Hanna Nicole and Ashley Grace Pérez Mosa, jointly known as Ha*Ash, are not professional tennis players. They answered a higher calling in life, creating moving music for themselves and their legion of fans, millions of global listeners who’ve fallen in love with their blend of country and pop songs performed largely in Spanish. The sisters, who live in Houston when they’re not off conquering the world with routinely sold-out shows, have just released a new album and are headed for a return visit to Smart Financial Centre Wednesday, November 27.
Hanna and Ashley were in Mexico when we chatted by Zoom and seeing them converse about HAASHVILLE, their new album, was like watching Venus and Serena Williams in action. Every question was a little yellow ball that one would connect with, then smoothly volley to the other. Back and forth it went this way, two siblings in total synch about the mission of their music, clearing the net with clean, well-placed shots.
First serve: since we were speaking with Ha*Ash on the date of their album release, we asked what they were feeling in that exact moment. It’s rare to be able to ask artists about an album release on the actual release date.
“After many months of work and we poured so much love,…” Hanna began.
“You’re pouring your heart out to a project and just letting all your stories come to life, putting them on paper and recording them,” Ashley returned.
“And then getting them to your fans,” Hanna came back. “After so many months of hard work of letting those stories out, we’re finally going to be able to give them to our fans today, so we’re really excited about that.”
“So, tonight we’ll be reading a lot of comments because obviously, when you do an album, you do it for yourself, but once you let it go, it’s for the fans,” Ashley added. “So, we’re really excited to see what they think.”
HAASHVILLE is the duo’s seventh studio album, continuing a string that began when the sisters started their music careers in 2002. As Ashley told us when we chatted last spring, they began singing in church with their grandmother and never stopped, perfecting their popular sound and graceful synchronicity by playing Louisiana parish fairgrounds on the way to locales like Mexico and South America.
The one place they’re currently fascinated with is HAASHVILLE.
“HAASHVILLE is an album that we recorded in Houston, in our house. It’s an album with recent stories. We (named it) HAASHVILLE because it’s a more country album than we normally release,” Hanna explained. “In every album, we always have country elements. We were born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, so we grew up listening to Dixie Chicks, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton, so that’s kind of what we grew up listening to.
“But whenever we would travel to Mexico, because of our parents’ job, we would be half the year in the U.S. and half the year in Mexico. So, whenever we’d get to Mexico, country wasn’t a thing here, people didn’t listen to country. So, what we would do, we would translate the country songs to Spanish and then Ashley and I were like, ‘We should do country in Spanish, right?’ It’s a genre that we love that we feel is ours. We’ve been 22 years doing country in Spanish and this album, we named it HAASHVILLE because of Nashville. We go to Nashville a lot of and, you know, Nashville is the heart of country music. So, it was almost like paying our respects to that city.”
HAASHVILLE is “an album, a tour, a state of mind and a place where we want our fans to just feel safe and feel like they can come and make it,…” Ashley began.
“And know that they’re not alone,” Hanna picked up. “Like, we’re in this together. Whenever we write songs about our love life, about heartbreak – when we write that and see that other people are also living that, we feel less alone. We feel like there are other people also living that. For us, HAASHVILLE is that utopic place where our fans and we spend our time.”
“It’s like a safe place,” Ashley concluded.
We asked about “I Got It,” an anthemic female empowerment track released from the album. It features some Ha*Ash trademarks – most notably beautiful, harmonic singing – but it’s also in English, a bit of an anomaly. Or, so we thought. We learned that “I Got It” wasn’t written to crossover to English-speaking audiences, it’s just the result of how the sisters write songs.
“There’s a lot of songs that we’ve written in English and that we’ve translated to Spanish,” Ashley said.
“What happened with ‘I Got It’ is we started to write it in Spanish and it just didn’t have the same feel and we were like, you know what, let’s just leave it in English. And it’s not necessarily for a crossover. It’s just because the song has that soul and we wanted to leave it.”
“Now that we’re touring, we started in Mexico, and our fans in Mexico are singing ‘I Got It.’ It’s a great feeling that we don’t necessarily think that all of our songs need to be in Spanish,” Hanna said. “We wrote this song in Nashville, we wrote it in English, hey, we love the vibe, let’s do it, let’s see what happens. And our fans have responded amazingly to it.
“‘I Got It’ is just a feel-good song. As a woman, you want to wake up feeling like that. This song is for all of our women fans. We want them to get up and know that they’ve got it. It’s all in the attitude. When we play it live, we love it, we love the response that our fans have and we cannot wait to play that in Houston whenever we take the tour to the US.”
Ha*Ash has an industry nickname, “Las Reinas del Sold Out,” Queens of the Sold Out shows. HAASHVILLE, the tour, will allow them to build on that reputation.
“This tour is actually the biggest tour that we’ve ever had. It’s awesome to see in South America, we used to go and play in theaters and now we’re playing in arenas, so that’s pretty cool. Here in Mexico, we’re breaking records in a lot of cities that we’re going to,” Ashley served.
“We’ve been doing this for 22 years and the reason we’re still here is because of the live shows,” Hanna returned. “What we mostly love is to feel the presence of our fans, to play our music live, to connect with our fans when we play live.”
“And, as for the US, it’s awesome to see how many Latin people are living in the US and, as far as that goes, it’s cool that we’re bringing a little bit of home to them,” Ashley noted.
“This tour is going to be our most extensive tour. We started in Mexico, then we’re taking it to the US then we’ll be going to Canada, Central America, South America, Spain. The last tour, we did 130 dates, so we’re hoping to break that record with this tour, but it’s just great with every single tour to be able to explore the world and get to know cities and countries that we might have never known if it wouldn’t have been because of our music. We’re really excited about that,” Hanna said.
Ha*Ash brings HAASHVILLE to the world starting in their hometown of Houston, Wednesday, November 27 at Smart Financial Centre, 18111 Lexington in Sugar Land. 8 p.m.,$39- $125.50.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
