Track listing: Felicia’s Lullaby
Danielle Hani is a Los Angeles-based composer, orchestrator, and pianist whose performance of "Felicia's Lullaby" is featured on the 2024 soundtrack for the Hulu series We Were The Lucky Ones. While composed by the renowned British composer Rachel Portman, today we examine "Felicia's Lullaby" as a solo piano performance piece recorded by Hani.
As the work's title implies, the lullaby serves a narrative device providing the viewer (and listener) a moment of reflection, closure, and emotional catharsis--a moment of calm after the plot's inevitable storm. Listening to Hani's approach to her performance, she interprets the notes into a voice of comfort, of memory, and of solace.
Through her own background, having studied film scoring and orchestration at Berklee College of Music, it is evident that she appreciates and embodies an awareness of how music functions in television and film. While her performance certainly reflects the musicality of the notes on the page, and channels her own musicianship in the process, she brings to life the piece for the valuable purpose it serves in the storyline.
In her July 2025 interview with Stereo Stickman she explains of "Felicia's Lullaby" that "It's such an intimate and emotional moment in the show, and playing it on piano gave me a deep connection to the characters and their journey." Her appreciation for the subtlety of musical storytelling shines through: "Sometimes the quietest, most delicate choices can have the strongest emotional impact." Her respectful approach--restrained, tender, deliberate--to the overarching theme allows the story to take the spotlight rather than drawing attention to herself as the performer.
Danielle has a beautiful touch on the piano's keys, maximizing the natural decay of the notes. She allows time and space for the sounds to create their most powerful impact. "Rubato" is the musical term, meaning "stolen time." In such a beautiful work, the pianist's slight adjustments in tempo and timing maximize the resonance of the piano strings' vibrations. Her "quiet" and "most delicate choices" indeed bring to "Felicia's Lullaby" all of the power and emotion the composition deserves.