When Sweden-based Australian musician, Mitchell Hazlett Lewis – better known as Hazlett – got a job at an advertising agency after quitting music, he soon realised that his step back was not permanent. When a friend told him about an opportunity to sing at a local pub in Australia for some cash, he found himself pulled back into music. Hazlett had played bass in a band before they broke up, so he wasn’t a stranger to performing, but he’d never sung in public before and would do so for the first time at the age of 25. And with a guitar in hand, he started playing three-hour sets at the pub to pay the bills.
After a series of events – including getting fired from his pub gig for singing original songs, receiving relentless calls from a friend in the music industry who urged him to try out a music career seriously, and resigning from his advertising agency job – the singer decided to leave Australia and settle in Sweden to work on his music with a producer.
Since then, Hazlett has put out a collection of EPs – most recently, the A and B-sides of Goodbye to the Valley Low – and his first album, Bloom Mountain, in 2023. Over the past few years, countless cities across the UK, Europe, and Canada have welcomed Hazlett and his guitar, and he’ll soon head off for his nearly sold-out headline North American tour.
With new music on the way, his discography is a collection of sonic romances between tender acoustic melodies and expansive, ambient soundscapes. A self-described solitary person, Hazlett earnestly invites his listeners’ own introspection in the quiet moments his songs offer.
For Hazlett, deciding on the vulnerabilities he brings into his music is all about timing. It’s a way to work through something in his mind for the most part, but he also describes the romance to it – the magic little moment where the right thought finds him at the right time.
“Surprisingly during the writing process, I don’t consider or feel the heaviness that comes from the idea of revisiting old memories. It just happens,”, he explains. “But when I play the songs live, that’s when it hits me the most. All the memories come flooding back and, in a strange way, I only realise the gravity of what I’ve been writing then.”
When it comes to writing, Hazlett’s environment has become a significant influence on the music he makes: “There’s an old saying that a guitar only has a certain amount of songs in it, but I think the same of spaces. I can’t be in the same studio day in, day out or I go a little stir crazy and find myself circling around the same thoughts.”
Hazlett’s most recent EPs, ‘Goodbye to the Valley Low (Side-A)’ and ‘(Side-B)’, were the products of escaping the city and retreating into a cabin on the Swedish West Coast. ‘Side-A’ was completed in 2023 but ready to move onto something else sonically and writing-wise after returning to the city, Hazlett found himself being pulled back into that cabin. He knew there was still unfinished business that he needed to explore and so, he returned to the cabin to write ‘Goodbye to the Valley Low (Side-B)’ in 2024.
In the last year of releasing music and touring, he’s had to learn a few lessons about himself. “I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that as introverted as I am, I really do need people,”, he shares. “I’ve spent a lot of time by myself over the years thinking that’s just the way I am and I’m always destined to be a solitary kind of person. But I don’t think people are supposed to live like that.”
Touring has become Hazlett’s happy place, where the music goes from being something he recorded and hopes people are listening to, to becoming something tangible. “I feel at ease on the road. It probably makes me sound super old, but I think the music and the world at large are quite digital at the moment, so there’s something oddly underrated and cathartic about being in a room with a bunch of people and feeling something in real time together,”, he says.
In the upcoming year, Hazlett’s plans come down to touring North America and releasing new music. “I’m a little nervous about the new music, to be honest. I don’t ever want to stay the same and I also want people who have been listening to me to feel a part of something that is moving forward and changing. In a strange way, we’re all growing together – personally and sonically,”, he exclaims. “It’s definitely hard to accept sometimes that my songs would ever mean that much to someone, but I guess that’s how I’ve always treated music myself. I had my comfort artists growing up and still do. So, in a weird way, I’m just paying it forward for what music has done for me personally. I suppose that’s what I’d want people to learn about me – I’m just like them. Some kind of sentimental person who takes solace in music too.”
For Hazlett, music means everything. “It’s given me purpose. It’s given clarity to the thoughts in my head. It’s given me a place to feel seen. It’s given me comfort. And it literally saved me. It’s given me everything I have.”
Written by Bernice Santos // photography by Jonathan Persson
GEM Magazine 