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…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply