Living in the Catskills for six years has made Hannah Cohen an expert at mushroom foraging. In the several acres of woods that surround her mid-Seventies house, she’ll encounter golden oysters, chicken-of-the-woods, indigo milk caps, black trumpets, and maitake (she takes home 30 pounds worth of the latter every year).
But two years ago, she came across an unfamiliar species that stunned her: earthstars, bizarrely beautiful fungi with several arms resembling a celestial body. “They looked like they were from another planet,” Cohen, 38, says. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? Is somebody leaving this here for me?’”
She took it as a sign, borrowing the name for a track (the hypnotic, synthy stunner “Earthstar”) and her new album, Earthstar Mountain, out March 28 via Bella Union/Congrats Records. It’s a love letter to the Catskills, an extraordinary rumination on the cyclical nature of life, and one of the best indie releases of the year.
It’s afternoon on Valentine’s Day, and Cohen is sitting inside her cozy wooden home, 25 minutes from Woodstock. She’s positioned on a rug in a white jacket, her brunette bangs hovering over her eyes, which are dazzling in precisely winged eyeliner. Sunlight beams through the window, splashing shadows on a mounted acoustic guitar. She squints until she gives up and relocates to another spot. “I was blinded by the light,” she jokes. “What’s that song?”
While “Earthstar Mountain” isn’t a real mountain, Cohen has taken to naming the one outside her window after it. If change is inevitable, the beloved mountain represents a constant in her life. “It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world,” she says. “I always reference the rot and repeat — the cycles of what’s happening around me — and yet these mountains never go away. Everything is constantly shifting, but these mountains don’t move. It’s pretty cool to watch that process.”
Cohen expands on this observation on her recent single “Dusty,” named after Dusty Springfield. “It’s not supposed to be this hard,” she coos over a euphoric flute and violin. “Everything’s changing, you can see it/Moving and evolve.” It’s the opening track on the album, and it serves as a blissful introduction to Cohen’s universe. And though she sings “I heard somebody say, ‘Be as lonely as you wanna be,’” you immediately feel a sense of camaraderie.
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Good hangs are felt all over Earthstar Mountain, from Cohen’s longtime partner and collaborator Sam Owens (who releases music under Sam Evian), to the home studio where they recorded it, Flying Cloud Recordings. Cohen and Owens converted their two-story barn into a studio and apartment, which they’ve spent years renovating. “Getting a cement truck across our narrow bridge was a very harrowing experience,” Cohen says. “I couldn’t watch. I was sick to my stomach.”
Following 2019’s Welcome Home, Cohen and Owens worked on Earthstar from 2020 up until last year, tinkering and narrowing down songs until the track list felt “the most potent.” This was in between their hectic schedule of touring and running sessions for Palehound, Big Thief, Cass McCombs, Blonde Redhead, Helena Deland, and others. “It’s basically been a revolving door of musicians coming up here and staying with us,” Cohen says. “Because we are in a pretty secluded place, I’m a den mother to all these people who come through. I cook and host and look after the artists, and Sam’s producing and recording with them in the studio.”
Cohen and Owens have found a thriving creative community with their neighbors in the Catskills. “The way that we spend time together is totally different than friendships that I’ve had over the years,” she says. In addition to making music, they cook, hike, and swim in the nearby creek, sometimes even cold plunging in the winter. “The water that goes from our creek, it goes to the Ashokan Reservoir, then it goes down to New York City,” she says. “I’m swimming in your water!”
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Several of these locals appear on Earthstar. Sufjan Stevens, who lives nearby, provides backing vocals on the devastating highlight “Mountain,” which Cohen wrote following the death of a friend. “Losing you is a mountain of stillness,” she mourns. “Distant star flashes your mischief.” But the lyrics provide a contrast to the dreamy, uplifting melody. “It was an exorcism of grief,” she says of the track. “But it definitely has some Fleetwood Mac vibes.”
Stevens also appears on the breezy instrumental “Una Spiaggia,” a cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Una Spiaggia a Mezzogiorno” (“An Afternoon on the Beach”), which the late Italian composer wrote for the 1969 thriller Vergogna Schifosi. If the lush harmonies and clarinet on Cohen’s version sound familiar, that would be the work of Clairo, another upstate resident. “One night she wrote me and was like, ‘Hey, I’m in Woodstock at a show. Do you want to come?’” Cohen recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, we’re in the studio, but if you happen to have your clarinet on you, do you want to come over?’”
Cohen’s Earthstar palette doesn’t stop at nearly 60-year-old Italian instrumentals. She veers into disco on the glossy gem “Summer Sweat” (“I want to make a disco record next,” she says. “I’ve been threatening for years”) and psychedelic soul (the bass-heavy “Draggin,’” inspired by a warped Sly and the Family Stone compilation tape she played in her Toyota Sienna minivan).
Many of the Earthstar songs were inspired by the morning walks Cohen takes with her five-year-old rescue dog, Jan, strolling old logging trails while the pup runs off-leash. (The name is short for Janis Joplin, the name she came up with. Cohen still laughs at how it looks for a couple running a studio in Woodstock to own a dog named after a Sixties legend.) Jan stands in front of the camera on Zoom wearing a red jacket, while Cohen pets her. “She’s complicated and emotional, just like her mommy,” she says.
COHEN ISN’T NEW to having a revolving door of musicians in her home. Growing up in San Francisco, she often met legendary players invited over by her jazz drummer father, from Billy Higgins to Louie Bellson. At 17, upon graduating high school, she moved to New York. She began singing, and around 2009, met Norah Jones through a group of musician friends. “[She was] the person who taught me how to sing harmony,” Cohen says. “Then I started getting the guts to write songs.” She released her debut album, Child Bride, in 2012.
Cohen was also modeling at the time, and I ask her about her Wikipedia page, which says she was “something of a muse to the city’s art scene,” with mentions of Richard Prince and the disgraced photographer Terry Richardson. “I don’t know if you want to be a muse to Terry Richardson,” she says with a laugh. “It’s hard for me sometimes to even talk about that time in my life, because what 17-year-old doesn’t want to get the opportunity to move to New York and do it? But I quickly realized that it wasn’t really an industry that I wanted to be involved in.”
After that, Cohen began working with artists like New York painter Will Cotton, known for incorporating candy and various sweets into his portraits. “I pivoted into working with artists instead, and that felt more aligned with me,” Cohen says. “I will still do stuff here and there. But now, I have a different relationship to modeling, because it’s me as a musician and not just a coat hanger.”
Though Cohen lived in New York City for 15 years, she’s always described herself as a nature girl and a country mouse. By the time she and Owens moved to the Catskills in 2018, she was more than ready. “It’s way different than being in a basement in Brooklyn with no windows and ordering in a burrito that’s going to have you laid out on the couch for half of the day, because you ate too much,” she says. (“But that’s also really cool, too,” she adds.)
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The album cover of Earthstar Mountain features Cohen in a shimmering blue suit, in the middle of an 1882 lithograph of the Catskills. The panorama was painted by German artist Henry Schile, who was hired by a railroad company to advertise traveling to the Catskills. It was her mom, who lives nearby and works in antiquarian book arts, who convinced her to reach out to the Albany History and Art Museum to license the image.
“There’s so much history with the Catskills and artist communities,” Cohen says. “It’s been like this for hundreds of years, and now I’m doing the same thing. I think that’s what the Catskills are: This open door for people to take in the beauty of this place. Everyone who comes here wants other people to experience the magic that we feel here. It’s this unspoken thing.”
