Get To Know: Hope Winter
From songwriting alone at the piano to finding her audience, Hope Winter reflects on grief, humour and the personal roots of her single ‘So Easily’.
For Hope Winter, the piano has never really been an accompaniment. She calls it her “extra limb”, something that has been part of her life since she began writing songs at seven years old. Hundreds of songs later, that relationship remains at the centre of her music, even as the performances around it have grown. Full-band arrangements, a powerful voice and a songwriting instinct that moves between soul, jazz and pop have introduced listeners to an artist capable of filling a room. With her latest single, So Easily, Winter is bringing things back to where they began.
“It being just the piano part and my voice,” she explains, “goes back to the roots of my musicianship.”
Winter's route into music has been shaped as much by experience as formal education. After leaving music college, she found herself learning through YouTube, jam sessions, concerts and the musicians she surrounded herself with. Rather than following a prescribed route, she had to work out what kind of musician she wanted to become.
“I think it gave me a perseverance to find my knowledge out in the wild,” she says. “Deciding to leave college felt like an obvious choice for me but not an easy one. I had to find a direction that would keep me on a path for the following year or years.”
That direction came through playing music with other people. “I think my musicianship grew more from gigging and gigging and gigging with more experienced musicians than me, going to jams and concerts and just listening to a shit ton of music.”
There is something fitting about an artist who learned so much through playing alongside others now returning to a song written entirely on her own. For Winter, knowing how to write a song and knowing what needs to be said are two different things.
“Sometimes rhyming schemes can get in the way of a meaningful lyric in the pursuit of making things match,” she explains. “I fall into that trap sometimes — like, this word would be perfect because it rhymes with line two, but is it actually what I want to say?”
It is a tension she recognises particularly in pop music, where the temptation to chase a hook can overpower the sentiment behind it. “Getting lost in the hook or the catchiness of it all, especially in pop, it’s a challenging fine line to tread. Great pop writing that doesn’t feel cliché is an amazing skill.”
Her musical reference points help explain that approach. While the soul influences running through her work might be immediately recognisable, others sit further from what listeners might expect. Turin Brakes' 2001 debut, The Optimist LP, was a favourite of her dad's, and its songwriting left an impression that has remained with her.
“I think the lyricism is really incredible,” she says. “That definitely had a big influence on my own writing. I’d say also my brother’s music taste, which is a lot of rap and hip-hop.”
Those influences sit alongside one another without Winter feeling much need to separate them. “I think of music in terms of great songs or great albums rather than genre,” she says. “The evolution of music feels so blended now. Sometimes labels can build up a picture of what I, or other artists make, before they’ve heard the music.”
The experiences behind Winter's writing have often been far more complicated than the music might initially suggest. She lost her dad at a young age, grew up around terminal illness and has faced difficult experiences with health within her family. These are parts of her life that have inevitably shaped the way she writes, but they have also informed the way she finds humour in situations that might otherwise be overwhelming.
“Oh my god, humour is my lifeline,” she says. “My life, especially my early life, was marked with a lot of really hard experiences that were abnormal for someone of my age at the time. Losing my dad, growing up around terminal illness, my brother and myself having a complicated relationship with health. Humour has always been the spine of our family, despite some really tough shit happening.”
For Winter, finding something to laugh about has never meant ignoring what happened. It is part of how she has learned to live alongside it. “My writing, I feel, reflects that. Laughing and finding joy in some of life’s hardest chapters.”
That relationship between grief and the life that continues around it is particularly apparent in Missing You, a song that approaches loss without allowing sadness to become its only defining emotion.
“I think if you’ve lost a parent in early life, and in a traumatic way, you have to find methods to make sense of that experience in a way that doesn’t consume you,” she explains. “Grief can be all-consuming. But I’ve found a path towards living with it and finding a weird gratefulness for the perspective it’s given me on life, and my own mortality.”
Interestingly, Missing You wasn't written with the intention of becoming a song about her dad. Working alongside James Smith, Winter found its meaning emerging through the process itself. “As the words we wrote started to come it was just like, okay, I know what this is about,” she says. “Sometimes it’s subconscious like that.”
