Liz Cooper is embracing her newfound confidence and rock influences on her most recent album.
According to astrology, Saturn returns to its placement in the sky when a person was born every 27–29 years. A person’s Saturn Return is said to accompany many major life changes, like divorces or career shifts, that propel a person into adulthood.
Liz Cooper, the singer-songwriter who formerly released music under the band name Liz Cooper & The Stampede, is experiencing her Saturn Return. She’s 29, and says the last two years have been the most emotionally tumultuous of her life so far. But she’s coming out on the other side of Saturn with a stronger sense of self, and an album to accompany it. On Sept. 3, Cooper’s album Hot Sass is out on Thirty Tigers Records.
Hot Sass is the follow-up to Coopers 2018 album Window Flowers, which received critical acclaim for its groovy combination of folk and psychedelia. The titles of these two projects suggest their essential difference: in Hot Sass, Cooper abandons banjo and ambience for a more forward psych-rock sound. The title track announces itself with guitars, establishing Cooper as a riot girl Eight-minute songs like “Lucky Charm” include extensive interludes that recall The Doors.
When Cooper wrote the record in 2019, she was nearing the end of her Window Flowers tour. She was overextending herself, trying to conform to the expectations of a culture prioritizing output over mental health. She became fed up. She was tired of giving in to other people’s desires, and expressed this discontent in her songwriting.
“I pushed myself too far, and for what?” Cooper asks. “I’m just trying to find balance. There’s more to life than doing this.”
Cooper moved to Nashville to start Liz Cooper & The Stampede when she was 19. According to Cooper, the band’s name arose after she absorbed Nashville’s culture. She loves old country music — “those are the O.G. emo records,” she says — but over the years, has increasingly felt as if the band’s name confined her to country and Americana. A stampede of horses doesn’t scream psychedelic rock.
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“I love my band,” Cooper says. “I trust them very much, and they worked really hard on this record, I just didn’t want to hide behind the name anymore.”
After consulting with her band — comprised of Ryan Usher, Joe Bisirri, and Michael Libramento — they agreed to drop the moniker and its connotations. They took Hot Sass to Burlington, Vermont, to work with producer Benny Yurco (Michael Nau).
Thus, Hot Sass is both a moment in Cooper’s personal evolution and the band’s musical one.
Hot Sass is, according to Cooper, “this madness that I’ve been more comfortable with accepting and like, this attitude that I do possess that I’ve been hiding from. It’s this confidence and sexiness, it’s something that I’ve always been very afraid of. It’s me learning about what kind of woman I am and It’s not pretty all the time. It’s not this thing that you can put in a box.”
One might expect for this confidence and assertiveness to inspire increased commentary on current events. But since finishing the record in 2019, Cooper has redirected creative attention to painting and playing the piano. Public figures, especially musicians, are often expected to have something to say about the state of affairs. But Cooper does’t feel prepared to make any kind of statements — she’s still figuring herself out.
“I don’t always have something to say,” she says. “There’s still so much happening, and I don’t feel like I have my thoughts organized enough to get them out on paper. I journal, but I’ve mostly been enjoying painting because it’s physical.”
“It’s just another way to expose my insides, which scares me but also makes me feel whole and healed. I love to paint because I don’t feel any pressure from myself or from anyone else. It’s just fun and it’s pure. Purely expressive.”
