Nita Strauss: Dodging Digital Bullets
Who is the hardest working person in rock music? If your answer wasn’t Nita Strauss, then you may want to rethink. As a touring guitarist for Alice Cooper and Demi Lovato, with appearances at WrestleMania, her own signature Ibanez guitar, and with an extremely successful career as a solo artist, the last few years have been nothing short of hectic for Strauss. As if this schedule wouldn’t break even the most capable of humans, Nita Strauss has decided to add even more to the workload and record an album between various tours and appearances. The Call Of The Void is an amalgamation of well over two years of work for Strauss, boasting an impressive line-up of a who’s-who of the rock world. We caught up with her from her tour bus to hear more about its conception and release.
“We had a really strong review on the digital charts,” she says. “We came out at number one rock album on iTunes, and number four album across all of iTunes behind Taylor Swift. That’s the kind of thing that kind of shows it’s like proof of concept, that what we’re doing works and it’s an amazing feeling.” Seeing a rock album this high in the charts is definitely not unheard of, but it is still gratifying to see artists from this community get this mainstream success they deserve, and no one is more deserving than Nita Strauss.
The album itself is a testament to her unending talents as a musician and songwriter, using not only her technical skills but allowing her to flex her songsmith muscles. Alongside her for this release is a team of over ten collaborators, handpicked by Strauss herself. Most are previous friends or acquaintances from working in the music industry over the years, allowing a more natural groove to the collaborative process. “Of course, Alice [Cooper] I knew from working with him for so long, Alissa [White-Gulz] and Dorothy are great friends, and I consider Lzzy [Hale] a great friend even though I’ve only done one tour with her. Same thing with Chris Motionless,” she says. Having such a close-knit community that is hyper aware of your intentions and values clearly pays off for Nita Strauss, with such a wide array of artists to choose from when writing material.
“It was really cool just to be able to reach out as peers and colleagues and friends and say like, ‘hey, we have this idea, what do you think about it?’ And the response from the artists themselves was always positive. Even the ones that weren’t able to do it. There were a couple people that I reached out to that weren’t able to be on the record because of scheduling conflicts, and even then, it wasn’t ‘I’m not really interested’. It was like ‘I would love to, but I have an album coming out or have tour at that time’, or whatever it is. It was a great experience overall, working with all the different people that we did.”
Though Nita Strauss had such a large selection of collaborators at her disposal, choosing who would feature where was an afterthought when writing, instead choosing to compose the songs first and then choose what voice would work best. “We didn’t necessarily write any with one particular artist in mind. It was more like, ‘hey, we’re writing this song now that’s meant for a strong female vocal’, and that could have been Lilith Czar, it could have been Dorothy, it could have been Lzzy. And then once the song is more fleshed out and it’s like ‘this one really sounds like this person’, we would send it to them. Then that artist gets a little more involved, whether it’s like writing, contributing some lyrics to some different parts or just adding adlibs on top of what we did.”
The one exception to this rule was Dead Inside, a track that features the infamous Disturbed and their powerhouse vocalist David Draiman. “I think that in the case of David, we sent him just a piece of music and he was the one that wrote the lyrics and vocal melody and everything like that. So, it just really widely ranged depending on the artist and the level of involvement they were able to have.”
This track in particular was released all the way back in 2021, nearly two full years before the release of the full album. In part it’s due to the politics of release dates and overlapping, as well as organizing the hectic schedules of all these collaborators. “It wasn’t meant to take as long as it did. Dead Inside came out so far ahead of the album because Disturbed was going into an album cycle and we have to make sure we respect everybody’s processes. So basically, it was like, ‘it can come out way ahead of when you guys are ready, or it can come out way later on’. And we’re like, ‘let’s just put it out’, why not give people something to listen to?”
If there is anywhere you may have seen Nita Strauss’ name pop up over the last year, it would probably be in the comments of an online article that details her collaborative nature with Demi Lovato. The child-star turned musician is a multi-talented artist herself, with her own career beginning in rock music and coming full circle with latest release Holy Fvck. Nita Strauss was recruited as a member of her all-female band for the accompanying tour, spawning a barrage of cruel remarks from the keyboard warriors that reside in the comment sections of Facebook news sites.
“I’m still actually getting flack for it today. I saw a headline just today, a clickbait type of headline from another publication that I did like a quite in-depth interview with on the new record and the headline they chose for release week was ‘Nita Strauss says this about critics and Demi Lovato.’ I actually jumped in the comment section, I was like, ‘really? That’s your headline on release week? We’re still talking about this?’”
What these commenters don’t realise is that Nita Strauss is introducing a whole new demographic to rock music and guitar playing. Through Demi Lovato, thousands of young women of the next generation have been able to see a woman playing guitar on stage, the representation inspiring young people across the globe to pick up a guitar and attempt Strauss’ crazy tapping and squeals themselves.
“We need more girls; we need more girl guitar players!” Laughs Strauss. “But in all seriousness, playing guitar for me has been the best therapy in the world. It’s my comfort, my safe place, the thing that I know that I have control over. You can’t control other things in your life, but you can do this and pursue this path of music and get better and have that feeling of self-worth, improving every day and being creative and getting your thoughts and feelings and emotions out and communicating through your instrument. It’s quite literally saved my life more times than I can count.”
