Nita Strauss, the Los Angeles-based guitar shredder for the ALICE COOPER band, has confirmed that her second solo album is "very well on the way." Strauss's upcoming disc, which is tentatively due in late 2020, will be the follow-up to her first solo album, "Controlled Chaos", released in 2018 via Sumerian Records. Nita offered an update on the next LP in an interview with Australian Musician during last month's Cooper tour of Australia. She said (see video below): "Album two is on the way. It's very well on the way, actually. I've got my Universal Audio Apollo out on the road. I've got it set up in the hotel room just about every single day off and just recording stuff, getting ideas down. We will finish here Down Under, I think, next week, and I'll go home. I'll have three weeks home that I can really go and laser in. I'm planning to get a big bulk of the writing for the album done. Then we go on and finish with Alice for the summer. And then after that, it'll be all, I think, 'Controlled Chaos' until the fall." Last year, Nita told the Long Island, New York radio station 94.3 The Shark that she didn't have any reservations about putting out an album of instrumentals with "Controlled Chaos". "Everyone said that I had to put out some tracks with vocals — that was the vast consensus among the people in the industry," she recalled. "And I have to say I'm really glad that Josh [Villalta, Nita's longtime boyfriend and manager] and I stuck to our guns and I put out the album I wanted to make. Maybe I could have made more money if I would have made it more marketable, maybe I could have had more success and [gotten airplay] on bigger radio stations and what have you, but it wouldn't have been the album I wanted to make." The 11-track "Controlled Chaos" was a challenge to Strauss and an opportunity for her to reconnect with what inspired her to start playing guitar when she was just 13 years old. "I started playing guitar because of instrumental guitar music," she said. "All my real heroes made instrumental albums. All my own career has been spent playing in bands, but I never forgot that dream of what inspired me to pick up the guitar in the first place." "Controlled Chaos" reached No. 1 on Billboard's Heatseekers Albums chart and No. 6 on the Hard Rock Albums chart. Nita's live show is mostly instrumental in nature, combining originals with covers. Strauss has been playing with Alice Cooper since 2014 when she replaced Australian musician and former Michael Jackson player Orianthi. She joined Alice in time for a mammoth MÖTLEY CRÜE tour. She was recommended to Cooper by the legendary rocker's former bass player and WINGER frontman Kip Winger.
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