Rebecca Schiffman announces Before the Future album, produced by Sasami, Chris Cohen & more
New album from Los Angeles-via-New York songwriter
Rebecca Schiffman
Announces new album, Before the Future
Due 25th July
Shares new single "Little Mr. Civility" - Watch the video here
Studio contributions from Sasami + members of Deerhoof, Woods, Perfume Genius, and more
Los Angeles can be an isolating city, but a strong musical community lingers between its sprawl of freeways. Today, Northeast Los Angeles-based songwriter Rebecca Schiffman announces her new album, Before the Future, which is out July 25, 2025. It will be released on cassette via Lost Sound Tapes, and digitally as a self-release.
The album is a product of the New York native settling into community in Southern California, resetting her mindset in the process. The record is aided by a cast of esteemed collaborators and producers, and finds Schiffman reconciling the push-pull of existence through the lens of prior mental health experiences.
Today, Schiffman also shares the lead single "Little Mr. Civility". It's inspired by her experience raising a toddler, including the confusing contradiction of having to teach loving lessons by saying no. "It’s so hard not to let you win / We want to give you everything / But it’s cry now or cry later / Don’t want a dictator so we need you to be / Little Mr. Civility," Schiffman sings over a shuffling beat and warm instrumental. Production contributions from Sasami help imbue the earthy track with a splash of futuristic coziness. "Little Mr. Civility" is accompanied by a touching video directed by Faryl Amadeus, which features footage of Schiffman and her son in colorful rooms and inviting outdoor spaces.
Rebecca Schiffman - "Little Mr. Civility"
YouTube: https://youtu.be/_Vq-NJIdNho?si=UNAc4ysSEUFaS1Cq
Streaming: https://lnk.to/beforethefuture
Album Preorder:
https://rebeccaschiffman.bandcamp.com
Limited Cassette:
https://lostsoundtapes.com/products/rebecca-schiffman-before-the-future-cassette-tape
On the the single, Schiffman shares: "When my son was two or three, it seemed like huge transitions were happening every week. I remember feeling like I was corrupting him when I had to explain that a toy on a bench at the playground 'belonged' to someone else and we couldn’t just take it. The song expresses misgivings about the large responsibility one bears bringing someone into the world, and resignation at having to try to shape them so they exist in society. The final chorus is a riff on the Jewish blessing for children - or rather, a riff on a riff - the original is gendered - if you have a boy you say - may you be like Ephraim and Menashe, and goes on from there - I love the simplicity and universality of the feminist poet/scholar Marcia Falk’s version: 'Be who you are and may you be blessed in all that you are.'
I had only one day to do two songs with producer Sasami Ashworth at Kyle (King Tuff)’s studio and I just brought in a rhythm section of Joshua Crumbly (bass) and Sam KS (drums) who had never played together before. I imagined we would add overdubs later but Sasami got them recording so many interesting interlocking parts, that we decided to let the track be primarily composed of layers of upright bass and drums/percussion which was further shaped by Jarvis Taveniere in mixing.
For the video, all I knew was I wanted my son to draw on something I would wear. I invited Faryl Amadeus, an old friend from New York who is now an LA-based filmmaker, to direct. Leading up to the shoot, my son lost his steam decorating the white suit, and I had to say 'definitely don’t draw any poop or vomit' which really got him going again. At 3:55 you can see a drawing in red of a bird pooping on my head. I wasn’t sure if I wanted my son in the video at all, but he was more enthusiastic about it than pretty much anything we’ve tried to get him into before."
More about Before the Future...
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.
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 (Detangler); Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Sam Evian, Vagabon); Zac Sokolow; Joshua Crumbly; 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.
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.”
