Over the last few years, Sasha Spielberg, also known as LA-based songwriter Buzzy Lee, has steadily carved out her own lane in alt-pop. Her 2021 debut LP Spoiled Love arrived after years of honing her craft, from experimenting with GarageBand to forming bands with her brother Theo as a teenager. By 2023, she returned with her sophomore record Internal Affairs, collaborating with Denzel Curry and hitting the road in support of HAIM along the way.
Now, Buzzy is back with her latest studio album, Shoulder to Shoulder. The project grew out of late-night sessions with her boyfriend-turned-husband, Harry, after the pair relocated to New York in 2021. Revisiting those early recordings in 2023, they embraced a stripped-back, homegrown approach, with Harry taking the reins on production. Joined by a close-knit circle of collaborators, including Will Epstein, Georgia Lill, Jake Falby, Mike Irwin, Jorge Balbi, Ben Fletcher and Ryan Richter, the album blends live instrumentation with the artist’s signature synth-led sound, intimate vocals and deeply personal lyricism.
To celebrate the release of Shoulder to Shoulder, Buzzy Lee has written an exclusive track-by-track for 1883, breaking down each song on the LP.
‘I’ll Wait’
This is the first song on the record, the first demo Harry and I did together, on the first night I moved from LA to NYC. This song set the tone for the entire record as we pieced it together like a collage, in the way that one does haphazardly, when the paper and glue start curling off the page. This is the sound we wanted and the feeling we set out to capture for the next nine songs. We pulled in instruments from friends, remotely, as we discovered an impressionistic way of recording which was that I would lay down a melody, then mute it as I did an entirely new one on top of it. After about 5 takes of completely different melodies, we unmuted all the tracks and played them all together, calling them “currents,” as they flowed and entwined with one another like currents in a stream. This is how we built all the other songs as well, using this as the template.
I had been through tumultuous patterns in relationships, and when I met Harry I couldn’t believe how at ease and in love I was at the same time. I had a slight fear for the first 9 months that the “other shoe was going to drop” because how could love be this easy? I had never known that love, hence the lyrics, “Lovers who sit easy, lovers who let silence wash over like TV, what if we never start off bad?”
‘Like That’
‘Like That’ was the first demo we brought to Nick Millhiser. On the first day, Nick gave an electrifying speech where the gist of it was that the demos alone were great, so we shouldn’t be afraid to take wild swings because we can always return to the demo. “Nothing we do can undo a previous step or version.” With Nick and Harry’s joint production on “Like That,” we did not return to the demo. Although we did later return to “apartment-grown” sounds, these first few days in Nick’s studio inspired us to bring the songs back home, which was in itself a wild swing. In the five years leading up to the inception of this song, I had been very struck by a song called “Iris” by Wim Mertens. I was also listening to some Laurie Anderson and various ambient artists, falling in love with the endless possibilities with a mere one to two notes, and how they could sustain an entire song. I aimed to do something like that with “Like That.”
‘Bad Company’
One night around 10:30 pm, I was seated at the piano with the soft pedal on, while Harry did the dishes. As I sat down to write, I was in a mood and I felt guilty about subjecting Harry to it. I sang “I’m just such bad company” and he sang the counter melody underneath it “you lift me up in the morning,” like a call and response, as he washed the dishes, we did this back and forth until the last dish was dried.
‘Shoulder to Shoulder’
Shoulder to Shoulder started off as one of my habitual “toxic relationship” songs. More often than not, I can sit at a piano and go melancholy. Harry, who had no agenda, (lol, truly) prompted the shape of the song by saying that it sounded like I was singing about sitting shoulder to shoulder with a stranger. And that’s where I shifted the lyrics and meaning of the song. The lyric “Shoulder to shoulder, but I cry on myself” is about a lot of things, but really it’s about sobbing to “About Time” Skinny Pop on my sweater, shoulder to shoulder with a complete stranger on a plane.
