Buzzy Lee – Shoulder To Shoulder
Today, Buzzy Lee, the musical moniker of Sasha Spielberg, announces her third studio album Shoulder to Shoulder, due out March 27 via Future Classic.
This is the first Buzzy Lee album since 2023’s lauded Internal Affairs. Her new single and video “Bad Company,” out today, is the first offering from the record.
“Bad Company” was written by Sasha at the piano (“always soft pedal for the neighbors”, she assures) and emerged around 10 p.m. one night. While figuring out the chorus, her husband, the visual artist and musician Harry McNally, stood across the room at the sink washing dishes when he began humming along. That melody would become the refrain “you lift me up in the morning.” The pair followed the song’s creative path until the last dish was washed.
For the accompanying music video, Sasha and Harry pulled their apartment door’s security footage together, capturing the couple’s daily comings and goings over the course of three years. An unintentional fly-on-the-wall rendering of life at their New York City loft.
A Los Angeles native, Sasha’s move to NYC came in 2021, after falling in love with her NYC-based future husband. After moving in together in 2021, the not-yet-engaged couple began experimenting with rudimentary home-recordings that would become the demos for Shoulder to Shoulder. The process, intended more as an exercise in creative collaboration than an album project, was simple yet strict: record a loose idea in one sitting, put it away immediately, and refrain from listening back until an agreed upon time in the future.
A year after marrying, Sasha and Harry rediscovered early recordings that revealed the foundation of her next album. They initially collaborated with Nick Millhiser (of LCD Soundsystem and DFA mentees Holy Ghost!) but when the songs began drifting from the demos’ intimate spirit, they chose to return to a homegrown approach, per Nick’s encouragement. Back in their Chelsea loft, Harry stepped in as producer, and the pair recorded mostly at night with a minimal setup, embracing their technical limitations to preserve the raw, instinctual feel of the original sketches. With help from musician friends – including Will Epstein, Georgia Lill, Jake Falby, Mike Irwin, Jorge Balbi, Ben Fletcher and Ryan Richter – adding live instrumentation, they captured vocals throughout their apartment and ultimately capped the album at 10 tracks to retain its sense of discovery and imperfect beauty.
Shoulder To Shoulder is a love story of an album, bursting with Sasha’s innate gift for melody and her rich, emotionally resonant lyrics. Her distinctive voice – that’s seen her sought out as a vocalist by the likes of Denzel Curry and JPEGMAFIA – moves across octaves with ease and heightens the emotional impact of these elegant, beautifully crafted songs. While indisputably a very personal document of Sasha and Harry’s relationship, as an album it’s evocative, accessible and cinematic; a powerful new addition to the Buzzy Lee catalog.
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