Lissa Hanner – Singer/Songwriter

Lissa Hanner — Guffey, Colorado  ·  Kent Gunnufson

Lissa Hanner is from the town of Guffey — a very small town in the Colorado high country known for having a dog as its mayor. She has spent much of her life living on her ranch in western Colorado, and her music reflects the wide open spaces and honest living of that life.

There's a particular kind of music that can only come from someone who actually lives the life they're singing about. Lissa Hanner is that kind of musician. Her ranch in western Colorado isn't a backdrop — it's the source. The land, the seasons, the work, the quiet — all of it finds its way into her songs.

Guffey is the kind of place that most people drive through without stopping. It's small enough that everyone knows everyone, remote enough that you have to mean it to be there. Lissa means it. She's built her life in that country and her music carries the weight and the openness of it.

I've always been drawn to artists who integrate their environment into their work rather than just referencing it. Lissa does that completely. When you listen to her, you can hear the distance between things — the space that western Colorado has in abundance and that most of the world has forgotten how to sit with.

She contributed to the soundtrack of Bumming Colorado's Ski Country, and her music was a natural fit — not because it's ski music, but because it's Colorado music. It comes from the same place the documentary comes from: a genuine love for this landscape and the people who choose to live in it.

Lissa Hanner is one of those artists who reminds you why music matters in the first place. Not as entertainment, but as testimony — as a record of what it feels like to be alive in a particular place at a particular time.