Jackie Cohen Shares New Single 'Moonstruck'

Jackie Cohen has signed to the Alabama-based indie label Earth Libraries and is announcing the release of her new album, Pratfall, which is out September 23rd. Cohen produced her new LP alongside her long-time collaborator, and husband, Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, The Killers, Tim Heidecker) and their engineer Rias Reed (The Lemon Twigs, Crumb).

The first single from Pratfall, "Moonstruck", with its music video directed by Sloppy Jane's Haley Dahl, sets the stage for Jackie Cohen's indie-pop exploration of the messier aspects of life, the oft glossed-over struggles that we like to pretend don't exist. Cohen instead chooses to face them head-on, allowing the listener into some of her darker moments.

"Moonstruck", with its glistening acoustic guitars, haunting synths, and sepia piano brings to mind the flourishes of Fleetwood Mac and the pomp of Kate Bush. Cohen's ability to build theatrical, lush and moving vignettes of inner strife and hurtling through the process of overcoming immense pain recall the work of contemporaries like Perfume Genius or Aimee Mann.

On the music video, Dahl writes; "The video is about object sentience and wanting to escape your own identity. Screaming is beautiful, beauty is horror, horror is funny, and comedy is incredibly sad, so sad I might scream, which would be beautiful. I fing love Donnie Darko."

Speaking to her new single and music video, Cohen says; "I wrote Moonstruck in a state of desperation and delusion. I got the title and paraphrasal chorus lyric from the film about horrible disgusting love starring Cher and Nicholas Cage.

Haley and I had a day of scream practice before filming the Moonstruck video. I'd never really let myself lose composure on purpose before, and I didn't know how to do it. So much of my life and career had been built upon this insane idea that good femininity meant remaining cute, composed, poised, peppy, quiet, palatable, smiling, even when life had turned into a total horror show nightmare. Over time I became very internally fractured. There's actually nothing more feminine than screaming bloody murder.

We only got two noise complaints."

One evening in early summer 2020, Jackie Cohen found herself sitting alone at the side of a pool at a stranger's home in a small town on the East Coast, an oil lamp flickering at her side. Befitting the shimmering water at her feet, Cohen found herself reflecting.

"I was in the middle of this horrible personal crisis, and for the first time in my life I just asked the universe for a sign, some signal that everything was going to be okay," Cohen says. At that very moment, a large white moth bolted across her eye-line and directly into the open flame of the oil lamp.

"He just dive-bombed, self-immolated," Cohen says, still in chuckling disbelief years later. "That was my message." From that point forward, Cohen decided the only way forward was to succumb to the crisis, to relax into it instead of fighting, to find beauty even in the flame-an approach that fuels her sublime new album, Pratfall, due September 22nd via Earth Libraries.

Prior to that transformative poolside evening, Cohen had spent a year touring in support of her sophomore release, Zagg, a record dotted through with poetic witticisms and daubed in strings and horns-a gritty pocket of the sun-stained California mystic continuum somewhere between Nilsson Schmilsson and Have One on Me.

While she'd been writing songs for the eventual followup on the road, it took that winged messenger to crack open the new world Cohen aimed to explore. Before the moth, Cohen had been focused on Meryl Streep, a master of the pratfall. "When you see it, you gasp and hold your breath because it's so violent that you worry it's real. You want to look away but you can't, not until she gets up," Cohen says.

"And when she does finally jump up and say 'tah-da,' you're so relieved that it was all just a bit that you burst out laughing." Cohen knew her album would embody that anxious, unbelievable, uncomfortable interim where the pain of the fall and the magic of the rise each hold equal potential yet to be realized.

Watch the new music video here:

Photo: Marly Ludwig

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