contributed violin.

But she’s eager about her next release, an EP entitled Dream of Rain that takes a global view of the climate crisis. A recurring image in this new batch of songs is wildfire smoke, whether blowing in from Canada over her New England home or far off in Austrailia, where a 2020 wildfires caused much devastation.

The new EP is scheduled for an early 2024 release. In the meantime, Hasen will keep hitting the stage and writing new songs.

“Climate change is the biggest threat to life as we know it, and it affects the whole world,” she says. “That’s why I’m so focused on it in my songwriting.”