Songwriter Chet Zenor steps into the spotlight on Lucky Cloud’s debut LP, ‘Foreground’
Chet Zenor is the singer and songwriter behind the Chicago-based alt-folk project, Lucky Cloud. Photo by Shannon Marks.
In-between playing gigs in New York City and Chicago, singer-songwriter Chet Zenor teaches guitar and pours rye neat for whiskey enthusiasts on the city’s north side. The latter is how I met Zenor on a cold evening in March, serving boozy flights at the former leather tannery turned distillery and concert venue, Judson & Moore.
Despite his calm exterior, Zenor had reason to be nervous. The musician was gearing up for an official showcase set at South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, where he’d be playing guitar for Chicago band (and new Merge Records signee) Case Oats just days later.
In that time at SXSW, he’d rub elbows with record execs, wind up at a makeshift baseball game organized by indie-folk darling Kevin Morby and somehow make time to iron out details for his own record release.
Performing under the moniker Lucky Cloud (coined after an Arthur Russell song from 1986’s World of Echo), Zenor released his debut full length Foreground on March 28, and he’ll be celebrating its launch at a release party presented by Audiotree on Saturday, April 5 at Schubas.
Zenor says he wrote the songs for Foreground in 2020, coming off the heels of a breakup and entering the “real world” for the first time as a college grad. The professional jazz musician channeled his emotions in a way that was, at the time, unconventional for Zenor.
Known in the Chicago scene for playing in or contributing to a number of bands (Minor Moon, Squirrel Flower, Hannah Frances), he hadn’t yet stepped into the limelight himself, or really taken a stab at songwriting in general—a surprise considering how effortlessly poetic Zenor appears throughout the record’s 40-minute runtime. “I actually had to learn to sing,” he laughs, adding that he’d only really ever sang in private until he wrote Foreground.
Album artwork for Foreground, released via Ruination Record Co. Courtesy of Lucky Cloud.
Zenor grew up in the north Chicago suburb of Deerfield, but didn’t exactly have the typical suburban experience. Zenor’s parents were heavily involved in the Chicagoland rockabilly scene, a niche subculture drenched in mid-mod kitsch and classic Americana. “When I was a kid I was kind of embarrassed by it because they dressed like they’re from the 50s,” Zenor laughs.
Originally born in Austin, Texas, Zenor and his family moved to Illinois when he was two. His parents found a midcentury modern house—”my mom is really into midcentury everything,” —where they raised Zenor and his sister. Zenor’s parents were never professional musicians themselves, but he credits his father with showing him his first guitar chords, and his sister with bestowing him a laptop full of torrented indie songs from the early aughts, which turned him onto the likes of bands like Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective.
In middle school he joined a School of Rock-style music camp and made friends with other young guitarists, and by high school he was performing in Deerfield High’s jazz band.
Zenor graduated from DePaul University with an emphasis in jazz and in 2020 began living with now-collaborators Max Subar (guitar) and Jason Ashworth (bass). Zenor had already felt himself shifting away from jazz when Subar tapped him to be in his band.
Zenor is a Chicago-based singer, songwriter and musician. Photo by Shannon Marks.
“I just had a moment of feeling like, ‘I don’t know if this is exactly what I want to be spending all of my time and creative energy doing,’” Zenor say about jazz. Playing music with Subar was “kind of the first time I was playing song-writing music in a serious way,” he says.
It instantly scratched an itch Zenor didn’t know he had.
“I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people who had a bunch of bands that played when they were in school, or their friends were in rock bands—but there weren’t people doing that when I was a kid,” Zenor says. “I didn’t really have an outlet for it in that way until after college. I just kind of realized a lot of my skills are much more in the songwriting kind-of-world, and I always wanted to make music like that.”
The songs Zenor wrote in that apartment appear on Foreground and combine elements of isolation, growth, evolution and heartache, though “it’s not trying to be a COVID album,” he assures.
“The songs are mostly about growing up,” Zenor says, now 29. When he wrote these songs, the musician was 23 or 24, “kind of entering into the world for the first time,” reflecting on his childhood and “moments like losing innocence and doing things I regretted.” And part of it was the reckoning, and then catharsis, of a relationship that had fallen apart. “A lot of the songs are about that,” he says.
