It’s been less than two years since Liza Anne released ‘Fine But Dying,’ her acclaimed debut for Arts & Crafts, but the breakout Nashville indie star has already managed to pack a whole career’s worth of highlights into that remarkably short window.
“It’s all been so surreal,” says Liza, who in the span of just months made her national TV debut on Conan, supported Ray LaMontagne on a sold-out theater run, joined Paramore for their inaugural Art + Friends festival, walked in the Alessandro Trincone NYFW show, and was handpicked by Kacey Musgraves to open select dates on her blockbuster “Oh, What A World” tour. “Those artists have all been pivotal to my understanding of creation and performance, so it felt really amazing to be invited into their worlds to do my own thing.”
On her new single, “Devotion,” Liza Anne melds self-love and empowerment with a combination of brute force and deft precision. Recorded in LA with her tight-knit touring band and produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Tegan & Sara), the track finds Liza Anne freeing herself from the shackles of an unhealthy relationship and reclaiming her identity and independence. “Devotion! Return to me who I was before I was in love!” she exclaims with a brash electricity that calls to mind everything from Sleater-Kinney and The Cars to Blondie and Laurie Anderson. Like the songs on ‘Fine But Dying,’ “Devotion” is a deeply raw and vulnerable piece of art, but the focus this time around is ultimately on growth and healing, which Liza Anne says felt like a natural, and necessary, evolution.
“Helping people validate and feel seen in their pain has been important,” she explains, “but it’s just the first part. I feel like if I’m giving people this door into feeling their pain, I also have a responsibility to hold a mirror up to their own power, as well. That’s the sum of what I’m trying to do with my music, both for my audience and myself.”
Raised in the quaint, sheltered community of Saint Simons Island, GA, Liza Anne (born Liza Anne Odachowski) discovered songwriting one summer at sleepaway camp, when a guitar class helped her realize that the notebooks she’d been filling with poetry and prose could be set to melodies. By the time she dropped out of college, Odachowski had self-released a pair of albums that generated more than 50 million streams and helped her land festival slots at Austin City Limits and dates with Joseph, Margaret Glaspy, and Bear’s Den, among others. Where those early albums were stripped-down and delicate, ‘Fine But Dying’ was a force of nature, a fierce, unapologetic, and radically honest reckoning with womanhood and mental health in the modern age. NPR called the record “bold in both sound and subject,” while Stereogum raved that Odachowski’s “melodies are obscenely catchy and her lyrics bite with honesty,” and the Sydney Morning Herald described her songwriting as “at once personal and strikingly relatable.”
