Rebecca Schiffman is an indie-pop songwriter who’s been on the scene for a couple decades already, making noise in New York in the early 2000s. But she gets deep into grown-up problems with her fantastic fourth album Before the Future. It’s a sly, candid sleeper of an album, where Schiffman sets out her life like a box of snapshots, while narrating the details in her dry, matter-of-fact deadpan voice.
A native Manhattan hipster kid relocated to L.A., she sings anxious vignettes about everyday life, whether it’s grief, romance, or parenting. But it all adds up to a charmer about careening through adulthood with a head full of memories that give you no peace — so your only option is to translate them into songs, to give them some place to call home.
You can hear that Schiffman learned her chops in the anti-folk scene of artists like Jeffrey Lewis or the Moldy Peaches, yet you can also hear the hushed intimacy of the Softies or the Marine Girls. She soars in the Liz Phair-like pop rush of “Bubble of Love,” a tale of 30-something lust where she bristles with neurotic self-doubt (“I thought my married friend would judge me/But she said you’re not just suited for monogamy”), yet shrugs, “When things go badly I can objectify you, like an ancient Roman sculpture in my room.”
She made the album with collaborators and guest producers like Deerhoof’s Chris Cohen, Perfume Genius’ Tim Carr, Sasami, and Luke Temple. The pick-to-click is “Little Mr. Civility,” one of the wittiest and warmest parenthood songs you’ll hear this year. Schiffman sings about the constant surprises of raising a toddler son, debating Lightning McQueen with a two-year old. “Let sunlight in through your long eyelashes,” she sings. “I wish I had long eyelashes too/It’s funny all my life I’ve been seeking the obliteration of meaning/But here you are, Little Mr. Civility.”
There’s also “Rudy’s Song,” a tender tribute to her late dog. It’s one of the many messy relationships on the album, as she recently explained to Rolling Stone. “I think I just grapple a lot with certain things, like having a dog,” Schiffman says. “I had never had a dog before I met my husband. And then suddenly I’m presented with all these ethical dilemmas, like where she’s sniffing something and I’m in a rush, but I can’t pull her—that’s interrupting reading for a dog or something.” That also applies to motherhood. “It’s same with having a kid — ‘uh-oh, I didn’t know I was going to have to think about explaining to him that this toy belongs to someone else.’ How is everybody dealing with this where I’m just having an internal moral crisis — ‘Oh my God, I am corrupting him with these things from our culture?’”
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Also a painter and jewelry artist, she brings that artisanal sensibility to her closely observed storytelling on Before the Future. The title tune is an intense 10-minute confession of bereavement, mourning a friend from her teenage years. “I was super into Jawbreaker,” she recalls. “The guy who ‘Before the Future’ is about — his favorite band was Jawbreaker, and he put them on a mix for me.” Other punk bands like Rancid, Operation Ivy, and the Clash inspired her to start writing her own songs as a kid. “I had this four-track, and I had SO much patience back then in high school,” she says. Rediscovering that focus as an adult was a bit different. “I had a six-month-old at home. I remember when we were first tracking, I would have to go home to breastfeed every two hours.”
“Beach Vacation” is a vibrant synth-pop reflection on childhood memories of herself as a morbid little girl, gazing out at the ocean and thinking about mortality, veering into early Depeche Mode territory as she sings, “Who knew that this was the most ‘now’ now would ever feel?” All over Before the Future, she keeps trying to figure out her obsessive need to second-guess herself and over-analyze every move she makes — like she sings in “Bubble of Love,” “Why do I poke at things that aren’t broken?” That’s a fair question. But that’s the only way great songs like these get written.