Radical Face

On Therapy, Radical Face has let go of all his past tales. Instead of a complicated saga, he kept his parameters simple. Instead of his troubled past, he focuses on his scarred presence. Instead of acoustic folk, he has written lush compositions. Uncertain yet self-confident, battered yet resilient, Cooper takes Radical Face in a new, poignant direction.

To test himself and leave the compositional boundaries of the The Family Tree trilogy, Cooper undertook a series of projects. There was his Missing Film instrumental album, a release for the use of filmmakers, and his covers, Vol. 1 EP, in which he only sang songs by female artists. His move to California also contributed to this challenge; The move from his studio in Florida forced him to relearn how to record in a flat with minimal equipment.

Weekly therapy sessions helped him realize that the portrait he'd made in The Family Tree hid the hard truth: "There's really nothing positive about it," as Cooper puts it. Although he is proud of his work on the trilogy, he looks back at her in retrospect. "I do not regret it, but it was not what I thought. I thought I was telling another story, perpetuating the strangeness into something useful, not just dysfunctioning.

The approach to songwriting from this painfully attentive mindset has opened Cooper's door to new insights. "Looking back, it's like letting go. Mourning concepts in a certain way," he explains. "Sometimes you have a story, it's an idea, a projection that you see for yourself. Sometimes you can understand that this is just a picture, and you never meet this picture. It's the letting go of this story."