Throughout her 28 years on Earth, practically until her death in September 2017, Jessi Zazu was phenomenally busy making music and art and advocating for a better world. In addition to a legacy of immense determination, she left behind the seeds of Jessi Zazu Inc. — a charitable organization founded in her name by her family — as well as a wealth of visual art and her extensive creative output as a co-founder of phenomenal rock band Those Darlins. Before their amicable dissolution in 2016, the punk- and country-schooled Darlins played a big role in bringing a new generation of Middle Tennessee rockers to the world stage.
In the months before her passing, Zazu also was hard at work with fellow former Darlin Linwood Regensburg on a new musical project. If you were one of the many friends or fans who attended Jessi’s public memorial service, you heard a couple of the songs performed. But the recordings remained unfinished.
“After she died, I didn’t want to touch it,” Regensburg says in a press release. “I didn’t want to play the songs or listen to the songs, let alone finish them. It just seemed like such a daunting task with a lot of layers — there was a lot of work left to do, but then there was also this exhausting underlying emotional component that pops in and hangs around the moment I’d open a session.”
However, by 2020, Regensburg was ready to dive back in, and has been at work finalizing the tracks. Or in the case of at least one song, building them up from demos recorded on a phone.
“It was a way of spending time with her, and kind of the only capacity in which I could,” he says in the release. “But then, I was also left with a lot of creative choices without her. Even though I had played most of the instruments, it had still been a totally collaborative thing; if there was a part I played that she didn’t like, she was clear about that. If someone’s gone, you can still talk to them, but you can only assume what their feedback might be. So I was stuck with a lot of musical choices that I’d be working under the context of, ‘I hope you like what I did here.’”
The duo has been dubbed Mama Zu, and their album Quilt Floor is set for release Feb. 23 via Thirty Tigers and Cosmic Twin. Preorders are available now, as is a lyric video for the first single, a ripper called “Lip.” Over layers of driving, snarling guitar that remind me of forever favorite “The True Wheel,” Zazu matter-of-factly tears down people and institutions who seem to have only their own needs in mind: “Used to be a saint / My heart could only cry / Before I was a sinner / It sucked my body dry.”
“The beauty of a 'fuck you' song (of which there might happen to be several on this album) is that you could simultaneously find yourself singing along while also being the oblivious target,” Regensburg says. “Granted, I never asked Jessi what this song was actually about and it's also quite possible I might be an unreliable narrator here. Nevertheless, in the meantime, whether you’re in the mood to raise a middle finger or perhaps deserved of one, this song's for you.”
Check out the video and follow Mama Zu on Instagram for more.
