Everywhere Hannah Cohen Goes, There She Is

HANNAH COHEN IS PLAYING FETCH with her five-year-old rescue dog Jan in the same room that Big Thief recorded Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You in 2020. That is the magic of Flying Cloud, the property Cohen and her partner Sam Evian share in the Catskills: brilliance vibrates through the woodwork. Part of the compound is a studio converted from a two-story barn, the rest a nucleus of hospitality where the couple can share their slice of the pie with the revolving door of performers and friends who come to visit. It’s a haven for musicians, and nurturing it is a spoil of riches, Cohen tells me. “Taking care of them and making them healing meals and sharing this beautiful place with them feels like such a gift. I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

A year ago, Evian told me about a New Year’s Eve “blowout,” a night-tinted parade of fireworks and creek swims, that led to him creating his last album, Plunge. Any place is what you make it, but the air is different where he and Cohen are, even if you’ve never been there or serenaded the encircling mountains. Sufjan Stevens, Cohen and Evian’s neighbor, uses the word “enlivened” when talking about the couple’s digs, calling Flying Cloud a “beautiful room where people make music.” Cohen says her role on the property is “hosting, cooking, and looking after the artists.” She pauses. “I am usually asked to come sing on something, backing vocals.” One of those instances was on Big Thief’s single “Certainty.” The influence of the studio on her is more about “the hang.” “I’m absorbing the great vibes,” she continues. “When bands are up here, we’re all living together, hiking, and having dinner together. It’s amazing being around artists all the time, and it’s also a nice reminder of how sensitive we are—that musicians should be protected at all costs.”

Before she was the matriarch of Flying Cloud, Cohen, now 38, was a Bay Area kid born into a family of poets and musicians. As a teenager, she migrated to New York City for modeling, worked as a caretaker for children, and ran around with painters and photographers. At the turn of the 2000s, she met Norah Jones, learned how to sing harmonies, and wound up in a studio with the likes of Doveman and Rob Moose while making her debut album, Child Bride. “There’s beauty and empathy to everything she does,” Sufjan tells me. “She’s really got a heart for others and to take care of the world around her. She’s a lot of fun, she’s really beautiful.” He says that she’s recently started knitting and that she’s “attuned to people who can share their experience and their wisdom.”

Sufjan’s feelings are corroborated by Cohen’s newest album, Earthstar Mountain, a close-to-earth pastoral of small life and big, transportive feelings. The first song, “Dusty,” sounds like Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris,” the folk instruments tuned like close-harmony pop spectacles. And the electronic hues from her last release, 2019’s Welcome Home—which came out in a different lifetime entirely and ditched the gentle textures of 2015’s Pleasure Boy—are animated by natural atmosphere, creamy soul designs, and plinky trances of guitar six years later on “Dog Years,” “Draggin’,” and “Summer Sweat,” the latter being one of Cohen’s best pursuits yet: a combination of sincerity and sexuality, a singalong about letting go while being held. And that voice of hers, cushiony and well-sustained always, is pure pageantry decorated with ageless style. Her vibrato will stand the test of time, just as it did a half-decade ago on “All I Wanted,” and Earthstar Mountain is the lived-in, romantic recital of flugelhorn, flutes, violins, clarinet, recorders, double bass, and nylon strings where her carols flourish.

AS SHE WAS HIKING ALONG miles of old logging trails in her woods, Cohen encountered a star-shaped fungi on the ground. “It looked like a sculpture,” she says. “It was in the springtime, so it wasn’t a fruiting one. It was an old one that was dry and it looked like a clay sculpture.” Many of the mushrooms surrounded a lovely tree, a scene Cohen photographed and sent to her friend Misha, a “forager and mushroom lover,” for identification. “She said, ‘Oh, that’s an earthstar mushroom,’ and I was really taken by them. I had never seen that.” She penned the song “Earthstar” as not only a tribute to her discovery but as an image of change, singing “part of me is always half of you, I see it now clear as day” to an accompaniment of strings, synths, and boom-bap percussion. Cohen tells me that when she and Evian recorded it, the direction of the album became clear, opening the door to “Mountain” (named after their backyard bluff), which chugs forward to a “thunder only happens when it’s raining” kind of tempo. The “hold on to me like you mean it” bridge is almost spiritual. The next logical choice was to name the album after its two most essential sections.

