Prior to making her new album Fine But Dying, Liza Anne released two records of literate, folk-leaning music recorded in Nashville, which earned her critical acclaim and helped her build a fan base. That gave the musician room to maneuver: She could buckle down on her distinctive songs and really stand out in the Americana crowd. Or maybe she could play up the danceable elements of her work, and join the wave of rising Nashville pop musicians.
“Everyone seemed to have lots of opinions about what I should be doing,” says Liza Anne, who moved to Nashville as a teenager from her native St. Simon’s Island, Ga., to study at Belmont. She was 21 when she began work on Fine — she’s now 24. “I do this because it’s a necessity for me to get out of my head to make music. So I wasn’t down to play the whole, like, ‘Oh, what’s the smartest choice for a 21-year-old woman, what should I really sound like?’ … I wanted to make the record that would’ve set my 18-year-old self free, and not made her feel like she had to sound like everybody else.”
Fine But Dying, released in March via Canadian indie label Arts & Crafts, puts a kaleidoscopic array of sounds to work. “Small Talks” is an anthemic tune about the pressure to be polite that charges along atop driving guitars; “Closest to Me” is a melancholy ballad about knowing how to hit your loved ones where it hurts (which a savvy country singer ought to cover); and “Kid Gloves” is an ominous, bristling piece about not treating someone like they’re fragile just because they’re struggling with something. The record offers honest and insightful assessments of Liza Anne’s frustration and disappointment as she tries to balance relationships with herself, other people and her panic disorder. The experience of learning how to cope with the illness has been a big influence on her work.
“I feel like I always had this escapist mentality towards myself,” Liza Anne says. “Like, ‘How do I get the farthest away from myself, and the farthest away from my brain?’ Because being alive felt so claustrophobic. There was something about it that I didn’t know how to control, and so I just wanted to get out of it. And then with this record, I started to realize the thing that I actually had to do to — not really gain control, because I don’t have much control over my panic disorder. But to just gain this — as if my panic disorder was a relationship I have. How do I give it a seat at the table, where I am understanding where this thing is coming from, and even when I don’t understand where it’s coming from, giving it the space to where I’m not trying to escape it, but I’m just trying to let it come to me and then leave?”
To turn these experiences into an album, Liza Anne and her longtime creative partner and co-producer Zachary Dyke traveled to La Frette, a studio just outside Paris where some of Liza Anne’s favorite LPs were made, including Feist’s The Reminder. What they created is making an impact that seems like it will last, because she trusts her instincts to express the things she’s learned about herself and human nature. It’s a significant step in a career that could develop in a multitude of directions.
“Who knows what I’ll sound like when I’m 40 years old,” says Liza Anne. “When I’m 24 and waking up to how angry I am at the patriarchy, I’m not gonna sound like I did when I was 19 and just fell out of love, you know? It’s like, there’s all these different windows that my music will catch me in. … It’s like each of those windows is just peering into an entire house of emotion that, not at every point, everyone will see every room. … I’m just slowly creating this thing, and I won’t be done until I’m dead, so it’s not gonna be easy to explain.”
