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Alison Stewart:  You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's end the show today with some music perfectly suited to our Get Lit event with Mona Awad. The novel Rouge is based on Snow White. It's fitting that the title of our musical guest's new album is Death of a Fairy Tale. Singer-songwriter Chase Cohl helms this new project called Dear Dear using a lush throwback sound to explore themes like unrealistic beauty standards, texting your ex on their birthday, and the unfair pressure women still face to get married.

You will hear my conversation with Chase Cohl in just a minute, but first, here is Dear Dear with a special performance of the new song, Happy Birthday Baby.

[MUSIC - Dear Dear: Happy Birthday Baby]

As you blow out your candles

I wonder what you'll wish

Do you still miss our long-lost love?

Are you dreaming of my kiss?

Happy birthday, baby

I'll have the worst day, baby

Dreaming on the love we had before

'Cause I don't call you baby anymore

Estranged to at you're growing

Knowing we're apart

A well-wished word cannot express

What I feel in my heart

Oh, happy birthday, baby

I'll have the words, stay, baby

Dreaming on the love we had before

'Cause I don't call you baby anymore

Will you dance with all the girls, spin them laughing, and cheers to the fun?

While I sit alone in my messy new world, wishing that you've been the one

Happy birthday, baby

I'll have the worst day, baby

Dreaming on the love we had before

'Cause I don't call you baby anymore

No, I don't call you baby anymore

No, I don't call you baby anymore

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for being here tonight.

Chase Cohl: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Let's introduce everybody on stage before we have a little conversation.

Chase Cohl: Yes. This is Ricardo on the drums. This is Sid on backing vocals, Andrea on guitar. Fema on keys. I'm Chase.

Alison Stewart: We turn a little bit about Mona's writing process. What's your writing process as a songwriter?

Chase Cohl: Well, this is a different project. Dear Dear is something new. This was a co-write, this album. I co-wrote with an 86-year-old man named Barry Goldberg who's very special. We're very intentional about the writing process on this in a way that I probably wouldn't have been on a solo project. By myself, I would sit, noodle, and wait until something comes where we were very specific and driven with this. We wanted to make something that sounded familiar and nostalgic, but tackles a newer subject matter.

When I think about all of the music that I think of as nostalgic, the '60s girl group style, it's a universally nostalgic style of music, regardless of what area you're from, whether you heard The Ronettes in Dirty Dancing or whether you grew up in the '60s, or no matter where you heard it. If you really dive into those songs, and this is not a dig, obviously, it was appropriate for the time, but they're very dated subject matter.

There's The Crystals song called He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss). That's always the first one that comes to mind. We really set out to make something that sounded familiar and welcoming, but had a very female-empowered standpoint.

Alison Stewart: Can I ask a little bit about Barry Goldberg, the 86-year-old?

Chase Cohl: Yes. [laughs] Barry Goldberg was Bob Dylan's piano player for 40 years. Barry Goldberg played with Phil Spector himself. He played with Ray Charles and the Ramones, and you name it. Barry came in on a session on my first record many years ago and just kept reaching out to me, and liked my writing. We ran into each other at the supermarket one day, and this is how that album became.

Alison Stewart: That's the best story ever.

Chase Cohl: Yes, he's great.

Alison Stewart: I know you're also a poet. You had a book of poetry published earlier this year.

Chase Cohl: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's titled Donation Plate, by the way. When did you start writing poetry?

Chase Cohl: I was a poetry major in college. I went to Eugene Lang at The New School, not far, just down the road. I was raised listening to folk music. That's my first love as a singer-songwriter. It's what my parents played in the car when I was on my way to school. Folk music is just all about the storytelling. That's really where poetry came in. I think you can't separate them, really.

Alison Stewart: Is poetry its own thing and your songwriting its own thing, or do they intersect all for you?

Chase Cohl: They do intersect. I find that because I tend toward a more classical style of songwriting, I find songwriting has slightly more limitation, whereas poetry is slightly more free form for me, which other musicians might not feel that way. Poetry usually starts a stream of consciousness for me, whereas songwriting is slightly more intentional.

Alison Stewart: Just so people are clear, we've been saying, calling you Chase and Dear Dear, [crosstalk] it's okay. No, this is your first project as Dear Dear.

Chase Cohl: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Where did the name Dear Dear come from and where does it sit in your career?

Chase Cohl: Barry and I actually put an EP out in 2021 entitled Dear Dear: Volume I, which was the first introduction to this style of music from a more solo-based singer-songwriter style that I had been working on for many years. He was very encouraging about me putting it out under my name. From the day it came out, it just didn't sit right with me to not be its own entity, and Dear Dear, in this style of music, really felt like it deserved its own home. It was just a title that I had been sitting on for a long time.

