INTERVIEW with HANNAH D'AMATO/FAKE FRUIT

Indie punk darlings Fake Fruit have long since lingered in the punk scenes of New York, Toronto, and San Francisco. With each new city the band developed style and refinement that would translate into the band’s debut record Fake Fruit, released on March 5, 2021 to Rocks In Your Head Records. Even as just a debut, the album was five years in the making and showed it in refined sensibilities with the punk it drew from.

Between all three iterations, the only constant is frontwoman and guitarist Hannah ‘Ham’ D’Amato who took the spirit of Fake Fruit to each music scene she went. D’Amato’s story and goofy personality is a central tenet of Fake Fruit’s music and aesthetic.

“I think I started to like music at a young age, because my dad was super into music,” says D’Amato, elaborating on her musical upbringing. Her first instrument was actually the viola and she was first a fan of classical music before punk. D’Amato’s father has an eclectic music taste and he fed his daughter a myriad of bands from punk classics like Suburban Lawns and Oingo Boingo to dadcore rock like DMB.

“I started branching out and doing my own thing, I think at the tail end of high school,” says D’Amato, mentioning that she first picked up the keyboard before guitars for her first band. She only picked up guitar when a high school ex fed her spite: “He's like, ‘No, like, keys don't belong in a rock band, or whatever the hell’… and I was like ‘Fine, fuck you, I'm gonna learn how to play guitar.’”

D’Amato divulged some of her latest listening habits, from seminal influences like Dolly Mixture to rap and R&B contemporaries like Earl Sweatshirt and Steve Lacy. She happily pulled out her Spotify for me and said she was in the middle of “Mambo Number Five” and had been blasting it earlier that day for her landlord’s cats.

“I remember when I lived in New York, I would hear people kind of saying like, ‘music seems dead in San Francisco’ or whatever,” D’Amato says, “but that's very much not my experience.” According to Ham, the Bay Area’s got a rocking scene, and that it’s “almost hard to keep up” with all the bands coming out of there: “Yeah, I think a lot of people are, really killing it right now and it feels exciting to be a part of the community.”

“I think a lot of the lyrics were ordered driven by spite,” D’Amato says about the debut’s lyrical content, “because I was going through this... rough patch of several years where I just felt, I couldn't figure out, I couldn't find my footing and I wasn't getting my sea legs.” While D’Amato’s is cheerfully comical in conversation, the lyrics of songs like “Swing And A Miss” and “Stroke My Ego” are charged with anger and heartbreak.

Ham’s favorite song on the record is the final track “Milkman” which is apparently only 1 of 3 written with the Bay Area lineup. “Yeah, it's mostly songs that I've been carrying around since I lived in New York and started the project up there, but there are a few exceptions,” D’Amato says, “The first track ‘No Mutuals’, ‘Milkman’, and ‘Swing And a Miss’ are the three songs on the record that I hadn't already written and those were written specifically with the Bay Area lineup.”

“Most of it's already written,” D’Amato says about the next Fake Fruit record, “We're just kind of like fine tuning and finishing up some lyrical stuff.” Despite the release of the first record only being 5 months ago, Ham says the band has had plenty of time to work on it during the pandemic. “But yeah, I'm very much thinking about it and excited about it, probably demo it out soon, and then kind of shop it around and see who takes a bite.”

Be sure to check out the extended audio interview here where Ham and I elaborate on her Dolly Mixture obsession, the art of songwriting, and that time the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped 800 pounds of human waste onto a sightseeing boat on the Chicago River.

Fake Fruit’s debut record Fake Fruit (via Rocks In Your Head Records) is available to listen on Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal as well as being available for purchase on Bandcamp. On July 30th, the band also released the single “I Am The Car” available on those same platforms too.