Now No, 33, is perched at the dining room table in her Crown Heights apartment. She looks cozy in a t-shirt, leggings and Uggs, her curls half-up, half-down. She has tiny silver ear piercings, like a constellation. No shares this fourth-story walkup with her partner Cole Nielsen, 42, her three step-kids and her overexcitable dog, Berlin, whom No describes as “squirrel-like.”
Art, both the framed and the made-by-kids varieties, hangs on the white walls. A blend of acoustic/indie/folk music plays softly on a speaker. The music resembles No’s own style. She describes “Halfsies” as Americana, alt-country and indie-country, with some rock songs, too. She needed different sounds for different cuts and doesn’t like to limit herself to industry conventions.
No sings and plays the harp and, as a Black and queer musician, knows that her music is intrinsically political. “If you’re a Black artist that is not completely living under a rock,” she explains, “you end up having a choice to make which is—am I going to be honest about my experiences and the way I see the world? Or am I going to smooth it down to try to get ahead?” No chooses to create music on her own terms.
Her stage name is a reflection of that desire. “When I went solo, I really needed to define what I didn’t want,” No, born Lizzie Quinlan, explains. “There’s a lot of ‘I refuse this, I refuse that,’ so that I can get to the good stuff.” Plus, “Lizzie, no!” was a phrase she heard a lot as a kid.
No grew up in Princeton, NJ, in a music-filled house—hymns courtesy of her Southern Baptist dad and The Beatles, Carol King and Mary Chapin Carpenter from her mom. She graduated from Stanford University in 2013 with a degree in comparative literature and moved to New York City two years later. She played music with friends for a bit, and then in 2017 released her debut solo album, “Hard Won.”
“As she got older and she was doing more with it, it just felt like a…
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