Nita Strauss was born in Los Angeles on December 7, 1986. Before joining Alice Cooper’s band in 2014, she had been a teenage touring musician and a member of The Iron Maidens. Her solo records would bring another set of decisions: when to let the guitar carry the melody, and when to give a singer room.
Her father, a professional musician, taught her first chords. In a 2015 interview with Glide Magazine, Strauss traced her enthusiasm for fast playing to seeing Steve Vai in the film Crossroads. His playing and stage presence gave the young guitarist something to chase. She began writing as soon as she could put chords and notes together, played shows while still a teenager and recalled making her first national tour at 15. Learning, performing and writing developed alongside one another.
The Cooper job required her to reconsider some of that education. Recalling the audition process in a 2023 Guitar Player interview, Strauss said producer Bob Ezrin had challenged her: “Alice Cooper doesn’t need a shred guitar player. He needs a rock guitar player.” She responded by taking her first formal guitar lesson. A teacher helped her work blues phrases into her playing, filling gaps she’d left while teaching herself the faster techniques. Those lessons expanded what she could bring to Cooper’s songs and, eventually, her own recordings.
Her debut solo album, Controlled Chaos, arrived through Sumerian Records in 2018. Its instrumental format gave her space to write without arranging around a vocalist, but she carried lessons from Cooper’s repertoire into it. Speaking to Outburn in 2019, she credited those songs with sharpening her understanding of melody and structure. The practical work happened wherever she could fit it in: some finished recordings were made with a laptop in hotel rooms and at the back of a tour bus. A Kickstarter campaign helped finance the project, reaching its $20,000 goal in two hours, according to Strauss. Sumerian came aboard after the campaign and recording were complete.
She opened her solo work to a guest singer on the 2021 single “Dead Inside,” featuring Disturbed vocalist David Draiman. The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart in January 2022. It also became part of a broader experiment in combining vocal collaborations with instrumental guitar music.
That combination shaped her second solo album, The Call of the Void, released on July 7, 2023. Strauss told Guitar World that she spent three years making it, compared with three months on her debut. Working with singers and outside writers meant learning different approaches to song construction. The project grew beyond the one or two collaborations she had initially imagined, but she wanted the instrumentals to retain their place in the finished record.
In the 2023 interview, she explained that the label had suggested separating the material into two albums. She worried that the guest appearances and radio songs would attract the attention while the instrumentals were overlooked. She also rejected dividing a single album into separate vocal and instrumental halves. Instead, she sequenced the two approaches together.
Cooper joined her on “Winner Takes All,” bringing their working relationship into her own solo catalog. As she explained to Guitar Player, playing around the guest vocals required restraint even when she wanted to keep adding guitar parts. On the song with Cooper, her reminder to herself was simple: “Hey, let him sing!”
