At a festival filled with jostling crowds and mosh pits in May, Bri Hunt had an audience sitting criss-cross on the floor like a kindergarten class.

“I didn’t even ask them to do that,” Hunt said, remembering the set. “It doesn’t happen too often, but it’s like, ‘Cool, y’all are posted up, ready to hear some music and chill out.’”

It was Bled Fest 2018 in Howell, Michigan, and Hunt, whose sets are trademarked by inter-song banter, went over her time slot contextualizing a song she ran out of time to play. But two months later, at the Old Church Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, Hunt’s sermon was more focused. “I’m gonna try to not do so much talking,” said Hunt from stage, laughing near the end of her set. “I can get a little carried away.” Delivered on a Friday night, rather than a Sunday morning, Hunt’s haunting vocals and Telecaster preached from the pulpit.

The crowd was arranged in the pews beneath Hunt’s perch and the massive organ that rose behind her. Like most church gatherings, it was an eclectic group of varying ages, including a mother and her child in the front row. The Portland show was the fourth of a 24-date national tour for the 23-year-old based in Columbus, Ohio, who tours under the name Many Rooms. Despite a sarcastic crack about the eerie silence of the crowd, she said she didn’t mind.

“It’s so respectful to just listen,” said Hunt in the green room after her show. The soft strumming and humming of Angelo de Augustine — headlining the tour — flittered in from across the building. “I’m pretty good at making people laugh. But this time I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m going to stop making jokes now because I feel like no one is in it.’”

The show did have a weighty feel. Compounding the mood set by the towering old walls of the church-turned-venue, Hunt’s song content is intensely personally and spares few punches. “And I fear that I can’t fight / And I fear that I won’t try,” she sings on her opener “Hollow Body” as she slips into the borrowed chorus of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in unbroken stride.

Environments like this are where her music echoes best — warm, quiet, relaxed. Where many acts benefit from a more traditional and physical energy, Hunt vibes with the hum of a rapt, silent gathering. Regardless of the mood of the crowd, she always attempts to maintain a relationship with her audience. Her banter is a fixture of her performance: consistent, thorough and a tad rambly.

“If I didn’t do that I would lose interest in writing and making music and playing shows. If I just go to the show, play my songs and then leave, what do I get out of that? What do people get out of that?” she asked after the set. “They hear these songs and they don’t know what they’re about, they don’t know anything about it. These songs have stories, they’re about things that are so important to me. I feel like I have an obligation.”

Hunt — decked in a sleeveless velvet gown and sandals — leaned close to the mic, speaking softly as she adjusted tuning between songs. Under the red stage lights at the Old Church, with the last of the summer sun coming through a stained glass pane, her song introductions — and the songs themselves — felt less like prepared statements and more like the audience was sitting in on Hunt’s confessional.

“I think, especially with art, you have to be honest. I think that makes good art, when you’re completely transparent,” said Hunt. “The only way that people are willing to break down walls is if the other person is willing to break down theirs first.”

This stance stems from musical growth within a DIY community, absorbing the culture of hardcore and punk performance earlier in her life. “The whole premise of the set was not just the music, but what the music was about. I definitely adopted that.”

Hunt’s songwriting hones in on the idea of reckoning with upbringing and identity. Raised Christian in Houston, Texas, religion is threaded intimately through those concepts. Though she cringes at the label of “Christian music,” she acknowledges that her relationship with faith — beginning as a self-proclaimed “Bible thumper” in her teenage years — has heavily influenced her musicianship. Her debut record, There is a Presence Here, released in April on Other People Records, stems from her faith as well, and her lapses with it. “The record is about my doubt,” she said. “Coming to a place of doubt and questioning was the best place I could’ve been in, because I was able to have a clean slate — take out everything that I was given and make something myself. To figure things out for myself.”

As Hunt neared the end of her set, she sandwiched two staples — “Danielle” and “The Father Complex,” the latter her most popular track — with a brief monologue. The pair are about her mother and father, respectively. The first exudes a sense of nostalgic comfort, the second drips with cold anger. Her preface to “The Father Complex,” her last song of the night, was that the song holds different significance to her now: written at 18, her perspective on her father and his early departure from her life has changed. But she thought it was important to keep playing the song anyway.

“That song doesn’t hold weight on me anymore, because I’ve made attempts to forgive my dad. It just feels like playing a song. It doesn’t bother me that it’s popular; I understand why,” she said. “I try to convey the forgiveness in my voice while I’m singing the song, just to be less passionate but more lighthearted, or give some sort of forgiving tone. I want to be honest. I don’t want to pretend that I’m feeling something that I’m not feeling.”

Although Hunt’s father has since gotten in touch, and she’s striven to forgive him, she stresses the importance of preserving a live library as a musician — a museum of her songs that an audience can access as necessary.

“When you’re a musician and you write a song, you put it out there and people take something from it, something that they interpret in their own way or they felt comforted or affected. The song doesn’t just belong to you anymore — it belongs to the people that received it,” she said. “It’s not my place to keep this song from people. If people need to hear something, then I want to be able to provide that sense of comfort.”

Hunt is balancing growth as a person and as a musician. The two happen in parallel. For her, the release of There is a Presence Here is a huge step for both. “I’m so proud of this record. The [Hollow Body] EP, after a while, I would cringe when I’d listen to some songs from it, just because it’s so old. But this record, I listen to it just because I want to, I want to hear my songs again,” she said.

At the same time, Hunt says she’s reached the healthiest mental state of her adult life. She’s able to blend this maturation of music and self, falling back on her own goals and applying them to her art just the same.

“Now that my head is clear, I can care about more than just music and touring,” Hunt said. “Touring and music has definitely changed since I’ve been healthy. I don’t want to say it’s less important, but it’s less about my survival to play these shows and do this. It’s more about doing it because I know it’s what I’m supposed to do.” 

This mindset has changed her live performances noticeably, Hunt said. Her pre-show preparation, too, has been different on this tour. This is in part due to the absence of her usual road partner: her fiance, on his own tour. The engagement was recent — one more big step in Hunt’s life which has influenced the way she thinks about what’s to come.

“I’ve always been like, ‘Settling down is for losers. You’re boring if you settle down.’ But now it’s like, I just want to garden. But that’s a future thing,” she said. “It’s really cool to be free of the feeling of needing music and needing touring to live and to survive, and feeling like I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this, if I didn’t have music I’d have no reason to live — that’s how I used to feel. I don’t feel that way anymore, and that’s a healthy place to be in. I feel like I can appreciate it in a different way, a better way, now that I’m not dependent on it. That’s a very long way of saying that this is my career; I’m trying to make this my career.”

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