Today’s Not Yesterday
Reviewed by: Jane Roser
If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere. New York sure has been good to The Chapin Sisters. Their first album of original material in five years, Today’s Not Yesterday, is a sweet honeysuckle of a record. It’s filled with lovely harmonies, honest lyrics and harkens back to a bygone era that is rarely captured so exquisitely.
Sisters Abigail and Lily Chapin grew up in the music business. Their father is Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Tom Chapin and their uncle was folk legend Harry Chapin, but the Chapin Sisters groove to the beat of their own drum. The dozen songs on this album explore the sisters’ past and their years spent living in L.A. to their move back to the east coast. Today’s Not Yesterday is self-released through a Kickstarter campaign and produced by The Chapin Sisters with Dan Horne (Conor Oberst, Allah Las, Jonathan Wilson) at Jonathan Wilson’s Five Star Studio.
The stand out track for me was the gorgeous “Love Come Back” about yearning for a lost love: “Oh I learned to love you slowly/Like a bird using its wings/And I’ll learn to live without you even/Slower now it seems.” Two other songs that I loved were the catchy, could-be-a-radio-hit “Getaway” and the hauntingly ethereal “Autumn”, a song which literally feels like Fall; you can almost smell the smoke of a campfire and feel the rustle of leaves under your feet.
The Chapin Sisters also had one of the coolest Kickstarter rewards I’ve ever seen. Homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (they sold out so fast, they wound up adding new cookie combo rewards).
Maybe they don’t make them like they used to, but Today’s Not Yesterday can certainly hold a candle to the classics while also creating something new under the sun. I’m happy to be spreading that news.
Rating: Bad-Ass
