Overview
The thing about finding yourself is there's always another corner to turn. The Vermont-based singer/songwriter Liz Cooper made her third album during a period of intense self-discovery and reinvention. She moved to New York for the first time, weathered a pandemic, came out to herself after falling in love with a friend, and experienced her first queer relationship and breakup, all in the course of a few years. New Day marks both a personal and a musical revolution for Cooper – a plunge into psychedelic pop depths and a fullhearted reflection of a whirlwind chapter in her life. These songs scintillate with the kind of self-confidence that only beams through after you've aimed a sharp gaze inward and realized that whatever you see will always keep darting ahead of you.
In making New Day, Cooper radically overturned her habitual approaches to making music. Rather than writing with a full band behind her, she recorded demos alone in her apartment, learning day by day to trust herself as she forged her new sound. “I needed to show up for myself to finish writing something that felt impossible,” Cooper says. “New York really challenged me to become a better writer, artist, and person. Living there made me ask myself, why am I making this? Why am I doing any of this? What's the point? I was tired of being pigeonholed as a guitar player and Americana artist. I needed to follow my own creative bliss.” While recording, Cooper assumed production duties for the first time in her career, which enabled her to work bold new textures into each song. Together with co-producer Dan Molad (Lucius, JD McPherson), she wrung entirely new sounds out of her guitar with studio equipment she’d never tried before. For the album’s bristlingly optimistic title track, Cooper ran her guitar through a Kaoss pad synthesizer while Molad captured the sound by swinging a microphone around the room. They visited the War on Drugs’ studio to record feedback from Marshall amplifier stacks. Rather than focusing solely on composition and performance, Cooper took a sculptural and procedural approach to production. “Instead of writing my guitar parts note by note, I was experimenting on the spot,” she says. “It opened my mind up – and it felt really good.”
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