There is a directness to that kind of songwriting which helps explain why her music has begun reaching people beyond her immediate circle. Small Talk was one of the first moments when Winter could see that connection happening on a larger scale, although the online response wasn't something she had necessarily anticipated.
TikTok, she admits, can feel like a “faceless machine”, somewhere artists constantly put their work forward without knowing what might connect. “We’re all churning out stuff we want to be seen — connected with — and going viral being the ultimate goal,” she says. “Small Talk was just one of many other shots in the dark I’d put out into the online space, and that happened to be the time the dart hit the bullseye for me.”
Yet it wasn't simply the attention that stayed with her. It was hearing from people who recognised their own experiences in the song. Winter remembers “People commenting and saying, ‘Hey, I get your experience and I’m going through the same thing. Thanks for the song.’”
That response also challenged some of the assumptions she had learned about songwriting. Much of the conventional thinking around pop places the chorus at the centre of a track, but listeners were finding their way into Small Talk through its verse and piano introduction. The same pattern has appeared across her other releases, with particular moments connecting online before audiences have even heard the full song.
“Which has been great because when the song comes out people get a great chorus at the end of the part of the song they already know,” she says.
What began through those online connections has gradually become something Winter can experience in front of her. One particularly significant moment came when Olivia Dean selected her to perform at Ronnie Scott's alongside Nectar Woode.
“I was so, so honoured to be picked by Olivia to play at Ronnie’s,” Winter recalls. “It felt like a really female-empowered evening. I’m a huge fan of Nectar Woode and it was so cool to share the stage with her too.”
The invitation itself was meaningful, but so was the example Dean had set through the way she developed her career. “I think Olivia has done an incredible job building her career from the ground up and focused on the long game. That’s what I admire about her. She’s in it for quality and longevity.”
Winter's own relationship with performing is continuing to develop. Having spent much of her time on stage surrounded by musicians, her upcoming London show on 16 October, at a secret location, will give audiences an opportunity to see a different part of her musicianship.
“This show will express my relationship with the piano,” she says. “I’ve always done very large, big-band shows where I’m very much a frontwoman. Which I love. But this show will allow people to see the path to shows like that.”
Rather than presenting the full-band performances listeners have come to associate with her, Winter wants to share the quieter environment in which so much of her music begins.
“I think it’s quite rare for listeners to get to see this environment I’m performing in,” she explains. “It’s one of my favourite things about being a musician and a very sacred space. I’m excited to invite people into it.”
That sense of returning to something personal runs through So Easily, released on 2 October. Despite writing hundreds of songs independently since childhood, it is the first track she has released that was written entirely by herself.
“So Easily is the first song I’ve released which is just 100% my own writing,” she says. “Which is funny because I only started co-writing in the past year or so.”
Her recent work with James Smith has helped bring new material into her catalogue, and she clearly values what that creative relationship has produced. But releasing something written alone offers a different kind of satisfaction, particularly when so much of her musical identity was developed before she ever began collaborating.
“Finding a real kinship in my writing with James meant we created some amazing songs together which I was eager to get out. But yes, I’m really excited to share one of many songs I’ve written alone in my bedroom.”
There is no need for So Easily to announce a complete change in direction. Its significance comes from allowing listeners to hear a part of Winter that has been present all along. The piano, her voice and the instinct to write something meaningful without allowing the process to become overly complicated are enough to carry the song.
The same thinking shapes the way she approaches singing. “I guess I’ve always sung in service of the song,” she says. “Some songs need power and some songs need gentleness.”
That distinction says a great deal about Hope Winter as an artist. Her music can be personal without losing its humour, informed by grief without being defined by it, and capable of moving from the scale of a full-band performance to the intimacy of a song written alone at the piano. These aren't competing sides of her identity, but different parts of the same musician.
With So Easily, Winter is giving listeners a clearer sense of where that musicianship began, without suggesting it needs to stay there. And for anyone still trying to work out what kind of artist she is, her own description says enough.
“That I’m an artist with ballads AND bops.”
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