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hen significant moments in life happen, we rarely have the luxury of recalling them exactly as they were. We might be able to remember sights, smells or sounds, but it’s always a little fuzzy around the edges. But the nature of recording music, capturing time and sound on tape, adds a bit of clarity to those unknowns. This has certainly been the case for Chiggi Momo’s Bella Cooper, who it’s clear takes her time to do things with intention.
Her first EP, “Oval Teen,” was (appropriately) composed of songs she wrote as a teen — some of them almost a decade old. And her latest release, “Souvenir,” which just dropped on March 21, was actually recorded in 2023. “I’m so ready to put out some of these songs that have lived in my head for so, so long,” she says.
“Souvenir” marks her first fully collaborative release, requiring coordination with several contributors. She tapped her longtime friend, drummer Aidan Walsh, along with Elisha Zepeda and Lilian Hanson (both on bass and guitar) to help record, which was done at Todd Rosenberg’s VCA Lab after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
“I just think it makes it so much better than anything I could make entirely on my own, because I had so much help from really talented, genius musicians and friends. I think you can feel the friendship. They love me [and put] so much of their love into these songs that I entrusted them with…. It’s a massive milestone in what I have out on the internet for people to listen to.”
It’s worth noting that the friendship and collaboration goes both ways: Chiggi Momo is Cooper’s own project, but she’s also known as an accomplished, versatile bassist in several projects around town, including Mari & The Dream and Palo Sopraño.
On “Souvenir,” Cooper was especially excited to work with Walsh, who was in their high school jazz band when they first met, and whose experience she wanted to put to good use. “I love how jazz musicians make pop music,” she explains. “A jazz background really uplifts and create[s] more dimension [in my songs].”
Indeed, compared to the sparse yet plucky instrumentation on “Oval Teen,” “Souvenir” is more driving, with Walsh making use of the whole drum kit to punctuate harmonies in the bass and guitar. Cooper’s full, throaty voice comes through atop it all, delivering a surprise start in “Flew Too Close,” wistfulness in “Ponderosa Pine” and raw emotion and catharsis in “Capture the Feeling,” a song that shares its title with the original name of the EP. “It felt fitting [originally], but that song specifically is not a very happy song,” Cooper says.
Rather than referring to the process of making a moment a tangible item, the song is about a “complicated, decade-long intense friendship that… was just full of misunderstanding and jealousy and power struggles and bad faith assumption.” Cooper’s hurt and sadness ring through, but not without some resolution in the repeated lines: “If I’m never going to capture the feeling and you’re asking me to control how you hear it / But I’m never able to explain my meaning / You’re gonna have to trust me, gonna have to believe it.”
The door on this friendship seems to have closed, but the song “Capture the Feeling” remains, an artifact to celebrate Cooper’s resolve. This, along with a trip to Australia where she was searching for gifts to bring back for family, inspired the name “Souvenir.”
Since 2023, Cooper’s collaborators on “Souvenir” have moved away, and the title has come to take on a different meaning for Cooper: “We got to record it when we were all together in the way that we were. Because now, that’s a formation of my band that no longer really exists…. It was a really sweet, special kind of magical group and moment for me and [I feel] so lucky we got the chance to record the EP together, but now it feels like it’s a souvenir of that time.”
Chiggi Momo’s current lineup includes Logan Anderson (drums), Kenny Jones (keys), Evan Forsythe (lead guitar and bass) and Haley Taylor (backing vocals). You can catch them at Bend’s HomeGrown Music Festival, which the band has performed at since the event’s founding in 2023. Since then, the festival has evolved, seemingly in tandem with Chiggi Momo. “It’s nice to see how much bigger it’s gotten,” Cooper says, “and also how much my project has shifted.”
Here’s to the future expressions of both, and whatever mementos they may offer us.
Catch Chiggi Momo on the HDMC Stage at Silver Moon on Friday, April 18 from 8 to 9pm
This article appears in Source Weekly April 10, 2025.
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