her first album. He produced Child Bride, underlaying Cohen’s sparse guitar-pluckings and tender coos with an abutment of chamber strings, woodwinds, and tittering, barely-there electronics. “I trusted Thomas. I just let him do his thing,” Cohen offers. “Once we got to the studio it was his production.” They recorded over the course of about a year, getting together about once per month at a friend’s studio when schedules permitted. “We recorded a bunch of the songs I had just written,” she explains, but once recording began, the inspiration to keep writing took hold and newer songs funneled in with the older group she’d first planned for the album. They wrapped recording last October, and released a video for Child Bride’s lead single shortly afterward. * * * “It was like water torture. We did eight takes and every take I’d have to act as though I was drowning. Then we’d have to drain the tub, dry my hair and do my makeup.” Cohen laughs as she recalls the process behind the video for “The Crying Game,” wherein she sings unflinchingly into a camera from a tub filling perilously with water. They went with the final take. There are equally harrowing moments in Child Bride, namely sparse standouts like “Sorry,” or the baroque-sounding “Shadows.” But, like its video, “The Crying Game” renders a romantic betrayal in stark black and white. “How much can you fill in before you start crying?” Cohen sings as an arpeggio figure twirls ad infinitum. “How many times did you think of her when your heart was supposed to be with my heart?” The poignancy swells but, between her purposeful fragility and Bartlett’s ascending arrangement, there’s an endless sense of forward momentum. “I like to leave things sort of vague, but I think that one is pretty blatantly a crying song,“ she says. Considering how it applies to the impaled spirit of the album more generally, the vocalist is tentative. “I think subconsciously things were coming out,” she
allows. “I was in a relationship that I wasn’t happy in. I wasn’t able to communicate what I wanted; I didn’t know how.” To that end, Cohen continues, the songs became a vessel: “I was saying things that I really couldn’t say.” Child Bride isn’t an entirely bleak affair. For Cohen, who grew up in San Francisco, “California” is a more jocular memoir, while “Say Anything” casts her relaxed, effortless singing into equally wrinklefree terrain. Her vocal intuition is palpable in those moments too, but it’s downright piercing when Cohen goes for broken: “One way to get back at you / Is to turn it around and do the same to you,” she begins on “Don’t Say,” tossing the words upward in gentle arcs, and with a fluid relation to the beat. Later, in “The Simplest,” she wafts the line of the chorus in a compact melisma, repeating, “Our love will poison everything.” “That was about somebody, yeah,” Cohen says of the line, withdrawing with a laugh. “That was sort of… the situation.” * * * More than a week later, Hannah Cohen is playing before a seated crowd in the back room of Barbés, a small Brooklyn performance space. She’s performing most of her first album, accompanied solely by Josh Kaufman, a multi-instrumentalist affiliated with New York-associated bands like Yellowbirds and Thieving Irons. After an interlude where Cohen allows a friend some time for a brief sit-in performance, she returns to her own material with shy elegance. “I’m just going to tune,” she says, before a smile. “And then I’ll play you a really sad song.”
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