“After, I made really big watercolor paintings for some friends,” she says. It was around then that Cunniff started focusing on visual art - something she’d studied since childhood but never actively pursued as a career.
In two years’ time, they dropped a crowd-funded LP, Magic Hour. With some help from neighborhood peers the Beastie Boys, who signed the quartet to their label, Grand Royal, Luscious released four critically beloved discs - 1992’s In Search Of Manny EP, 1994’s Natural Ingredients, 1996’s Fever In Fever Out (home to the grooving staple “Naked Eye”), and 1999’s Electric Honey - before splitting in 2000.Īfter parting ways, Cunniff put out a solo full-length, City Beach (2007), and later reunited with Luscious Jackson in 2011. New York isn’t just Cunniff’s home - it’s also where she formed alt-pop mainstay Luscious Jackson in the early ’90s. “Every time I’ve come here over the last 10 years I’ve been like, ‘Yeah, I could move here.’ For various reasons we never did, but I thought, ‘God, if I was 10 or 20 years younger like didn’t have all this stuff established, I could see myself doing that.'”
“There’s something cool about LA,” she muses. She even admits her relocation fantasies. Like many other Brooklynites (Cunniff currently resides in Park Slope), she’s openly fascinated with the City Of Angels, specifically its sprawling mid-century architecture and seemingly stuck-in-time road signage. But today the Luscious Jackson frontwoman and founding member is in Los Angeles visiting her brother, who, naturally, works in TV. Jill Cunniff is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised. Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.