PRE-ORDER | REBECCA SCHIFFMAN "Before The Future" cassette tape

LST-137 REBECCA SCHIFFMAN "Before the Future" Cassette Tape

Rebecca Shiffman is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles via NYC. Her newest record, Before The Future, is set to release on July 25th, 2025. 

8 songs, 36 minutes, featuring contributions from Sasami, Chris Cohen, and more. 

Edition of 100 solid blue cassette shells with black printing, full color, double-sided artwork, in a clear norelco case. 

Included is a Bandcamp digital download code. 

Is pure feeling possible? Can we ever extricate ourselves from culture or do we need it to even think, let alone communicate with others? As a teenager, Rebecca Schiffman wished she could exist outside of culture to feel free from the constraints of principle and inhibition. Severe OCD, including diagnosed “moral perfectionism,” magnified the weight of these constraints and the urge to escape. She eventually came to two conclusions – the claustrophobic truth that no matter how hard you try, “there is always more culture to notice that you’ve previously taken for granted,” and the belief that shared values are what make life meaningful – in a good way. The gaps encountered in this push-and-pull of trying to coexist are where Rebecca Schiffman’s curiosity lies. On her fourth album Before the Future, Schiffman interrogates what it means to be a decent human and strives to step outside of herself to find balance. She invites collaboration, coloring these questions with nostalgia and hope to create an absorbing, humane gesture.

Before the Future is rooted in the openness and tenacity of a beginner’s mind. To build the album’s foundation, Schiffman channeled the focus she once enjoyed as a teenager making 4-track demos. She read productivity self-help books and worked on lyrics first thing in the morning to avoid the decision fatigue that would no doubt catch up with her as the day went on. The album was created like this: in pieces, with intention and patience.

A born-and-bred New Yorker, Before the Future is an album of Schiffman finally finding her musical home in Los Angeles. Schiffman invited Deerhoof’s Chris Cohen, Tim Carr (Perfume Genius, Hand Habits), SASAMI, and Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic) to collaborate with her as producers. She credits the demystifying and welcoming nature of these friends, and friends-of-friends, as a driving force in Before the Future’s sonic palette. The sound was shaped with help from LA-based players including Steve Marion (Delicate Steve); Gregory Uhlmann; Davin Givhan (Leon Bridges, Amen Dunes, Diana Gordon); Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Sam Evian, Vagabon); Zac Sokolow; Joshua Crumbly (Kamasi Washington); Sam KS (The War on Drugs, St. Vincent); Kosta Galanopoulos (Cassandra Jenkins); Doug Stuart (Luke Temple, Meerna); Clinton Patterson; Jay Israelson; and Emily Elkin (Damien Jurado, Angel Olsen). Mixed by Sean O’Brien (The National), Jarvis Taveniere (Woods) and Rob Shelton (Meerna, Shannon Lay), engineered by Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), Cohen, Carr, and Shelton, and mastered by Mike Nolte, Before the Future is a testament to community and receptivity.

For each of her previous three albums, Schiffman spent around ten days in a studio with a sole producer, often feeling anxious and rushed during the creative process. By contrast, Before the Future was recorded piecemeal, with Schiffman working first on two songs with Cohen who taught her to record and comp her own vocals––a task she would complete on her own for the rest of the album. This solitary process gave her unlimited time to experiment with layers of harmonies and backing vocals.

The seed of opener (and album namesake) "Before the Future" emerged during a grief meditation over the untimely passing of a childhood friend; the song tells the story of its own germination, using a bookended drone to invoke a blank stillness. “I had a moment of brightness / Thinking of light and nothing else,” Schiffman begins, but narrative, as always, returns. The instrumental was tracked live, and throughout the song’s almost 10-minute running time, Schiffman and her band explore the constant but always changing nature of bereavement. "Rudy’s Song," an ode to Schiffman’s beloved late dog, continues to tackle the difficulty of grief and co-existence. We love our companion animals, but we take for granted how much control we hold over them, and we’re not always capable of recognizing them for who they are. “I’m trying to hold on to the real her / Find what got lost in our invention,” Schiffman sings in the chorus, hinting at the off-the-mark identities we superimpose on each other. Inspired by Carol Jay Adams’s “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” Schiffman intentionally obscures the species of the subject, who might be mistaken for a constrained Victorian lady when she sings, “You were as wild as a well-bred girl could be.”

