Brian LoPiccolo: Stories

My younger brother David died in 2007. We were very close. In the months after David’s death I struggled to find purpose in almost anything I did. But I had a persisting urge to write songs. So out came Death Swallowed in Victory. It’s basically the culmination of everything that gave me hope during that time. I was pouring through the New Testament and the Psalms, being reminded of what I believed. The passages that gave me hope for David and hope for me – they all sort of found their way into my writing.
Initially this was for me. I still see it as a gift. God’s Spirit was helping me work through my grief. But our faith community carried the burden with us. The church was patient while my focus was on my own circumstances. So I wrote Death Swallowed as a hymn, that way the congregation could share it with me. When we sing the hymn now, it has personal meaning. Some folks tell me they’ve adopted portions of the hymn as their own. I’ve [...]

We had a lot of fun with this one.  It all began when I found the "atomic lead" patch in the keyboard at my office.  I remember becoming distracted from my work one day because I stumbled onto this sound.  I began fiddling with it - playing with arpeggios under a smokin' drum beat in the sound bank.  I remember Trip Beans banging on the wall (next office over) telling me to be quiet because he couldn't concentrate.  Oh well, here's the result.  The sound was always supposed to be big-eighties hard rock; over-produced, quantized, and plenty of spectacle.  
The song picks on my own subculture.  I don't think I know anyone who really believes what the lyrics portray - but the song serves as a gross caricature of hidden faith - and just as sad, homogenized faith.  There are traces of real fears here - but taken to the extreme for satire.  Again, we were having fun with this, but it does press a point.

This song was inspired by a poem my brother wrote in the late nineteen-nineties. He called it Stormy Monday.  He must have been seventeen or eighteen. I remember loving the imagery and the thought progression, so I've preserved these in the song Lighthouse. The song endured a few changes over the years, and John and I gave it some needed tweaking during recording. John's guitar work was the perfect touch that brought it to completion. The poem, and so the song, tugs on the tension between personal solace and self sacrifice, between monotony and mission. It contrasts my own heart with the heart of the Savior. At first glance, you might think the words stress moral performance, but no. The message strives to pull you out of your lethargy.

It's amusing now to think that this song was conceived with an autoharp at a picnic table. Honestly - we were visiting the Dabys a couple of summers ago. Josh was borrowing someone's autoharp. Being that I've had little interaction with the instrument, I was enjoying the feel and sound of the strums. We were sitting at the backyard picnic table, keeping a slight eye on the kids playing. As I strummed, Josh was whistling away on, well, a whistle I think, or an ethnic flute of some kind; I can't remember. But the haunting delicacy of the sound left a mark. And so a simple progression and melody developed, very simple actually, and sudden. It happened while the kids were playing away.
So it's hard to take credit for ideas that seem to drop out of the sky when you're not looking. But take advantage of those moments, right? The good Lord provides! John added some amazing touches to the original concept and helped us bring it to it's final expression.
While the music settled quickly, [...]

This track began several years back after I had been listening to a Van Morrison song. I don't think it sounds at all like Van Morrison now, but it started there. The music floated around my head and in my fingers for a few years. The words always come harder for me, so I have to wait until the right idea presents itself. I had a sudden image of my Uncle Joe Brucato's grapevine. The inside traycard of the CD features a photo (courtesy Edward Addeo) of the old man and his vine. The vine was one of the earliest but vivid images of my childhood. I can remember images of my parents, settings of the place where we lived in Canarsie, and I remember the grapevine on East 95th Street in Brooklyn. The garden and grapevine were nestled behind the old narrow house. There was a shaded yard on the house's right and an alley on the left. We used to chase each other through the alley. And so this became the picture, an illustration, of what is known as sanctification. Spiritual pruning.