Song You Need to Know: Coco Reilly, ‘Oh Oh My My’

Los Angeles songwriter Coco Reilly explores our sometimes-faulty understanding of self in the new song “Oh Oh My My,” from her upcoming self-titled debut album. The project, recorded at Nashville’s Battle Tapes studio with Jeremy Ferguson, also includes contributions from singer-songwriter Erin Rae.

“Oh Oh My My,” one of a handful of singles (including “After All” and “Suited”) released ahead of the album, plays up Reilly’s neoclassical leanings as a songwriter and composer. It opens with a country-ish strum, but then quickly transforms into a languid, walking-bassline groove that fits somewhere between Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn and Air’s moody score for The Virgin Suicides, emphasizing atmosphere alongside the arrangement. It also tosses in a tinge of bright honky-tonk piano and some distorted, George Harrison-style lead guitar to give it a hint of lush, late-period Beatles albums and even the Flaming Lips’ most accessible work from the early 2000s.

As a singer, though, Reilly brings a certain vulnerability to her phrasing, preferring subtlety to outright power with her swirling melody. It meshes well with the lyrical approach in “Oh Oh My My,” which asks someone — perhaps herself — a lot of questions about how we identify our destructive habits and find our way into healthier relationships. “Do you think that you can really ever/Step outside of your mind/Long enough to step into your heart,” she sings, somehow mirroring the uncertainty of the last year with her unanswerable musings.

Coco Reilly was initially tracked in 2017 but delayed and then finally completed during the pandemic, while Reilly was in Iceland working on film compositions. It arrives via Golden Wheel Records on December 9th.

Find a playlist of all of our recent Songs You Need to Know selections on Spotify.