I clear my throat, but my voice still comes out hoarse. “Look, I know you’re pissed. I wrote that song after I left you at the Caesars pool. I was really fucking mad—”
Theo moves before I can finish my sentence. I’m so surprised I take a step back, sure he’s going to punch past me out the door. But he strides across the room and wraps his arms around me, drawing me to him with such force he lifts me off the floor.
I blink for a moment against his shoulder, too stunned to think. No one has hugged me since Ginny’s funeral. I don’t blame them—I surround myself with all kinds of spikes—but it makes what’s happening almost foreign. Tentatively, I circle my arms around Theo and press my face into his chest, closing my eyes against the starchy cotton of his T-shirt. It’s hard to breathe, but the air I do breathe smells like him, like orange body wash from the MGM mixed with nutmeg and cedar. And even though it’s probably only his deodorant, it reminds me, with a jolt, of one day back in early high school, when I played hooky with Ginny. We’d crammed in the back of our friend’s minivan on the way to the beach with the cutest guy in my grade. It was the first time I’d gotten close enough to a boy to smell his skin. Ginny and I had exchanged wide-eyed glances, flushed with nerves.
Theo cradles the back of my head and rests his chin on my temple, fitting me against him. He just stands there silently, like the point is to simply be. No lectures, no admonishments, no dry jokes. Something breaks loose inside me, and before I can stop myself, I start crying.
I bury my face into his shirt, trying to stop the tears, but Theo rubs my back, pressing his lips to my hairline and murmuring, “It’s okay.” After that, there’s nothing I can do. Ican’t cry hard enough to match the hurt. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to show him or anyone what it feels like.
“It’s okay,” he repeats, so faintly I can barely hear. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He whispers the words into my hair. Such a simple thing, but it makes me shake my head, a protest that turns into me rubbing my face back and forth against his chest. It grows more comforting the longer I do it, until I’m dragging my mouth over his shirt, like a person nuzzling themself to sleep.
Theo’s fingers weave into my hair. I pull back to look at him.
“It’s not your fault,” I whisper raggedly. “I’m angry all the time—”
“I know.” His eyes trail down my cheeks, and then his thumbs follow, brushing my tears away. I can feel it each time he takes a breath.
“Hannah, are you down here?” Ripper yells.
Theo and I jerk back from each other.
“The fans are waiting for us,” Ripper shouts. “There’s a line out back.”
I wipe my eyes, brushing away dampness and black streaks of mascara. When I take an uncertain step away from Theo, I see the ink slashes all over his shirt.
“Shit.” I clear my throat. “Your shirt . . . ”
He blinks at me, confused, before glancing down. “You think I care about that?”
“Han-nah!” Ripper bellows.
Theo straightens. “You better go.” He smiles softly. “Soak up your moment. You killed tonight.”
I give him one last searching look, wondering how this man has so little anger when I have so much of it, then leave the way I came.
Chapter 21
Excerpt fromRolling Stonearticle, “All Hail the Queen of Sadness,” by Matt Sanford (May 9, 2024)
Hannah Cortland and I meet for breakfast at the Heights Hotel in Haight-Ashbury bright and early on a Sunday morning. I’m terribly disappointed she’s not hungover. Despite tucking me into bed in the middle of a rager only hours before—more on that later—she’s alert, no bags under her eyes, only moderately fiending for caffeine as opposed to desperate like me. “Made a deal with the devil,” she explains. “My soul for no hangovers. Knowing the value of my soul, I figured it was a pretty good trade.”
Her delivery is so dry I’m only half sure she’s joking.
She’s wearing standard Hannah Cortland gear: the same black overalls she wore onstage last night during the Future Saints’ show at the Bellmore, and a Dead to Rights T-shirt signed in Sharpie with the message: “To Ginny, the real star, xo BM.” She’s mellow and reflective, ready for our interview. I’ve got my work cut out for me.
If you’re wondering how a reporter normally on the tech beat found himself hungover and sitting across a Formica table from the rock darling currently taking the internet by storm, it all started with a GIF. A couple of weeks before my trip to San Francisco that coincided with the Saints’ Bellmore show, a GIF appeared on my TikTok For You page, a short video of a blond woman sinking to her knees onstage, lookingfor all the world like she was ready to give up. The pathos of it captured me, and I watched a few more times before searching YouTube and finding the performance in full: it was Hannah Cortland with her band, the Future Saints, performing “Six Feet Under,” the song I would later learn put them on the map.
It’s a killer song. High-intensity, beautifully written, and when you listen to it, you get the sense that you’re listening to someone giving you their all, which is a mesmerizing thing to witness. After a few hundred streams, I found myself researching the Saints, curious about these musicians who’d sprung out of nowhere and had the world paying attention.
I wasn’t prepared for the bomb. The band—composed of Kenny Lovins, Tarak Ravishankar (he goes by “Ripper”), and Hannah Cortland—has been around for a while, though you’d hardly recognize their old beach-house sound if you encountered them through one of their new singles (again, more on this later). Their artistic transformation seems to have been motivated by the loss of Cortland’s younger sister, Virginia (“Ginny,” Hannah corrects. “Always Ginny.”), also the band’s manager, who drowned at the appalling age of twenty-six. While it’s hard to find much information about Ginny—she seems to have ceded the spotlight to her sister during her short life—that only made me more curious about the invisible loss at the center of one of music’s biggest breakouts of the year. I was determined to make the Saints the subject of my first-ever music feature, and luckily my editor saw my passion (and the Saints’ social media impressions) and agreed to give us a shot.
I’m going to settle your most burning question first: yes, Cortland is the real deal. Except, when I ask her if she agrees, she says, “Absolutely not. Show me a confident creative person and I’ll show you someone who stopped taking risks.” I am not among the tech bros anymore, where confidence is currency, that’s for sure.
The first thing that strikes you when you meet Cortland is her beauty. Let’s not play coy. Part of the reason the internet is fascinated with her is because she’s not just a Sad Person, she’s a Hot Sad Person. (And don’t even get me started on Ravishankar—his face deserves its own feature.) Cortland looks like a quintessential California girl, the kind whose picture you might find in an oldTiger Beatarticle titled “Surfer Girls of Los Angeles.” When I ask her about her beauty routine, she asks if I “enjoy getting punched early in the morning.”
But the important thing, the thing that lingers, is her talent. I saw it from mere feet away when she dragged me onstage at the Bellmore for a rock star experience I’ll never forget. And in the short time since our weekend in San Francisco, yet another Future Saints performance has gone viral, this one an awe-inspiring clip of Ripper absolutely shredding the guitar and Hannah’s vocals literally bringing the venue down in Las Vegas. While most people react to debilitating grief by breaking down, loss seems to have sharpened the Saints, opening up new possibilities within them—dare I say, helping them find the voice they were meant to have. It begs the question: Would we have this version of the Saints if they hadn’t lost Ginny? If not, what does it feel like to have your greatest success hinge on your greatest tragedy?
I plan on posing these questions to Cortland and the others, but first I need to survive the weekend. Part of the band’s allure to fans is their reputation as hard partiers, a species of devil-may-care rock star that seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs. After all, in the twenty-first century, trashing a hotel room—à la the infamous hair bands of the eighties or Cameron Crowe’s fictional band, Still-water, from the movieAlmost Famous—is no longer something to be celebrated, but frowned upon. In lieu of making headlines with drugfueled antics, most musicians these days favor tight control over theirimages, social media accounts scrupulously run by managers, vetted interviews with their publicity teams in the room, and the kinds of squeaky-clean reputations that make them more likely to get offered brand sponsorships.
