Hip-hop and neo-soul artist Chad HaTTaH; photo credit: Olha Melokhina
Modern audiences frequently search for deeper meaning and connection in entertainment, yet they often encounter surface-level content. Artists face the difficult task of balancing authentic self-expression with the fast-paced demands of the music industry.
This creates a distinct need for art that addresses the complexities of human perception, personal identity, and emotional growth.
Independent hip-hop and neo-soul artist Chad HaTTaH is taking a different approach. His new EP, The Reconciliation of Chad HaTTaH, is built around a more inward question: What happens when we stop fighting the parts of ourselves we would rather leave behind?
For HaTTaH, the answer has come through music, psychology, philosophy, and personal experience. The EP follows a continuous story about understanding different parts of oneself, using soul, wordplay, and cinematic storytelling to explore identity, emotion, and personal growth.
At the center of the project is HaTTaH himself, both as an artist and as a character representing different aspects of the human experience.
“The dual perspective revealed itself to me through the relationship between my lower self and my higher self,” HaTTaH says.
For much of his life, he says, he felt loving, calm, open and compassionate, particularly during later experiences traveling with friends and attending festivals. He came to recognize that part of himself as his higher self, “the wiser, more compassionate part of us.”
But a painful falling-out with close friends changed that relationship. After speaking his mind and stepping away, HaTTaH felt that his intentions and reasons for leaving were being misrepresented. He found himself unusually hurt, insecure and reactive.
“That mindset is what I think of as the lower self,” he says. “Not a lesser part, but one that needed understanding.”
That distinction became central to the EP. Rather than treating the lower self as something that needs to be defeated, HaTTaH began viewing it as something that needs to be heard.
“When I began creating The Reconciliation of Chad HaTTaH, I felt like life had hurt me enough that my frequency had fallen,” he says. “So the EP became a pathway back to that higher version of myself.”
His creative process followed the same idea. “I try to put myself in the lower self’s shoes and rhyme from my higher self’s perspective,” he says. “Honestly, I was leaving a breadcrumb trail of insight for myself, while recognizing that it could also help listeners who were seeking that same resolution.”
The reconciliation, then, is not about choosing one self over another.
“I’m not trying to destroy or defeat the lower self. I’m trying to understand and reconcile with it,” HaTTaH says. “The higher self is me, and the lower self is me. I want to validate how my lower self perceived an experience rather than simply dismissing it.”
He compares the process to the relationship between a mother and her child. “I think of the higher self holding the lower self the way a mother holds her baby,” he says. “Instead of judging the reactive or wounded parts of ourselves, we become curious about them, listen to them, understand what they need, and allow the wiser part of us to respond with compassion. To me, that’s what reconciliation means.”
That perspective did not come immediately. In the aftermath of his personal upheaval, HaTTaH says his early songwriting came from a very different place.
“At first, in the middle of the upheaval, I’d say the songs were coming from a place of sitting on a pedestal,” he says. “Suggesting how society should work and, honestly, talking down to people I felt were operating at a lower frequency.”
The songs, however, did not feel completely right. Over time, his relationship with his emotions began to change. “Instead of feeling like life was happening to me, I started to understand that maybe life was happening for me,” he says.
The shift did not mean that anger, resentment, or hurt disappeared. In fact, HaTTaH says he initially judged himself for continuing to experience those emotions even after understanding what he believed the experience had taught him.
“Eventually I realized the emotions weren’t the problem. My relationship with them was,” he says. Rather than immediately judging an emotion, he began to be curious about where it came from. That change also transformed the music. “The songs became less about pointing a finger outward and more about observing what was happening inward,” he says.
Once he stopped writing from what he describes as a pedestal, the songs became more honest. Pain and frustration could remain part of the story without becoming an accusation.
“I could still speak about pain or frustration, but instead of condemning someone else, or myself, I could allow HaTTaH to show me what those emotions were trying to teach me,” he says. “That created a kind of yellow brick road back to myself.”
That journey is informed by a wide range of influences. HaTTaH draws from psychology and philosophy, but also from Burning Man, travel, friendships, sports, literature and film.
“Burning Man, travel, different friendships, and other transformational festivals gave me opportunities to accumulate real experiences and then apply that kind of thinking to my own life,” he says. These experiences allowed ideas about “reality, life’s status quo, presence, identity, connection, and growth” to become experiences rather than abstract concepts.
His interest in cinematic storytelling goes back to high school, when he took a class called The Art of Film. “It was an amazing class because it revealed how many layers a film can have and how intentional the placement of certain symbols, lighting, visual cues, music, or Easter eggs can be,” he says.
Those references have remained with him. When he writes, HaTTaH draws from what he calls a library of psychology, philosophy, sports, festivals, literature, film, and personal experiences. “When I’m writing, I can pull from all of those places and string together verbal and cinematic analogies that help communicate a particular story, emotion, or idea,” he says.
A reference to Alice in Wonderland, for example, can connect with a psychological or philosophical concept, which can then connect with something he has experienced himself. “I’m not referencing things just to reference them,” he says. “I’m trying to use familiar symbols and stories either for what they already represent or as entry points into something deeper.”
That layered approach becomes especially important in The Reconciliation of Chad HaTTaH, where each song represents a chapter in a larger story.
HaTTaH plans to release each song as a single first, beginning with “Gee,” expected later this September. Most of the releases will unfold through the fall, a timing he sees as fitting the project’s central metaphor. “The season itself becomes another metaphor for shedding old ‘leaves’ and changing our relationship with the lower-self states we’ve been carrying,” he says.
The story begins with five lower-self states associated with suffering: judgment, fear, worry, ego, and doubt. Each is gradually transformed into a higher quality. Judgment becomes observation, while doubt eventually becomes faith.
The music videos are designed to carry the story forward as well. “With each song, Chad HaTTaH becomes more whole,” he says. “What may look like an isolated symbol in one song starts to take on a different meaning once you’ve experienced the chapters that follow.”
The visual world moves through three centers of human experience: the mind, representing perception and understanding; the heart, representing emotion and motivation; and the spirit, representing meaning and purpose.
HaTTaH wants listeners to experience the project as something they gradually piece together. “You can enjoy each song and video independently, but symbols, transformations, and clues accumulate beneath the surface,” he says. “Each chapter gives you a piece, and the larger picture slowly becomes clearer as the story progresses.”
When the full EP arrives, one final visual reveal in the last minute of the final song will bring the five chapters together.
For HaTTaH, the project is ultimately less about presenting a finished answer than documenting the process of finding one. “I’m trying to understand and reconcile with it,” he says of the parts of himself that once felt difficult to accept.
This fall, as the leaves change, The Reconciliation of Chad HaTTaH offers its own version of the same process: letting go of old patterns, looking more closely at what remains, and finding a way to become whole without having to erase any part of the journey.
