Conquering Hero: Liz Cooper returns to Gainesville
By Shelton Hull
As it stands, the only concert Liz Cooper has announced for 2024 is her performance at the Playground Music + Arts Festival, held at Heartwood Soundstage this Saturday, January 20. Her last time in Gainesville was also her first time here, when her trio played the High Dive in March 2022. This show marks her return to Florida, a state she only started working in about five years ago. Since she’s my favorite living musician, I make a point of keeping up with such things.
Born in Baltimore, Cooper started playing music seriously while attending college on a golf scholarship. (She is not to be confused with the other Liz Cooper, who actually went on to become a professional golfer. The two have never met, but each is aware of the other’s existence, so that would seem inevitable.) She eventually dropped out of college and moved to Nashville, where her focus really honed in on electric guitar. To say that she progressed rapidly on the instrument would be an understatement, because she was established as one of the very best electric guitarists working today, less than a decade after she first took up the instrument. Cooper’s songwriting skills developed on a parallel track, and what one might call version 1.0 of Liz Cooper was ready to be rolled out to the general public within a few short years.
Nashville was also where she met the men with whom she would go national in 2016. With Grant Prettyman on bass and backing vocals, and drummer/vocalist Ryan Usher, Liz Cooper and the Stampede was born. For my money, they are the best rock band of the past ten years, full stop–a fully subjective comment that I’ve stood by since Obama was still president. This group traveled the country for the better part of five years, until the pandemic brought the world to a standstill, while also forcing changes to Cooper’s career, and her life. Prettyman decamped first, to start a family in Los Angeles first; Usher moved on, not long after the High Dive show in 2022. Meanwhile, Cooper moved from Nashville to Brooklyn, cut her hair, switched up her aesthetic and began writing the music that would eventually become her most recent album, Hot Sass.
For most of us, our introduction to Liz Cooper and the Stampede was facilitated by Audiotree, the Chicago-based platform where the band recorded a 30-minute live Audiotree Live session that was uploaded on October 26, 2016, a mere 13 days before the election that changed America forever. The full session has since garnered exactly 311,287 views since then, of which at least a couple hundred were by me, or by people I forced to watch it. (I’m listening to it at this very moment, in fact.) Individual videos from that session also generated an additional 350,000+ views. That was followed by an Audiotree Live session, as well as a second studio session in February 2022.
The music on the session consisted of material from Window Flowers, her legendary debut LP, which had not even been recorded yet at that time. It speaks to Cooper’s characteristic confidence that she would go into the Audiotree session, which was her biggest opportunity in the industry to that point, and she did it with brand-new material. That has remained a pattern throughout her career, and you can expect to hear a bunch of new stuff on Saturday. The Saturday set also marks the debut of a whole new band, and a fairly new version of the leader, who never stops changing.
Word about the band and their fiercely wholesome sound spread like wildfire over the next couple of years. Window Flowers was eventually released almost two years after the Audiotree session, in August 2018, and from there, it was off to the races. The album was an instant classic, but it was almost impossible to obtain for several years. Only last year was she finally able to get the album reissued as a deluxe double-LP in late 2023. I first saw them perform at the Charleston Music Confab in September 2018, just three weeks after the album came out. (She is not to be confused with yet another Liz Cooper, who currently works at the Associate Director for Financial Wellness at the College of Charleston. They are, to my knowledge, currently unaware of the other’s existence.)
Late last year, Cooper released Soft Sass, a four-song EP of acoustic takes on songs from her second full-length album, 2022’s Hot Sass. In her hands, these songs are like brand-new compositions, and that’s consistent with the acoustic versions of her other songs that can be found online.
While Cooper may be the highlight for many attendees, the Playground festival lineup is actually fairly stacked with new and established talent from across the southeast. The main event features Flipturn, an indie-rock quintet from Fernandina Beach whose debut album, Shadowglow, was released in 2022. It also includes Coyboi, from Jacksonville, as well as a variety of other acts, including Trash Panda, Girl Puppy, Early Eyes, Easy Honey, Corey Kilgannon, Quail Hollow, The Brazen Youth and The Housing Crisis. Tickets for the festival were sold out well in advance of the event, despite having little or no official media support. It promises to be one of the first must-see musical events of this new year, and Liz Cooper’s set will certainly end up on my own top ten for 2024, when all is said and done. You, the reader, will likely agree.
