Bad Vacation is a collection of art rock anthems, new wave jams, power pop earworms set to establish Liza as a breakthrough independent artist and a bold young voice in mental health self awareness.
The album follows her 2018 critically praised album Fine But Dying, which saw Liza open sold out runs with Kacey Musgraves and Ray LaMontagne, make her national television debut on CONAN, and win praise from Hayley Williams who asked Liza to join Paramore on their inaugural Art + Friends festival. Liza recently launched #EmotionalHealth2020 rallies – a live mental health focused interview series airing weekly on Liza’s Instagram. Each Tuesday at 6 PM CT featuring Liza with friends and collaborators including Half Waif and Caroline Rose and more on deck for future conversations, including Courtney Marie Andrews and Madison Cunningham .
Bad Vacation is a self aware account of the emotionally difficult years that followed Fine But Dying’s success. The album reflects on her time on tour and where fresh out of an exhausting relationship, which took a considerable toll on both her physical and mental health, Liza found herself often at her lowest. She learned she was behaving in a way she learned to be destructive. Liza said, “I was a wreck. I left the relationship and was desperate to find emotional safety in someone else. It felt better to have someone outside of me show me love than sit with myself long enough to learn how to show myself love. I was on a bender for emotional safety, not knowing that I could be my own healing space.”
She underwent intensive therapy that led to painful reckonings and valuable epiphanies to write her way out of the panic and anxiety, writing odes to autonomy and self-respect and who she wanted to see in the mirror. Liza Anne, shared, “I was writing what I needed to hear. I literally wrote a stronger, more empowered version of myself into existence.”
Singing to her past selves, Liza also reflected on moments from her childhood in Georgia, which saw her break away from a repressive evangelical religious environment in her teens, “With this record, as a whole, I have felt like I am doing something for my kid-self.”
Songs “Desire” and “Devotion” were produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen and the remaining album tracks including “Bad Vacation” were co-produced by Liza Anne, Kyle Ryan and Micah Tawlks. As pre-release singles, they have earned praise from Stereogum to Fader who stated, “pushes her sound even further,” and her muscular guitar hooks and retro synthesizers earning comparisons to artists from St. Vincent to Talking Heads.
The latter, Liza discovered during the period when she was mixing the completed album, “I had never listened to David Byrne before and in the last few days of production, someone made a note of a Talking Heads reference and that spurred a rabbit hole of music discovery. I felt like I was watching where I want to be when I’m older. It opened up a whole new realm of possibility.”
The album was tracked in Kyle Ryan’s studio, Wardenclyffe South, in Nashville (With the exception of “Devotion” and “Desire” which were tracked at Kingsize Studios and Chez JMJ), with her touring band (guitarist Robbie Jackson, bassist Josh Gilligan, and drummer Cody Carpenter), alongside Nashville musician, Lou Hayat who creatively contributed to the project, adding french spoken word vocals and synth parts.
Tracklist:
1.East Beach For Fourteen Seconds
2.Bad Vacation
3.I Shouldn’t Ghost My Therapist
4.Terrible Discovery
5.Devotion
6.Change My Mind
7.Bummer Days
8.This Chaos, That Feeling
9.Oops
10.Desire
11.I Wanna Be There
12.Too Soon
OVERALL RATING
3½ stars
♥ Bubble Days... 