Anna Hamilton

Bucyrus, a banjo, and twelve children

Anna Hamilton grew up in Bucyrus, a small town south of Kansas City, in a household of twelve children — six boys and six girls. The family's principal shared activity was not music but competitive water skiing: she started training at four and was competing at national level by eight, with the family crossing the country by RV for tournaments. She has said that the travel and the pressure of that circuit shaped both her work ethic and the closeness she still describes when talking about home.

Songwriting arrived at roughly the same age. She began writing at eight, with a guitar and a banjo as her only instruments, and remembers singing her own material around the house while her siblings were trying to study. Family harmonies around a campfire are the origin story she returns to most often in interviews. She also taught herself to yodel by working through The Sound of Music syllable by syllable until she could reproduce it — a detail that says something useful about the method behind the apparently artless delivery.

The move to Nashville came later, and she has been candid about what it cost: she left parents and eleven siblings behind to do it, and has described periods of doubt about whether the trade was worth making. Her answer, when asked, has been to reframe the goal away from scale — making honest work that moves people rather than chasing a chart position.

The cover that outgrew the singer

In 2018 Hamilton released an acoustic reading of Imagine Dragons' 'Bad Liar'. It was slower and barer than the original, and it travelled a long way further than anything she had released under her own name. By mid-2020 the video had passed fifty-one million views on YouTube; her current booking biography puts her aggregate figures at more than a hundred million streams and 368 million YouTube views across her catalogue, and notes chart entries in several countries.

That kind of arrival is a mixed inheritance. A cover that large fixes an audience's idea of an artist at the exact moment she is least in control of it, and the version of Hamilton that millions of people met first was an interpreter rather than a writer. Almost everything she has done since 2022 reads as an argument against that framing.

The rebuttal was slow and deliberate rather than dramatic. 'Maybe in the Morning' and '8 Hours' followed in 2022, 'Dead End' and 'Too Tight' in 2023, 'cigarettes & us' in 2024 — a steady drip of original material, most of it built on the same stripped acoustic architecture that had carried the cover, but with the writing credit where it belonged.

Belmont, Songland and the years of writing for other people

Hamilton graduated from Belmont University in Nashville with a music business degree in 2018 — the same year the cover broke. The training shows in how her career has been run: independent releases, a clear management and booking structure, and a preference for building slowly through placements rather than waiting for a label.

In the summer of 2020 she appeared on the second season of NBC's Songland, in the ninth episode, pitching an original called 'Deathbed' to Ben Platt. She described the song as being about giving the whole of yourself to the present moment. Platt did not advance her to the studio round, but told her that her writing was 'super emotional and bold and courageous'. It was a national television slot that produced no obvious immediate reward, which is a fair summary of how most of that period went.

Alongside it came the less visible work: sync placements on network shows including Love Island and The Titan Games, and a single, 'Self Help', in August 2020. Through that stretch she was functioning primarily as a writer for other people. The shift back towards being an artist in her own right — her phrase for it — is comparatively recent, and Collarbones is where it lands.

Collarbones

Collarbones, a five-track EP running a little over fourteen minutes, was released on 23 January 2026. It collects 'Collarbones', 'Silverware', 'God Forbid', 'Worst Case' and 'little love'. Three of the five had already been released as singles — 'Silverware' and 'God Forbid' through 2025, 'Worst Case' at the top of 2026 — so the EP works less as a surprise than as a consolidation, gathering eighteen months of separate releases into a single statement with a shape.

It is self-released: the copyright line reads simply ℗ 2025 Anna Hamilton, and Apple Music files it under Folk rather than pop. That classification is closer to the truth of the record than the acoustic-pop tag she is often given. The arrangements range from near-solo voice-and-guitar to fuller band settings, but the centre of gravity stays with the lyric.

The titles give away the method. 'Collarbones' and 'Silverware' both take a small physical object and use it to carry something much larger — a habit of writing that suits a fourteen-minute record, because nothing has time to be explained twice. Both have drawn the strongest streaming response of anything she has released since the cover.

Physical editions followed through her own shop: the EP is available on vinyl in several colour variants alongside the usual merchandise. For an artist with no label behind her, that direct-to-audience route is where the margin actually is.

Where she stands, September 2026

The state of play in late September 2026 is a songwriter who has finally got the record she wanted out into the world and is between cycles. Collarbones is eight months old. The spring touring run that supported it has finished. Ticketmaster currently lists no dates for her, and setlist.fm holds no setlists at all — the latter is a reasonable indicator of the rooms she plays, since audiences at two-hundred-capacity clubs rarely log them.

Her business affairs are handled by Jeff Hoehne at Hoehne Entertainment, with bookings through Eva Alexiou-Reo at FATA Booking — an agency structure that points towards continued club-level touring rather than a jump in venue size. Nothing has been announced publicly about a follow-up release.

The measurable trajectory is upward but unhurried: from a 2018 cover that briefly made her a global name, through five years of writing and placements, to an independent EP in 2026 with vinyl behind it and a spring tour that put her in front of paying rooms in three time zones. Whether the next step is a full-length album is, at the time of writing, unannounced.

The rooms she plays now

Hamilton has built a touring habit rather than a touring campaign: a Fall 2024 run, a Spring 2025 run, and in 2026 a support slot on Ike Dweck's Safe With Me tour. Each of those cycles has its own setlist playlist published on Apple Music, which is an unusually direct way of telling an audience what they will hear before they buy a ticket.

The 2026 dates confirmed her in the American club circuit proper: Schubas Tavern in Chicago on 27 May, 7th St Entry in Minneapolis on 28 May, and The Evening Muse in Charlotte on 7 June, a 7.30pm start that sold out. These are rooms in the low hundreds — the Minneapolis venue is the small room attached to First Avenue — and they suit a set that depends on the audience being quiet enough to follow a lyric.

Dweck's own headline schedule runs on through November 2026 across Texas and Canada, though support acts for those dates have not been announced.