“Who knew that that was the most now now would ever feel?” Schiffman asks on the percolating, bass-driven "Beach Vacation." In spare, imagistic lyrics, Schiffman describes a childhood trip with her family at the age when our own interior monologue is just beginning to color and obscure the world we see around us.

After becoming a mother, Schiffman found herself once again at odds with the cultural norms that close in on us as we age. An exploration of the frequent, playful metamorphoses of her then two-year-old son, the scampering “Little Mr. Civility” (the album’s first single) explores the discomfort at having so much power to shape another human. “I felt uneasy about teaching him the arbitrary rules of our culture,” Schiffman says. These niceties – like the concept of personal property and the ever-shifting norms we call “good manners” – hang like a cloud over an already tricky path, evoked in the song with poignant strings and shuffling percussion. As her son has gotten older, Schiffman has gained a sense of clarity and balance. “Be who you are when as yourself each day you bloom anew” she sings, inspired by feminist Marcia Falk’s version of the Jewish blessing over children. “All my life I've been seeking the obliteration of meaning, but here you are, Little Mr. Civility” the song concludes, pointing to the un-asked for culture that shapes us but also to its necessity.

The album is a collage of varying shades and shapes, with the weight of time at its core. The sonic palette often belies its heavy subject matter, like in the bright indie-pop swells of "Bubble of Love." Pointing to the honeymoon phase in a relationship, both the expanse and the claustrophobia of this specific experience is mimicked with quick-step rhythms and swooning backing vocals. "The Mercenary"––a song created during a one-off stint in the Bushwick Book Club where members write a song based on the book they’ve read that month––grooves with balmy, funk-focused tones. Luke Temple spearheaded the sonic energy of the song, centering a Triton synth, amidst speckles of low-bellied keys, under sporadic, bright spots of Marion’s guitar.

Before the Future is an ode to staying open and aware. It traces the life of the mind from childhood to adulthood, expanding and compressing the layers upon layers of memories, experience, and perspective that fold in on themselves in a single person. On Before the Future, Schiffman finds balance in the seesaw between our limitations and the what-ifs, between our mind’s tendency to ruminate and rest. The album becomes a circle – while it opens with a drone that serves as a portal to the past – to a “sunlit afternoon’ – it closes with the moon, the same one we saw as children, which beckons us back to the present, however we are, with the repeated mantra “this is the now.” 

Credits
Rebecca Schiffman Songwriter (all songs); producer (1, 6, 7); vocals (all songs); vocal engineer (1-5, 8); vocal harmony arrangements (1, 3, 5-8); guitar (4, 5, 6, 7, 8); Moog (4); engineer, cello (6)
Tim Carr producer, engineer, drums, percussion (1)
Sasami Ashworth producer (2, 3); Moog (2); Wurlitzer (3)
Luke Temple producer (4, 5, 8); percussion (4, 8); guitar (5); synths (5, 8)
Chris Cohen producer, engineer, mixing, drums (6, 7); Nashville guitar (6); percussion (7)
Gregory Uhlmann bass (1)
Zac Sokolow guitar (1)
Davin Givhan guitar (1); bass (6, 7)
Oliver Hill strings, string arrangement (1)
Joshua Crumbly upright bass (2, 3)
Sam KS drums (2, 3); percussion (2)
Steve Marion guitar (3, 4, 5, 8)
Doug Stuart bass guitar (4, 5, 8)
Kosta Galanopoulos drums (4, 5, 8)
Emily Elkin cello (6)
Jay Israelson harpsichord, synth strings (6); vibraphone, piano (7)
Clinton Patterson trumpet (7)
Sean O'Brien mixing (1)
Kyle Thomas engineer (2, 3)
Jarvis Taveniere mixing (2, 3)
Rob Shelton engineer, mixing (4, 5, 8)
Jake Supple engineer (5, 8)
Mike Nolte mastering (all songs)
Giraffe Studios cover photo
CHIPS graphic design

Recorded at Altamira Sound in Alhambra, and at locations in Los Angeles and Pasadena