LP Giobbi: A Buoyant Bridge

Photo: Sarah Northrop

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“I think that my purpose in life is to be a conduit of joy for people on the dance floor,” LP Giobbi declares, while discussing the nature of her DJ efforts, which have kept her on the road for more than 300 days a year, as of late. “What I think I’m best at is showing up and celebrating joy. That’s my goal and, hopefully, it’s contagious for other people.”

The prominent DJ has not only fostered connections with audiences in nightclubs and festival grounds across the globe, but she also has applied her flair and finesse to many other notable ventures. In 2023, she released her debut album, Light Places, earning DJ Mag’s Best Producer of the year title, along with recognition as one of NPR’s Favorite New Musicians and Spotify RADAR’s Artists to Watch. She has remixed Taylor Swift, Brittany Howard and Calvin Harris to far-reaching acclaim. The jazz-trained pianist and songwriter also runs her own record label, Yes Yes Yes, as well as Femme House, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that creates opportunities and advocates for gender equity in the electronic world.

LP Giobbi, who grew up in Eugene, Ore., as Leah Chisholm, maintains closes familial ties, and her role as a daughter supplies both the title and theme of her new album, Dotr. On the record, named after her initial youthful attempts to spell the word, she celebrates her parents, along with three women who provided inspiration and succor. Guest artists include Portugal. The Man, Panama, Danielle Ponder and Howard.

Her parents were Deadheads, which eventually set her on a path to host Dead House events and later resulted in an opportunity to reimagine Jerry Garcia’s debut solo album on 2023’s Garcia (Remixed). She recalls, “For many years, the Grateful Dead were just home to me. Jerry’s voice was like an uncle’s voice, and it made me think of my parents. So I took on the project because I wanted to make my parents proud and excited. But then during the remix, listening to the stems individually, I realized what a genius Jerry was. When I was in school, I would transcribe Oscar Peterson and now I was transcribing Jerry, and it really gave me a new level of appreciation for him.

“I was in Eugene for my first Dead House show after the remixes came out, and when I was walking off the stage, this older gentleman came up to me and was like, ‘Hi, I flew in from New York for the show and my son flew in from Los Angeles. We have had a really rocky relationship. We’ve never seen eye to eye. He is a raver and I’m a Deadhead and this is the first two hours that we’ve spent together in peace and love for quite some time. So thank you for that.’ At every show I’ve played since then, a parent and child have come up to me who have found my music and have been able to enjoy it together. That is everything to me.”

Last year, you were the first DJ to headline the Oregon Country Fair. What did that experience mean to you?

I haven’t missed the Oregon Country Fair since the womb. My parents have been going since their 20s. Then my mom started bringing me when she was pregnant. We’d go during the day when I was a kid and then we started camping when I was like 7. So that place is in my bones, it is in my soul, it is in my heart. It’s my favorite place in the world.

I have a record label now called Yes Yes Yes, which is named after the first sign that you see when you walk into the Fair. I think it’s the most special place on the planet.

At this point, I’ve flown in from Romania and all over the world, even if just for a day because I will never miss that festival. I bring different friends every year to expose them to it and see it through their eyes.

My mom works for KLCC, the NPR affiliate, and she helps them broadcast the main stage music, so she knows the folks who book the Fair. For the last eight or nine years, she has been like, “My daughter’s a DJ, you should definitely book her.” They’d all be like, “OK, Gayle” and then roll their eyes. The elders had sort of a problem with electronic music, and it wasn’t really welcome there. So my mom put on a silent disco at her booth—that way I could DJ and it wouldn’t bother people.

Eventually one of the bookers became this wonderful guy named Jans [Inger, former vocalist for The Motet]. I think he saw that they needed to be a little bit more open-minded and find crossover electronic music acts in order to speak to the next generation.

So, one day, I was in Australia playing with Fatboy Slim and I got a phone call from a number I didn’t know. I usually don’t pick those up, but for some reason I did, and it was Jans. He said, “I’m a booker for the Oregon Country Fair. I wanted to see if maybe you’d be available to play this year.” I told him: “First of all, this can’t be real, but second of all, you know that I play electronic music and that’s not really welcome at the Fair, right?” He was like, “We know that you’re a kid who grew up there, that you really care about this place and you have your Dead House set. So we think maybe you can be the bridge.”

My mom always says, “You’re the bridge between my world and your world.” That’s how she sees my music. So when he used the word bridge, I was like, “Whoa, what is going on?”

I asked him if he was thinking about an early set at Monkey Palace, which is the third or fourth smallest stage, and he said, “No, I’m talking about headlining the main stage Saturday night.” I literally collapsed to the ground and started screaming, “No way!” Then I told him, “I’m so sorry but I need to call you back because I have to call my parents.”

My mom later said the funniest part was that, when she went to her next meeting, the bookers were like, “Gayle, you won’t believe this. We’ve got this girl named LP Giobbi who’s going to play.” And my mom was like, “That’s my daughter! I’ve been trying to tell you guys!”

Then my agents didn’t even present me the offer. I had to call them and say, “Hey, I’m waiting on an offer from the Oregon Country Fair.” They were like, “We thought that was some sort of joke. There’s no money in it. We went to the website, and it looks like a kid made it. Leah, you’re not playing this.” I was like, “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I am 100% going to play it.”

Some people talk about how they’ve always wanted to play Red Rocks or the Gorge or whatever it is. For me, it was the Fair. I feel like I can retire now. [Laughs.] I’ve also helped them find some other artists who can be the bridge and brought them into the fold. Last year, I got on the phone with Bad Snacks, and I was like, “Just trust me on this. It’s a really magical place. You’re going to have some mind-bending, human-opening experiences. That’s what it’s going to be about.”

As a DJ, can you talk about striking the balance between reading the vibe of a room and telling your own story?

I spend most of the summer all over Europe, and every country, every room, every time slot is a different experience. Are you playing peak hour? Are you warming up? Are you opening? Are you headlining? What country are you in? What time of day is it? Are you doing sunset? Every single one of those situations is going to call for a completely different set.

You’re not making music live in the moment like a jamband, but it is very similar in that you really have no idea where the set’s going to go. You lead and you’re also being led by the dance floor. The first few songs, you’re getting to know them, so you’re listening to what they want and what they need. You’re taking that information and then you’re pushing them a little bit.

It’s extremely improvisational and you prep as well as you can with your arsenal of tracks. I mix in key too because that subconsciously feels good to the dancers. So I have all of my tracks keyed and I have different crates labeled with different crazy names in order to know how to recall a track that is asked for in that moment, at that hour, in that country, in that club.

I also play the piano when I DJ. So sometimes, I’ll have a drum loop going in one deck and then, in another deck, maybe something a cappella and then, in a third one, an instrumental loop. They will all be in the same key, and I can play the piano on top of that in the same key. I also run my piano through a DJS that enables me to live record and sequence my keyboard, so I can have all these things going on at once and be a one-woman jamband, if you will. [Laughs.]

In Europe, you play three to-four hour sets. In London, I just did an open-to-close, four-to-five hour set, which was euphoria because I got to start exactly where I wanted and then I got to control the room. As a DJ, you usually have to catch the flow of the last DJ. So you mix into them—you start wherever they’re at and then you have to go to wherever you want from that place. So mixing in is a whole skill set to learn because, if you want to take the club somewhere else, you can’t make a sharp left. You have to slowly get there like with a frog in boiling water. You dump in boiling water, it’s going to jump out. That’s the job of a DJ—you can’t just crank it to boiling, you have to get there in maybe five or 10 songs.

I see a lot of similarities between the jamband scene and the DJ scene. Then the talent of DJing is a completely different skill set than producing, which requires another level of mastery. I’m just at the beginning of that.

Speaking of producing, as you continue to release new music, to what extent have you been folding that into your DJ sets?

It’s funny, when people go see a band, they expect to hear that band’s music.

As a DJ, there are sets where I won’t play any of my music because I’m playing Space in Miami from 4-6 a.m. and I don’t have tracks that fit that peak hour of the dance floor. There will probably be people who are there to hear my Taylor Swift remix and are pissed that I’m not playing it. [Laughs.]

I have had a lot of these conversations with other DJs and producers. When are you a DJ and when are you an artist? When I go and play in Europe, I’m almost always a DJ. With their dance culture, it’s never expected that you’re going to play your own tracks. They’re there to see how you DJ. In the U.S., they expect to hear your songs more, so I sprinkle them in.

I’m doing a headlining tour through mid-December, where I’ll have a section when I’m playing just my own music, and then I will also just DJ. But that’s specific to a headlining tour.

At a festival, you’ll hear my music because I’m not really there to read the room. I’m there to stand on a God tower and play my very short one-hour set. In that case, I’m an artist, but if I’m going into a club, I think of myself as a DJ.

What was your starting point as you began contemplating work on Dotr?

I’m always writing on the road. I suppose that’s because I’m always on the road. I’ll be sending music to my publisher for topline ideas and to my record label for collaboration ideas. I’m also writing songs that maybe will be singles in their own right.

As a dance artist, I’ll release singles that will probably be heard more than albums, but I make albums to tell stories. Thematically, I tell those stories through the intro, the interludes and the outro. Then the songs are sprinkled in, mostly by key, thanks to my nerdiness. [Laughs.] That’s how the album will flow, both energetically and key-wise.

For this album, I had been obsessed with a few different things. Spending 300 days on the road, I find myself getting further and further away from home and also becoming sort of a workaholic in an unhealthy way, having less time for family and friends. I’m also aware of my parents getting old and, at some point, them not being with me on this journey. They’re always my first phone call for any good news—they make all the good news better. So I wanted to give them their f lowers while they’re alive.

A lot of my lens in life, a huge part of my identity, is that I am a daughter. So I thought a lot about what it means to be a daughter, to love a daughter, to have a daughter, and how I interact in this world as a daughter.

Some of my earliest memories are writing little love notes to my parents and signing them D-O T-R because I didn’t know how to spell and they thought that was really cute. So to this day still, when they’re writing me a card or giving me a Christmas gift, they spell daughter that way.

Then the other theme of the album is that I lost three of the most important women in my life one month apart last year. It was a really intense year of grief. The first one was my fiancé’s mom, who has been there for 12-13 years, so she’s definitely the next closest thing I had to a mother. Then the next month was my mom’s best friend, who was a professional musician and the only real-life professional artist that I knew growing up. Then, when I was in the studio working on music, I got the call I was dreading for years from my piano teacher’s best friend, telling me that my piano teacher had passed away. I was in throes of pain, but I remembered that I’d recorded our last piano lesson together. So that day in the studio, I wrote “Carolyn,” which was the first song I’ve written in a major key because she was a major woman.

All these deaths happened and I hadn’t really processed them. I was just getting on the next plane and going to the next show. So putting together this album was a way to process that, to finally take a minute and write something for these women and write something for my family, who I’ve missed so much.

Can you describe the creative give-and-take while working on a track with one of the guest artists on the album, for instance, Brittany Howard?

Well, the Brittany song is definitely a unique one-off example of how I collaborate, so I’m going to start with Danielle Ponder.

On that song, “Is This Love,” I had written the full track. I’d been playing the track out without any vocal on it in Ibiza and other places. I thought the track was working and I loved it.

With my record label, Yes Yes Yes, I’m making and releasing tracks purely for the dance floor. I don’t like to have toplines; it’s just body music.

When I’m making an album it’s fun because it’s a different challenge. I get to make songs. So I had this track that I knew worked really well just as a dance floor track, but I wondered what would happen if I were to take the juxtaposition of this harder hitting dance track and put a beautiful, almost jazz vocal on it.

I had been playing this Blessed Madonna track out featuring Danielle Ponder and I loved Danielle Ponder’s voice but I assumed she was a 1950s jazz singer who was no longer with us and that Blessed Madonna had sampled her. So I sent this track to my publisher and, immediately, he wrote back, “What about Danielle Ponder?” I just screamed, then I called him and said, “She’s alive? She’s still with us?” He said, “Uh, yeah,” and set up a session with her.

So she walked into my studio, I played her the track and we started chatting. She’s a total badass, I could talk about her forever. We started talking about her bad Hinge date, and she was like, “I was asking myself, ‘Is this love? Is this enough for me?’” That’s when I said, “Snap to that. Maybe that’s what this is about.” So she stepped on the microphone and just started riffing off of that concept after we talked for an hour about Hinge dates.

I’m not a singer. I feel like if they want lyrical or writing help, I’ll do my best but I think that you find the people who are best at what they do, and you just support them. So as a producer, that’s what I do with a vocalist or lyricist, and then I’m responsible for writing the rest of the music. Oftentimes, what will happen though, is I’ll send a track out and a singer will write to it, and then what they write is so good that I’ll rearrange or change the entire track to fit exactly with their vocal.

With Brittany, I have loved Alabama Shakes forever. When I was working at Another Planet, I saw them play the Fox, and it was life-changing for me. So all these years later, I made an edit of the Alabama Shakes track, “Don’t Wanna Fight.” I had been playing it out and really liked it but I said to my team that, since I wouldn’t get cleared to use the vocal, we should remove it and send the track around to get a different vocalist on it. Then my team said, “Actually, we know her manager. Let’s send it to her.”

So they did and she told me that she was starting to make dance music, in a way. So she said, “Let’s release this as a collab.” I had my mind blown by that. Then she was like, “I’ll let you release it if you do a remix for me.” So I did a remix for her newest album, which was an honor, and I got the approval to release this track that I’d made just because I love her voice and wanted to put it in my set.

Dotr concludes with an outro that references “Brokedown Palace.” How did that come about?

It’s my one nod on the album to the Dead. I had to have a nod. [Laughs.] During one of those days on the road, when I don’t see the sun or I’m getting back on an airplane, I will put on “Brokedown Palace” and when it gets to the line, “Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home,” I will start crying. I think that’s my way of processing how many places I’ve been over the past few years and how far away I’ve gone. It’s amazing how big my life has become. I wanted my life to be this big but, at the same time, I miss home.

That line is like a dagger in my heart, and it feels so good to cry when I listen to it. I know that song means so many things to so many people. I wish I could better explain why that one just lights my heart on fire, but what a line!