Earthstar Mountain is a love letter to the Catskills—a fabled place in the Hudson Valley with a common thread of love, vitality, and balance running through it. It’s an oft-unspoken, deep-bodied affection, Cohen argues, before correcting herself: “We talk about how much we love it, but we are really drawn to this place and the beauty of it. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” People flock to Woodstock from all parts of the world—“leaf-peepers” and fly fishermen take advantage of the Valley’s fertile land, while music fans visit the Band’s Big Pink house 10 minutes outside of town. Cohen and Evian moved to the area seven years ago, joining a long lineage of curious folks decamping to a part of rural America where the frontier meets the imagination. “There’s an energy that draws so many artists—painters, sculptors, writers, songwriting, musicians,” she says. “For hundreds of years, there were artist colonies, and they’re still up here. There’s this history of people coming up here to create. There’s so much water and nature, it’s pulling us all here. It’s really shifted the way that I live and the way that I see things, the way that I experience time.”

Cohen and Evian worked together on Earthstar Mountain for the better part of four years before finishing it last autumn. The material benefited from her taking the process step by step, as Cohen tells me how she’s a habitual editor—writing new songs to replace old ones and then repeating the process regularly. The sequencing wound up a challenge, as Cohen yearned for an “old wizard man” to come down from the nearby mountain and bless her with a perfect order. But, by the end of the recording sessions, she made “Una Spiaggia” and “Mountain,” songs that were “puzzle pieces making the record feel whole.” “I really needed to wait that long to get those pieces.”

“Mountain” was written about a friend’s passing, but it’s not a sad song. Evian plays a lovely slide guitar, and Cohen sounds especially grounded in the melody, even when singing “Love like that won’t ever end, we could be like this or that instead.” She gravitated towards delight, not despair, because it’s “what the song wanted.” Soon, other people who shared in her late friend’s began reaching out. “They’d say, ‘This is helping me metabolize this loss,’” she remembers. “I never really thought about it helping our group of friends. It was so insular for me, to hear back from friends about it, it can be for anyone and everyone you know.” Cohen sits with herself for a moment. “I guess that’s what happens when you write a song: It’s for everyone.”

Two years after Cohen sang on Sufjan’s 10th album, Javelin (her presence on “Shit Talk,” along with Megan Lui and Pauline Delassus, is cathartic), the songwriter returned the favor on Earthstar Mountain, performing backup vocals on “Mountain.” “I invited him to come play on a couple of things and listen back to the record,” Cohen recalls. “He was like, ‘Oh, I hear this part on there.’ And you don’t say no!” She and him aren’t simply neighbors; they’re great friends, often doing song-a-day exercises together and taking their dogs on walks along the trails outside their homes. “She’s been really important to me in finding my bearings up here [in the Catskills],” Sufjan says.

“Una Spiaggia” is a fascinating inclusion on Earthstar Mountain, considering that it’s an Ennio Morricone composition (previously titled “Una spiaggia a mezzogiorno”) from the Vergogna Schifosi film score. Cohen, with the help of Sufjan on piano and recorder, Sean “Moon” Mullins (who recently released his own terrific album, Hotel Paradiso) on percussion, Evian on guitar, and Clairo on clarinet and vocal harmonies, repurposed the track as an homage to Morricone, an orchestrator whose prolific curriculum vitae spans hundreds of titles. “He never said no to a project, and I really love that about him,” she elaborates. “We were on tour last year, driving across Utah, and I put this record on. I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know this one.’ Everyone was sleeping in the back of the van or had their headphones on. Sean was driving and we both were just floored.”