Nita Strauss, guitarist for Alice Cooper, has opened up on the latest episode of The MetalSucks Podcast about working on her second solo album, which is set to drop in 2020 as a follow up 2018’s Controlled Chaos.
The 32-year-old, who recently kicked off Rock Guitar Fundamentals – an online guitar teaching program suitable for learners of all levels – spoke on the difference between her first and second solo albums, calling Controlled Chaos “a selfish record” in comparison to her forthcoming work.
“Controlled Chaos was a really selfish record, if that makes sense. I had all this pent-up angst of playing other people’s songs my whole career, which is great — I’m a thousand percent not complaining about the career that I’ve had. I love playing Alice Cooper songs, I love playing Iron Maiden songs, but so many years of my life spent as a session guitar player, I had this explosion of, like, ‘I have to do my own thing, and I can’t let anybody tell me what to do with it’,” she said.
“So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I still feel that need to create and do it on my own, but I don’t feel like I need to do it without any external opinion.”
Adding that she feels she’s able to “relax the reins” this time around, Strauss continued that after engineering her debut album entirely herself, she’ll be bringing in expertise from outsiders for her second solo record, saying:
“For Controlled Chaos, I had no producer, I had no engineer — I engineered the whole record myself. I didn’t ask for any external input, even on my guitar tones or anything like that. So I feel like this time I can relax the reins a little bit and I can listen to some advice from professionals, whether it’s someone helping me produce or somebody… I’m still recording all my guitars myself, but maybe bring an engineer to do the drums.”
She added, “That’s something that I struggled with a lot — engineering drums — ’cause I had never done it before. So I feel like that’s sort of the way that I’ve grown up in this process.”
Love Metal?
Get the latest Metal news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
Asked if having such a hands-on approach to her first solo album was important to her, Strauss said:
“Hugely important. So many people said, ‘Are you gonna get Alice to play on your record? Or Steve Vai, your hero, are you gonna ask him to play on your record?’ And while I feel like I could have made that kind of call at the time, I just wanted so badly to stand on my own two feet with this record and not have anyone say, ‘Well, yeah, of course she sold some records, because she had Alice Cooper on it, because she’s in his band.’ I really wanted to just make that at least for the first go-round, it just stood on its own merits.”
Strauss has been playing guitar alongside Alice Cooper since 2014 after replacing Australian musician Orianthi.
Check out by ‘Our Most Desperate Hour’ by Nita Strauss:
