Lucky Cloud

They say if a song emerges fully formed from the ether, chances are it's your own truth getting out ahead of you. When Chet Zenor received the chorus of Foreground’s title track ("I saw you in the foreground / you saw me in the background") and its accompanying verses over the course of an afternoon, he seized upon it as a centerpiece for his first LP as Lucky Cloud. It's an apt choice for the jazz-inflected indie rock record’s tender themes: coming of age amidst chaos, finding a focal point in confusion, and the thrill and terror of actually receiving the attention you’d asked for. But when I point out the fact that Foreground is also a suitable title for a debut from a songwriter who's previously only been known as a sideman, Zenor takes a pause. "I actually did not think about it that way," he laughs. "That's very true."

It’s the kind of realization Zenor captures time and again across the span of Foreground’s tracklist: we are capable of being known more than we might guess, and any grounding force of understanding comes at the cost of possibly losing it altogether. And though Zenor makes no explicit reference to the context of the record’s making, it’s impossible to ignore the same emergence happening in and outside of the text. Lucky Cloud’s debut offers us the first deep look at Chet Zenor’s musical identity apart from his onstage and studio work as a staple Chicago guitarist (Squirrel Flower, Hannah Frances, Minor Moon) – a process that would require Zenor to step forward from a comfortable degree of shadow into a new and vulnerable limelight. Largely recorded in a single three-day 2020 session, Foreground took Zenor the ensuing four years to complete – partly to add the rich orchestral flourishes that adorn the album’s outer stereo field, but mostly to reckon with the fact of hearing his voice reflected for the first time.

Up to that point, Zenor was quick to hop each hurdle in Lucky Cloud’s formation, putting together the cast of the project from a like-minded set of prior collaborators – only to play a single show on the eve of the pandemic before the ensuing disorder locationally and logistically splintered the band. He not only doubled down by forming a second lineup, but also by expanding the set of songs he’d intended to record to that of a full-length album. When studio time came, Zenor devoted one day of live tracking to each era of the band – one for the initial outfit of pedal steel player and co-producer Max Subar, drummer Andy Danstrom, and bassist Jakob Heinemann; another for the present-day lineup of Subar, drummer Spencer Tweedy, and bassist / additional co-producer Jason Ashworth. The division of labor both enabled the band to brilliantly cover Foreground’s impressively vast musical terrain and clarified avenues of output for Zenor’s distinct composing attitudes – Zenor and the prior lineup of the band now comprise the improvisational, instrumental “melted country” act Alta Vista, the latter continues as the Lucky Cloud live band.

The result is a record that’s somehow seamless in spite of its changing roster – a testament to the strength of Zenor’s songwriting vision and the formidable assembled chops of the players carrying it out. “You Know,” a song wherein Zenor finds his own assumed invisibility suddenly spotlighted, is heightened by the band bringing the feeling of entrapment to a boiling point. “Can’t help feeling that you know me more than myself,” Zenor sings, the rhythm section locking the groove of the chorus into a single tonic note while Subar’s pedal steel wanders like a pair of eyes searching to exit the room. Zenor’s own guitar work similarly populates the quick-stepping “Invitation,” a heartbreakingly comic tune of a new crush igniting and sputtering just as quickly. Zenor responds with a flurry of slapbacked soloing that makes the whole song spin, leaving him and the listener alike reeling from their own revealed volatility. The carousel continues on “Laughter Yoga”, a bossa-nova infused track that avoids resolution as deftly as its narrator skirts admitting to an inconvenient truth. This broad harmonic range is a hallmark of the Lucky Cloud sound: knotted chords and unexpected modulations soundtrack anxiety and uncertainty, lending power to the contrastingly lucid moments of peace or emotional clarity. See “Vacation Again,” the introductory single that concludes its own rattling ambivalence with the record’s most directly cathartic moment, seeing Zenor relinquish his hold on a devil-you-know cycle of a relationship gone sour and release himself into a torrent of the unknown.

It’s a counterintuitive lesson that lies at the heart of Lucky Cloud’s debut: stability is most readily found by letting go. The harmony between the content of the record and the circumstances of its making abounds here – as Zenor travailed through the grueling process of mixing and finishing Foreground, his collaborators in Subar and Ashworth repeatedly dissuaded him from his impulses to hide behind layers of reverb or lowered fidelity, opting to instead repeatedly thrust Zenor into an honest, clear presentation. Over time, Zenor’s own confidence began to grow in kind, seeing him recognize the vulnerabilities he was ashamed of in the art he most treasured – see the project’s own namesake Arthur Russell for a charming point of reference. And “Undertow” arguably begins Foreground with the same sentiment – that connection is worth all of the risk and reward of the complications it creates, exposed warts and all. “I wanna feel anything,” Zenor sings – “even if it means I’ll be tangled.”