Foreground was recorded in-studio over the course of a few days, but the process from album concept to its realization was more complicated. For one, Zenor has made himself a notable figure in the Chicago alt-folk scene, contributing as a studio and touring guitarist for other people’s bands. With Lucky Cloud, Zenor had to find the confidence to be the frontman—not fade into the background.
“Most of the people who I've known and connected with have been through being a side person trying to support other people and their music,” Zenor says. “This is the first thing that feels like, ‘Here I am,’ which is not a role I feel comfortable in,” he laughs. “That part has been challenging, but having those people on my side has made me feel a little bit more confident or comfortable to be able to do that.”
Those people include his studio ensemble—folks that tracked some of the LP’s songs, and whom he continues to play with as the jazz-country group Alta Vista—and Lucky Cloud’s touring band, consisting of Subar, Ashworth, and Spencer Tweedy (drums).
“Then there are times where it feels kind of like, damn this is really bizarre,” Zenor says of his ascent in the Chicago indie scene. Photo by Shannon Marks.
While Zenor just wrapped up playing SXSW with Case Oats, the songwriter remains humble and approachable as ever. He talks about orbiting the Wilco-adjacent web of Chicago and New York musicians he’s met since graduating from DePaul—“there’s just this kind of constellation of different people” he says, everyone working in tandem and helping each other get to the next stepping stone in their careers.
Zenor named his band after an Arthur Russell song from the album ‘World of Echo.’ Photo by Shannon Marks.
That constellation is loosely tied to Zenor’s drummer, Spencer (the son of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy), who belongs to a number of indie-Americana groups, including Case Oats.
But Zenor “keeps his head down,” he says, sliding back into the foreground once more. His ego appears nearly non-existent as he talks, with gratitude, about being able to have stability in a notably volatile industry.
“I feel like a big part of myself has not really allowed myself to really like, reflect on that in a real way,” Zenor laughs. “There are times where I kind of have to be like, ‘If teenage me could know that I would get to do this, I would feel so excited.’”
It was just a few weeks ago when Zenor found himself at that Morby-arranged baseball game in Austin, TX. The guitarist watched from the sidelines as his bandmate, Tweedy, cracked balls inside the diamond alongside one of the decade’s more notable folk stars.
“Then there are times where it feels kind of like, damn this is really bizarre,” he laughs. “There can definitely be moments of feeling a little jaded about how this stuff works, and I feel like I’m not alone in that feeling, thinking about a lot of my other friends in the music world who are all just trying to figure out some way to build a sustainable career. Which I feel that’s like my only thing—trying to do that in music.”
And his music speaks for itself. As a professionally trained musician with an ear for the avant garde, jazz rhythms and unconventional chord progressions are woven throughout Foreground.
With one foot evenly planted in Americana, Zenor explores various depths with the other, like taking the listener on a complex journey of his own musical mastermind.
Lucky Cloud plays Schubas on Saturday, April 5. Photo by Shannon Marks.
Album opener, “Undertow,” begins with a Leonard Cohen-esque riff, the chords of Zenor’s guitar echoing against his warm and winding vocals. “The strangest of ways/Open up when you play/By the rules of a game/We’re making up as we go along,” he sings, channeling feelings of uncertainty and freefall that once overwhelmed a younger Zenor.
Nods to the late Russell are rife, as are folk stalwarts like Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens, but Foreground remains starkly Zenor’s own. On “You Know,” Subar’s pedal steel combines with drummer Andy Danstrom’s steady jazz rhythms, as Zenor’s vocals dance atop whimsical washes of vibraphone, played by Sarah Weddle, and saxophone riffs by Sarah Clausen.
A shakier, rough-and-tumble Zenor appears on “Invitation,” rounded out by a chorus of angelic background vocals and raucous, jangling guitars and whiplash percussion.
It’s a full-circle moment, being front and center for the first time, but it’s one that’s been hard-fought by Zenor.
After dutifully playing on the sidelines for years, Zenor hasn’t just earned the respect of his peers, he’s completely come into his own, earning a position in the Chicago indie scene as a bonafide singer and songwriter.
As Zenor prepares to take the stage at Schuba’s on Saturday for his record release party, it marks not just the celebration of an album five years in the making, but the beginning of a long and promising career that’s just getting started.
And for Chicagoans outside the folk scene, it may be their first time seeing Zenor center stage, but it certainly won’t be their last.