‘Youth on Age’
This one actually was written in 2020 through a prompt by one of my best friends, an incredible musician/writer/teacher, Greta Morgan. I was watching Mad Men for the first time and her prompt was to take a line from the show and make a song around it. There’s this moment in the elevator with Joan and Bert where he looks at her and says “don’t waste your youth on age.” I really related to this as I had just been in a somewhat similar situation a few years prior. I played the voice memo for Harry in one of our “go, go, go “ late night sessions in 2021 and we immediately recorded the demo of it. We changed the key of this song about four times before we went full circle and landed on the original key (classic.) In 2024, we scratched the version we had recorded and started over in LA because we realized we wanted it to sound more like the voice note which is just my vocals run through a TC Helicon, a drum machine, and my grandpa’s Clavinova. You see a theme here with “Demo-itis.”
‘Waffle Knit’
This one I actually recorded on a voice note March of 2020. I had this Alesis Ion that was a bit broken and because it was broken, it produced the most amazing sounds to me. I recorded this and put it away and rediscovered it years later. I played it for Harry and said “how can we make this work? Right now all I have is this voice note, and I cannot recreate this even if I tried.” So what you hear in the final recording is a voice memo! I sent the voice note to Will Epstein, and said I want this to sound like I took a recording of a faraway performance on a subway platform. It’s actually quite a bicoastal song to me, it gives off LA dusk when the Santa Ana winds come in hot, but it blends the heartbeat and noise of New York.
‘Blame It’
My grandpa died at almost 104 and passed down to me his Yamaha Clavinova. One LA night, Harry heard me riffing on “Blame It” and at this point he actually had become quite a good engineer, “Gearhead” rising. We felt we had all the songs we needed on the record, anything after felt like extra credit. As I was still figuring the song out, he immediately ran it through the computer and we recorded the instrumental and temp vocals in one night. It was sort of a farewell to LA, in a way. In the song, we created all these bursts of instrumentation that we called “blooms” because it felt like we were pouring water onto these flower beds. I always say “I’m the person who says sorry if someone steps on my foot.” This song sort of spells that out.
‘You Should Be Alone’
I wrote this about a person very close to me. This was Harry’s first time mic-ing a piano. We stared at it having no idea where to even start. We have such a beautiful soft pedal that we wanted to capture alongside the fragility of the vocals. We have this phrase we use a lot that’s synonymous with “jerry-rig” called a “Larry-lean.” So we kept describing our mic set up as a Larry Lean. We had two mics over the piano, then two handheld recorders and an iPhone voice memo running. We combined all of them and therein lies the sound of “The Lean.”
‘Hot Nights’
After Harry and I got married, I went to Nashville to spend a few days with the aforementioned Greta Morgan. We were getting ready to go to a restaurant on the hottest, muggiest night in June. We were essentially wearing nothing and I sat down in my nothing-garb and started playing what is now “Hot Nights.” I sang “Hot nights on the avenue, let me roll on down” and then Greta sang “French fries and Martinis now, I wanna dine with you.” We kept going and wrote this very quickly as a joke song, making us late to our reservation. We both had it stuck in our head for days to follow, so she encouraged me to replace the joke lyrics with real ones, and so we did that together. One of my favorite riffs I’ve ever come up with is the organ underneath the last “verse.” I wish there were a way to write it out. It’s just, “dunnnn, dun dun dun dun dun dun, dunnnn dun dun dun duuuun.” That’s the organ part. This is song is a farewell to the joys and sorrows of dangerous love.
‘Gingham’
Gingham was one of the biggest headaches to figure out. Over the course of three years I tried about 120 different melody variations. This song meant so much to me, it became so precious where it felt that the melody had to be as good, if not better than the instrumental. After endless attempts at sung out melodies, I tried a mix of spoken word/humming over it. I even screamed for one minute straight over the instrumental to see if that was cool. It wasn’t. Absolutely nothing worked. I was ready to can it when Harry suggested we just keep it as is, an instrumental. We were trying to make it something it wasn’t. So we relied on the strings to take the place of the vocal melody. Maybe one day, in 20 years, I will come up with the perfect melody for this song and release it, but right now I think it is what it wants to be and I can’t be its “Mom-ager.”
Listen to Buzzy Lee’s new record Shoulder to Shoulder now.
Intro Cameron Poole
Photography by Phil Chester & Sara Byrne
