Brooklyn‘s Tod Lippy has made his name across a variety of artistic pursuits, working as a designer, editor, and author, notably creating the award-winning arts journal, Esopus. The publication saw extensive collaboration with artists and authors, and every issue featured a specially commissioned CD featuring new music from the likes of Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Neko Case, Cloud Nothings and Kimya Dawson. If the entirety of Esopus was a labour of love and artistic obsession, this musical aspect helped open out a new dimension to the pursuit. Tod Lippy had trained in classical guitar for a decade, but it was this that inspired him to finally work on creating his own songs.
After honing his craft with a collection of demos, Lippy finally released his debut album, Here We Are, in 2016, and the Esopus aesthetic was stamped all over it. “Making Here We Are was like an extension of everything I was involved (and obsessed) with in producing [the journal],” Lippy says, who worked with the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco to create short films for a handful of the tracks and turn the album into a multimedia project. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Kramer, Lippy crafted songs rooted in the past but never maudlin, a form of nostalgia stripped of its worst sentimental excesses.
This summer saw Tod Lippy return with a brand new album, Yearbook, and this relationship with the past continues. Almost two years in the making, the record was again created in collaboration with Kramer, though the early songs recorded in 2019 were scrapped during the first wave of the pandemic as the isolation triggered new ideas. “If there is any silver lining to the horrors of Covid,” Lippy says, “it’s this: I finally had the time and space not only to dive deep into my music but also to fully comprehend my reasons for making it.” New songs emerged from this freshly robust engagement with the practice, taking Lippy’s songwriting to another level. “Nearly every song I wrote in this period ultimately ended up on the album,” he continues, “and all of them come from this deeper understanding of why I need to express myself through music.”
Yearbook‘s final single, ‘Appian Way’ shows just what such a process can achieve. Inspired by memories of a late friend, the track draws upon Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and his idea of the “ça-a-été,” the sense a photograph exists in a perpetual present tense which creates an emotional “stab” when viewed. The emotional reflex which occurs when we are confronted by a present version of something we know to be lost to the past. Centering on unearthed photos, ‘Appian Way’ sees Tod Lippy experience this phenomenon, but most interesting is how the song not only describes the ça-a-été sensation, but itself becomes its own example. For the track is also eternally present tense, the ever-lasting moment where Lippy faces grief once more.
A long time ago
I took a lot of photos
And then I packed them away
I didn’t look until today
Some of them went in the trash
Some of them were not bad
And then occasionally
I’d find one of you and me
In my car
There you are
There you are
There you are
There you were
There you were
There you were
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We’re delighted to share a brand new video for the single, directed by Charlie Theobald with cinematography from Ella Gibney. Check it out below:
Yearbook is out now and available from the Tod Lippy Bandcamp page., and you can find more about Lippy’s other work on his website.
