Chris Cohen’s songs initially sound easy. They’re each tiny jewels that unfurl at a leisurely pace, but dig a little deeper and you’ll reach a melancholy core. His previous two albums — 2012’s Overgrown Path, and 2016’s As If Apart — were built from lush, blurry tracks that embedded themselves in your
subconscious, like they’d always been there.
Chris Cohen, his third solo album, was written and recorded in his Lincoln Heights studio and at
Tropico Beauties in Glendale, California over the course of the last two years. Cohen would sing
melodies into his phone, fleshing them out on piano, then constructing songs around the melodies, and later, adding lyrics and other instrumentation with the help of Katy Davidson (Dear Nora), Luke Csehak (Happy Jawbone Family Band), Zach Phillips, and saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, among others. It is his most straightforward album yet, but it is also the conclusion of an unofficial cycle that began with Overgrown Path.
“My parents got divorced while I was making this record,” he says. “They were married for 53 years and my father spent most of his life in the closet, hiding both his sexual identity and various drug
addictions. For me it was like being relieved of a great burden, like my life could finally begin.” It is this
sense of truth and freedom that is woven into the very fabric of the record even as it grapples with
complicated emotions. Indeed, a core truth of the record is what at first seems like a simple idea: “I
hoped that by writing about what was closest to me at the time, I might share something of myself and where I came from,” Cohen says.
Listen back here to his Studio 5 Live session. Proudly brought to you by Mountain Goat.