Nita Strauss helps bring the “best live band in the world” to the studio with Alice Cooper’s new ‘Road’ album
For the first time ever, Nita Strauss plays on an Alice Cooper studio album.
The “School’s Out” rocker recorded his latest effort, Road, alongside his longtime live band. As Strauss tells ABC Audio, Cooper wanted Road to showcase the “best live band in the world.”
“His words, not mine,” Strauss points out. “[Cooper] said, ‘I want a record that captures what you guys do and what makes you the best.’ So he wanted it to be very raw, he didn’t want us to do a lot of punch-ins and overdubs and fixes, he wanted it to capture the sense of how this band is live.”
The title Road isn’t a metaphor, either — Strauss and the rest of Cooper’s band wrote the album mostly while on tour and used soundchecks to work out the new material.
“We actually finished up the tour, then drove to Nashville and went straight into the studio the next day to make the record,” Strauss explains. “We were fresh off the tour, we were just locked in, we’d never been tighter as a band, and I think that really shows in the final recording of the record.”
Cooper’s been releasing music for over 50 years, and Road is his 22nd solo album. Strauss, who also recorded with Cooper for a song off her new The Call of the Void solo album, remains impressed with his longevity.
“Whether it’s my song or his music or Hollywood Vampires‘ music, he doesn’t reinvent the wheel,” Strauss says. “He has a good handle on the Alice Cooper character and he does it better than anybody else could do something like that in the world.”
Road is out now. Cooper’s currently supporting the album on a tour with Rob Zombie.
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