Paint a Room Chris Cohen

• 1 Damage 03:04
• 2 Paint a Room 03:08
• 3 Sunever 02:40
• 4 Cobb Estate 03:04
• 5 Laughing 02:54
• 6 Wishing Well 02:38
• 7 Dog's Face 03:09
• 8 Night or Day 03:19
• 9 Physical Address 02:26
• 10 Randy's Chimes 02:43
• Total Runtime 29:05

Info for Paint a Room

Chris Cohen war schon immer ein stilles Kind. Tatsächlich war diese Introvertiertheit einer der Gründe, warum er schon als Kleinkind anfing, Musik zu machen - um zu kommunizieren, ohne zu sprechen, um sich mit anderen zu identifizieren, ohne die direkte Darstellung von Worten. Das hat auch funktioniert, mit Cohens grandioser Zeit bei den mächtigen Deerhoof und seiner eigenen fesselnden Art-Rock-Band The Curtains, vor der Produktion und Session-Arbeit für Leute wie Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren und Marina Allen. Irgendwann auf diesem langen Weg begann Cohen, Texte zu schreiben. Er stellte fest, dass dieser Prozess, auch wenn er ihm nicht in die Wiege gelegt wurde, ein neues Gefühl der Selbstentdeckung und Abrechnung bot, eine Möglichkeit, sich selbst und die Welt aus unerwarteten Blickwinkeln zu betrachten. Seine drei zwielichtigen Alben mit lässig-kompliziertem Pop im letzten Jahrzehnt strahlten diese Epiphanien aus: der Umgang mit familiären Konflikten, die Bewältigung des fortschreitenden Alters und das Verständnis für soziale Missstände.

Aber Cohen hatte noch nie so viel direkt zu singen wie auf Paint a Room, seinem ersten Album seit fünf Jahren und seinem Debüt für Hardly Art. Wenn Cohens Bedeutungen zuvor in den mosaikartigen musikalischen Schichten lauerten, die er allein aufbaute, so sind sie hier neu und klar, belebt und unterstrichen zum ersten Mal von einer Band, die in Echtzeit spielt. Da ist das endlose Miasma staatlicher Gewalt auf dem subversiv-melodiösen Opener Damage", die existenzielle Erschöpfung der Moderne auf dem von Hörnern durchzogenen Jangle Laughing": Hier kommuniziert Cohen mit Freunden nicht nur durch sein tiefes Verständnis von Groove, Harmonie und Hook, sondern auch mit seinen Zuhörern durch Songs, die von unserer unruhigen kleinen Zeit krähen.

Auf Paint a Room fühlt sich Cohens Musik wie eine warme Frühlingsbrise an, leicht zu lieben und sanft zu fühlen. Aber sie trägt oft etwas Schweres in sich, als ob sie von einer unsichtbaren Sturmwolke herüberweht. Paint a Room rechnet mit der Realität und beschwört eine andere herauf, in der nächtliche Spaziergänge und das Windspiel des Nachbarn endlose Fluchtmöglichkeiten für die Fantasie und Raum für die Gedanken bieten. Erhaben und sonnendurchflutet suchen diese 10 Songs nach verträumten Auswegen aus alten Problemen, die das Problem klar benennen und sich tanzend und singend einen neuen Weg bahnen. Auf "Paint a Room" steuert Jeff Parker das flatternde Bläserarrangement von "Damage" bei, und Parkers Kollege Josh Johnson (der Meshell Ndegeocellos mit einem Grammy ausgezeichnetes Album "The Omnichord Real Book" produziert hat) steuert Flöten-, Saxophon- und Klarinettenarrangements für das gesamte Album bei.

Chris Cohen

Chris Cohen
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 (The Lentils), 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.

Though the album is undeniably part of the framework that made up his previous two records — Chris Cohen is also a thoughtful, accomplished meditation on life and family, backed by dusky instrumentation influenced by the late evening beauty of Pat Metheny’s Falcon and the Snowman soundtrack, and Thomas Dolby’s Golden Age of Wireless. It’s beautiful, but it’s also unflinching in its depiction of emotional turmoil.

On “Edit Out,” written in the wake of his parents’ divorce, Cohen examines his relationship with his father through devastatingly straightforward lyrics: “We were loved from afar / Everyone kept in the dark.” Though it’s a gorgeous song, the emotional weight is immense. A line like “people want a lot” carries a substantial amount of power, even if the initial intention of the lyric is not immediately clear.

But Chris Cohen is not a confessional record in the traditional sense. Instead of picking at open wounds, the album looks forward by embracing the past. Cohen’s father worked in the music industry, which exposed him as a child to not just the practical realities of a career in music — from a young age he saw plenty of recording studios and heard stories about musicians from his parents — but the more creative as well. “I had the sense that music was important and was something I could do,” he says.

On album opener, “Song They Play,” Cohen revisits his childhood, and his attempts to get his father’s attention. “I was mostly shielded from what was going on,” he says. “but had occasional glimpses into my parents’ complex world. When I sing these songs, I think it’s my way of communicating what I am unable to communicate in real life.”

None of these songs are abrasive or even aggressive. The soft drum fills on “Song They Play” comfort, and the guitar virtually glitters. Chris Cohen is a beautiful album about pain and loss but it’s also about accepting loss. Of the song “Green Eyes,” Cohen says “[It’s about] the men in my family and how they passed their worldview along to each other from great emotional distances. My father and grandfather were full of secrets and longing, which were communicated through everyday actions like driving a car or cooking a meal. We all wanted closeness, but never found it in each other.” This is a statement about a specific song, but it is also a statement about the album as a whole: Chris Cohen is not so much autobiographical as it is multi-generational.

This album contains no booklet.