Chris Cohen returns after 5 years with Paint a Room
Chris Cohen’s Paint a Room
Available July 12th Worldwide From Hardly Art
Shares First Single “Damage”
On July 12th, Chris Cohen will release Paint a Room, his fourth full-length and debut effort for Hardly Art. Sublime and sunlit, this collection of 10 songs considers dreamy new ways out of old predicaments, clearly stating the problem and dancing and singing their way somewhere new.
If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real-time. Enlisting help from longtime touring bandmates Davin Givhan (bass), Josh da Costa (drums), and Jay Israelson (keyboards), he built demos in a dusty garage of a suburban Altadena rental and tried something new—he took the songs on tour with that crew, yielding total control by letting them fill in or flourish their own parts as they saw fit. Cohen called in a few friends to help, with multi-instrumentalist and composer Jeff Parker contributing the fluttering horn arrangement on “Damage” and Parker’s collaborator Josh Johnson (who produced Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-Award-winning album The Omnichord Real Book) supplying flute, sax, and clarinet arrangements throughout the record. Paint a Room was produced and engineered by Chris Cohen, mixed by Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood), and Mastered by Mike Nolte at Eureka Mastering.
On the album’s subversively melodious opener and lead single, “Damage,” Chris Cohen shares:
"Trying to make something beautiful as a way to think through a problem, I wrote this song to consider the many forms state violence takes and the subtly pervasive habit of denying someone else’s personhood. We're told that police, prisons, and the military are necessary to ensure peace, but like many people, I've come to see that it’s actually the opposite. I definitely struggled to find what I thought were the right words, to say something that might be hard for some of us to hear. This is my best attempt for now - my version of an abolitionist pop song.”
‘At the hospital and the middle school
Anywhere you look
Someone’s power over someone else
Protecting property
But only life is precious
Only life is precious
Somebody’s love was shot down today
Don’t believe what they say
You can’t just throw someone away
There is another way
Where the damage is done
This is the place for everyone’
Paint a Room is now available to preorder on CD/LP/DSPs from Hardly Art. LP preorders from the Hardly Art Minimart, Mega Mart 2 (the new, UK-based sibling site to the world-famous Sub Pop Mega Mart), and select independent retailers in North America and the UK/EU will receive the album on Red vinyl.
About Chris Cohen’s Paint a Room:
Chris Cohen was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler—to communicate without speaking, to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen’s terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn’t come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums (Overgrown Path (2012), As If Apart (2016), Chris Cohen (2019)) of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies: handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes.
But Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on Paint a Room, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. In the past, Cohen made records in spells of isolation, phases when, as he puts it, he would “try to make my world a lot smaller.” He would play any of a dozen or so instruments until he stumbled upon something interesting, then slowly build upward and outward upon the idea. The method was solitary and stepwise, an act of accretion and deletion.
Cohen, though, has been playing live with bassist Davin Givhan, drummer Josh da Costa, and keyboardist Jay Israelson in some fashion for the better part of a decade. This time around, then, he built demos in the dusty garage of the suburban Altadena rental that smelled like old wood and gasoline and tried something new—he took the songs on tour with that crew, yielding total control by letting them fill in or flourish their own parts as they saw fit. They came back home and began recording as a band.
Cohen even called in a few friends to help, with Jeff Parker contributing the fluttering horn arrangement on “Damage,” and Parker collaborator Josh Johnson (who produced Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-Award-winning album The Omnichord Real Book) supplying flute, sax, and clarinet arrangements throughout the record. It felt a little bit like producing someone else’s records, with Cohen given the chance to step back and evaluate others’ contributions to his own songs rather than scrutinize every little bit he made himself. This was a longtime ambition realized, another way of relating to others openly through sound.
Cohen had another hobby as a kid: transcendental meditation, a practice his parents taught him when he was six. It’s still part of his life, a window into observing his thought processes, habits, and relationship to the rest of the world. Making music—and, turns out, writing lyrics for it—works in a similar way for Cohen, as he’s able to understand and then articulate notions that wouldn’t be so easy with the absolutism of mere words. Paint a Room both reckons with reality and conjures an alternate one, where nighttime walks and a neighbour’s wind chimes offer endless escapes for the imagination, space for the mind to roam. Sublime and sunlit, these 10 songs consider dreamy new ways out of old predicaments, clearly stating the problem and dancing and singing their way somewhere new.
Chris Cohen
Paint a Room
Track Listing:
1. Damage
2. Paint a Room
3. Sunever
4. Cobb Estate
5. Laughing
6. Wishing Well
7. Dog’s Face
8. Night or Day
9. Physical Address
10. Randy’s Chimes
