At Work: The Chapin Sisters

A lot has changed since Lily and Abigail Chapin’s last studio effort. “The gap coincided with becoming parents,” Abigail explains, referencing the extended period between The Chapin Sisters’ 2018 EP, Ferry Boat and their early 2023 single, “Bergin Street.”

“We went in to demo a bunch of songs in 2022. We were just going to record a couple, ‘Bergen Street’ being one of them. And in the weeks leading up to that, it turned out that we started mining our notebooks and voice memos. We realized that we had a lot of songs, so we threw them all in the mix,” Abigail adds, before discussing her and her sister’s pandemic-induced migration, which had a palpable effect on their work in the studio.

“When we were demoing and playing these songs for each other, we realized that many of them had similar themes, which coincided with our current lives—parenthood, not being single waif, young ingénues, growing up and leaving the city. We went back to the Hudson Valley,” Abigail says, while describing the origins of another new original, the August single “All Through the Night.” “Singing and listening to that one has a palliative, calming effect,” Lily explains, alluding to the meditative nature of the lullaby. “Unlike many of our songs, where you go through a hard experience as you sing it or are reminded of a sad moment or a loss, this song is intended to quell anxiety.”

“With each song, we sort of have to decide if we will do it in the Everly Brothers style, where we try to completely blend into one voice, or the Crosby Stills & Nash style, where we do three parts and blend it into one sound, or if we want to go the Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris route, where you notice the two voices,” Lily says.

While the aforementioned material got the COVID treatment, passed around from person to person, the sisters took another approach on their third 2023 drop, “Wasting Your Time.” Abigail explains, “Our next single was completely the opposite, where everything was done live in one room. We recorded it with producer J.J. Blair. J.J. ended up playing guitar, I was playing guitar, Lily and I were singing, Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played piano, Dan Rothchild provided bass, and Chad Cromwell, Neil Young’s drummer, played on it. We did three takes, and it was perfect, so we left it.”

Given their neoteric strive in the studio, Abigail assures fans, “These are the songs that have come to us, and we’re putting them out little by little because that’s our pace right now. There’s an album coming. We’re just getting to it a bit at a time.”