Alicia Hall Moran has never been the kind of artist to keep her emotions at a safe distance from her work. So when the outside world began to feel heavier and more disconnected, the Broadway-trained mezzo-soprano and performance artist did what she has always done she turned it into art.
The result is Coldblooded, a 19-track album that doubles as a meditation on survival, emotional discipline, and the quiet power of cooling down rather than burning out. Far from a retreat, the record represents one of the most intentional creative moves of Hall Moran’s career a conscious decision to lower the temperature of her artistic expression in order to gain more control over it.
The album features four covers, two original songs written specifically for her, and 13 tracks composed by Hall Moran herself, a breadth of creative ownership that underscores just how personal this project is. She has described the record as carrying clear political undertones rooted in the concept of pure survival a frame that gives the album an urgent, quietly defiant energy throughout.
From Broadway stages to a multidisciplinary career
Hall Moran’s path to Coldblooded runs through some of the most respected stages in American performance. She has appeared on Broadway and toured nationally with productions including The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, and her voice has filled prestigious New York City venues such as Jazz at Lincoln Center. She has also performed alongside major orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra Pops and the Chicago Philharmonic.
In 2017, she and her husband, jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, were jointly awarded the Art of Change fellowship by the Ford Foundation recognition that affirmed their shared commitment to using art as a vehicle for social engagement.
Her piece Black Wall Street has drawn national attention for the way it weaves music together with layered storytelling, and last year she performed at the Park Avenue Armory, interpreting Yoko Ono’s 1981 composition Walking on Thin Ice as part of a larger exhibition. Each project adds a new dimension to a career that resists easy categorization.
When figure skating became part of the art
Perhaps the most unexpected thread running through Coldblooded is figure skating a lifelong passion that Hall Moran has gradually woven into the fabric of her artistic practice.
Her performance piece Breaking Ice is an alt-opera that merges Bizet’s Carmen with the visual language of Olympic figure skating, a combination that captures exactly how she thinks about creative boundaries: not as limits, but as starting points.
To celebrate the release of Coldblooded, she shared a video for the album track Civil Twilight, filmed at an ice rink in Maryland. The video features Hall Moran singing and skating alongside choreographer Joy Thomas, with the song drawing on themes of childhood friendship and the lasting emotional pull of time spent on the ice.
Finding community on the ice in Harlem
Hall Moran lives in Harlem, where she has built a quiet but meaningful skating life at local rinks including Riverbank State Park and the Gottesman Rink at Central Park. She takes classes with the Ice Theatre of New York, and for her, the rink is as much a place of spiritual practice as it is a physical one.
She views skating as a grounding ritual something that allows her to physicalize thought, regulate emotion, and reconnect with herself in a way that feeds directly into her creative output. The public skating session, in her view, is its own kind of concert: music moving through bodies, energy circulating, community forming without announcement.
What Coldblooded really means
At its core, Coldblooded is about reclaiming agency in an era that can make empathic people feel particularly vulnerable. For Hall Moran, tempering emotional heat was not about going numb it was about becoming more precise, more self-assured, and ultimately more free. The album is playful in places, politically awake in others, and throughout it all, unmistakably hers.
In a cultural moment that often rewards volume and urgency, Hall Moran has made something that rewards stillness and attention. That, perhaps more than anything, is what makes Coldblooded worth listening to closely.
