Cortlandt Musician/Artist Has Got it Going On

I could really use a brownie

God, that makes me feel kind of horny,

What the F...is going wrong with me

You know what, I should go get high

I think there's something in my eye

It think it's cancer. It's definitely cancer

I looked it up on WebMD and it's malignant

Don't you tell me it's a figment...

So sings Hannah Friedman eclectically on her YouTube website, but just because she seems unhinged in song doesn't mean she hasn't got it together.

Called "Neurosis in D," says the Cortlandt resident, I wanted to capture a complex thought process - a sort of stream of consciousness where you're not only worrying about all kinds of your things but you're also worrying about worrying.

Influenced by the typical class rock stuff, Jazz, musical theater and her father's life's work as a musician, her Oh Obama song burrowed a bit of country western skeptical optimism in hopes that he would live up to the billing.

What if this is a super secret GOP plot

Like you unzip your skin, revealing Sara Palin...

You two never are in the same spot!

Oh Obama don't break my heart...

And give me time to adjust my paradigm

Now that the president is actually smart

Amusement, political sarcasm and the pseudo rap aside, she can hit the harmonies as well as the musical punchlines. When she's not on YouTube, the soloist is making it a duo at area locales like the Peekskill Coffee with Yorktown folk singer Scott Seltzer. "When voices blend together - that's just really satisfying," she says.

She'll be giving us a bit more of that with the release of her first CD this March. A fusion between pop, rock and jazz, she says, I'm putting together some really soulful tracks, while laying some big band ensemble action onto the mix.

Otherwise, her writing isn't only something that dissipates into the air for an audience's enjoyment. Her book, "Everything Sucks" is a dissertation of teenage angst in memoir form.

Nice enough, and as we all can go the way of self-publishing, she seems among the masses of starving artists who string it together, while waiting on tables or driving taxis. She admits to the stringing together part, but she's definitely a step or two ahead of the rest.

"Everything Sucks" was published by Health Communications Inc, which puts out the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and ties back to an article she wrote for Newsweek at the age of 17 and a series of Op-eds about the college application process. Freelancing for Cosmopolitan and consulting high schoolers on writing the college essay also helps keep her out from behind a bar or pet sitting for cats.

And her resume doesn't end there. She graduated from Yale with a degree in Screenplay Writing, and is currently adapting her book into a screenplay. So whether "Neurosis in D" is autobiographical or not, it's really anyone following her who needs a stream of consciousness to keep up with all she's done and seems destined to do.

http://www.hannahfriedman.com/