Lizzy McAlpine was meant to be our featured artist last week, but her enthusiastic endorsement of last week’s artist sidetracked me a bit. But let’s make it up to McAlpine by telling you three things I find very interesting about her:
- Rather than making individual videos for the tracks on her most recent album, Five Seconds Flat, she made a short film to accompany the album. That’s an artistic commitment not too many musicians are prepared to make.
- At the outset of the pandemic, while a student at the Berklee College of Music, she launched an Instagram live concert series called #BerkleeAtHome. That’s faster pivoting than most students are capable of doing.
- The first #BerkleeAtHome live stream happened less than a month after she had lost her father. That’s a level of courage so extreme as to feel almost abstract.
- She went to Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia, which is the same school Kobe Bryant attended. That’s a completely meaningless coincidence, but I still find it interesting.
- This beautiful song describes someone escaping stress by heading “to the mountains” and her last name contains the word “Alpine.” That’s also a coincidence, but it feels like a more meaningful one.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Although it was written to capture the feeling of retreating into isolation following a break-up, something about it conveys a contentedness that feels more like a running towards than a running from.
2. The way the plucked strings follow the vocal melody at 1:17 evokes someone tip-toeing out the door so as not to be noticed.
3. A minute later, the strings and vocalizing (and a subtle little birdsong) open the track up enough to help the listener visualize the wide open spaces that help us feel better when we need it.
Recommended listening activity:
Activating your out-of-office autoreply.