We keep calling this project a musical Trojan horse, where it's like I picture the image of this pretty girl with the bow in her hair, but she's really just got a lot to say, and it's less expected. She's singing about politics, she's singing about women's issues, she's talking about men in a really honest way, gender issues, and all sorts of different things. Dear Dear was this perfect little bow that we put on it.

Alison Stewart: Dear Dear.

Chase Cohl: Yes, it felt really sweet, [chuckles] but it wasn't that at all.

Alison Stewart: You're going to play a couple more songs for us and one of them is Natural, which fits into our theme for the evening. Tell us a little bit about the song Natural, the origin of the song, what you were hoping people get away from it.

Chase Cohl: We just came with this hook and I actually started Natural as a poem, which rarely happens. I was like in my car one day driving and it just came to me. I think I was frustrated. I'd been living in Los Angeles and thinking about the pressure on not just women, but all sorts of people to look a certain way, and the amount of value placed on the way we look. I think for me, songwriting and telling the story through whatever medium is always about saying the thing I wish someone would say to me.

Natural is just simply a song that I felt needed a little bit of a push reminder that I wasn't hearing that you can mess with your body or your face and change whatever you want and there's no judgment, whatsoever, but it is not going to cure you, and it's not going to make you love yourself more. I think there are all moments when we need to hear that. I know I do and at moments and speaking of the skincare industry, speaking of facials and this desire to constantly better the way we look and constantly be reminded that we're not enough, especially living in the modern society of social media, which I wrote this record during COVID and we were just living through our phones. It was the only way we were socializing. It just was something I needed to hear and I was hoping other people to do.

Alison Stewart: Great. Well, let's hear it.

[MUSIC - Dear Dear: Natural]

In this crazy time

To love yourself is to rebel

A click or fix is swiped alive

It's all outside ourselves

I'm a sister, [unintelligible 00:11:04]

You have this same, damn face

Keeping young and fresh inside

How dare you if you ain't

Keep it natural

Baby, natural

I'm natural, yeah

'Cause I'm natural

I'm natural

[unintelligible 00:11:35]

I'm not gonna judge

'Cause no, I feel, I cannot feel

A void of no self-love

Turn that dial down

Forget the last thing it will tell

Don't have to be absurd inside

Just keep that body held

Keep it natural,

Baby, natural

I'm natural, yeah

'Cause I'm natural

I'm natural

Our body's day are competent

A mountaintop of compliments

Will never be that confident

That's leased within yourself

Keep it natural

Baby, natural

Work that body well

Lovin' it to hell

People need some more appreciation for themselves

Work that body well

Lovin' it to hell

People need some more appreciation for themselves

Work that body well

Lovin' it to hell

People need some more appreciation for themselves

Work that body well

Lovin' it to hell

Appreciation for themselves

Work that body well

Lovin' it to hell

Appreciation for themselves

[applause]

Chase Cohl: Thank you. This is our last song. This is a love song that I wrote to New York City when I was living in California. I'm very sad about it. Thank you guys so much for your time. I'm Dear Dear. I can't tell you how much it means to me.

[MUSIC - Dear Dear: Death Of a Fairy Tale]

Hold the magic of these summer nights

Strollin' hand in hand by the moonlight

Central Park was made for you and I

And I can't live without you

Cherry blossoms whisper as we pass

Streets of stone, they melt right into glass

Oh, sweet day, my love is here at last

And I can't live without you

[unintelligible 00:15:30] I know the city's crazy

But nothing shines as bright as you too, baby

And if everything should disappear

There'd be nothing for me to fear

All I need is just to have you near

'Cause I can't live without you

No, I can't live without you

[applause]

Alison Stewart: That was Dear Dear with a special live performance from our November Get Lit with All Of It book club event with author Mona Awad. Dear Dear's new album, Death Of a Fairy Tale is out now. That is All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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Announcer: Support for WNYC comes from Bergen Performing Arts Center presenting Holiday Wonderland, a new musical performance with acrobats, aerialists, and comedy, featuring the cast of Cirque Musica on December 13th in Inglewood, New Jersey. Tickets at bergenPAC.org.

Brian Lehrer: On the next Brian Lehrer Show, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, on their new special issue in which 24 writers imagine what a second Donald Trump presidency would look like in 24 different areas from abortion rights to foreign policy. Also, our climate story of the week, why an oil executive, with plans to increase production, is being allowed to leave the COP28 climate summit. The Brian Lehrer Show, weekdays at 10:00 AM on WNYC.

Alison Stewart: Fresh Air is coming up with a conversation between Terry Gross and Dave Davies about his career. That's next on 93.9 FM and AM 820 or live stream it at WNYC.org.

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