Hannah Dasher
Mercury Lounge
August 16, 2023
If you like country music and haven’t heard of Hannah Dasher, I’d bet some honey-buttered biscuits on that fixing to change. Seeing is believing, and I bore witness along with a taxidermied possum, owl, fox, and jackalope inside a packed Mercury Lounge last Wednesday.
A Nashville native, Dasher has made a name for herself with her sly-witted country rock, biblically booming hair, and “I am woman, hear me shred” guitar bravado. She burst onto the scene in a cloud of hairspray and rhinestones in 2021 with spotlights by Fender guitars and Rachael Ray. Yes, that Rachael Ray. Those honey-buttered biscuits I’m betting? They’ll be Dasher’s own recipe. She’s risen to prominence not just with her music but with her “Stand By Your Pan” TikTok cooking series. But last week in Tulsa, she left her pan in her tour bus and gave the 150-cap Mercury crowd just what we came for.
“Country” is clearly Dasher’s genre, but her “fit for a Trans Am hood” logo betrays her leanings towards red meat southern rock. Her lyrics find affinity with Loretta Lynn’s interests, but her backing band has the boudin and crackle of Molly Hatchet. During one part of the set, Dasher took a short catwalk into the spellbound crowd to shred slide guitar over a vamp lifted straight from ZZ Top’s “Tejas.”
Sexuality is a big part of Dasher’s brand, and it’s the “large and in charge” variety, along the lines of Dolly Parton’s. Her merch table is replete with pinup glossies of her (one of which she signed to my partner and me as “you hotties”) and during her set she proudly told the audience how she had just “got these new boobies.” (Dasher’s having fun bringing back that long lost word, and why not? In her Thanksgiving “Stand By Your Pan” segment, she reminds the viewer they’re making dressing, because “stuffing is what you put in your bra when you don’t have enough boobies.”) If you weren’t reminded of Dolly’s “it takes an awful lot of money to look this cheap” quote, then you haven’t seen enough midwest truck stop magnets.