Photo Credits: Graham Tolbert
After a long and exhausting tour for their most recent album, Bambi, which spanned 18 months and over 115 shows, Hippo Campus, the beloved indie pop outfit out of St. Paul, Minnesota, is taking a break. Worn out from the demanding nature of performing and travelling day in and day out, the band has decided to take 2020 off to get some well-deserved rest and to work on some of their own side projects. For front man Jake Luppen, this has provided the perfect opportunity to launch his solo project, Lupin, with the help of world-renowned producer, BJ Burton. As he told me on a phone call from the porch of his Minnesota home, “after we finished Bambi, I had a bunch of creative energy going on. A lot of things were changing in my life at that time and I wanted to keep writing music. Everyone else was pretty tired, so I decided to start writing for myself.” For the next year and a half, Luppen would write and record bits and pieces of this project on breaks from the Bambi tour and on the road, somehow gaining songwriting momentum through “one of the darkest points of [his] life.”
On October 9th, Jake Luppen will release his debut solo LP titled Lupin, “a fractured self-portrait” detailing the agonizing process of being torn apart and put back together again through some of the most trying experiences a 24-year-old can face. The project addresses the brutal end to a seven-plus year relationship, a diagnosis of a brain tumor that was at the time believed to be cancer or a rare form of Parkinson’s, and the struggles of self-sabotage while re-entering single life in the face of impending death, all happening simultaneously on a world tour with an internationally recognized band. “It’s basically just a journal of everything I was going through at that time,” he said, “writing a record is very therapeutic, it was kind of my way of figuring out how I was getting through these tough times.” From start to finish, the album follows the progression of his pain, his failed attempts to rebuild himself, and his eventual recovery, reflected in the artificially programmed production paired with his unique and impressive vocal range.
As Jake mentioned, “it's very intentional that the production sounds the way it does,” as he and BJ wanted to reflect the process of being torn apart and put back together by flipping the project upside down and breaking it up with thunderous drums and strange, manipulated sounds. Despite the obviously artificial production, Jake displays his mastery of the most intimate instrument he owns: his voice. “Obviously my voice is the instrument I know best, so it's easy to work with it and sample it.”
Luppen’s unique melodies over an extremely dynamic range really shine on tracks such as the intro track, “Harbor,” and the final track of the album, “NZ.” In both of these, he samples his voice and manipulates it into a synthesizer, essentially layering his voice as if it were an instrument under his cleaner vocal track. On tracks like “Murderer,” one of two he released earlier this month, Jake shows an immense amount of growth as a songwriter from his work with Hippo Campus. As the passion and pain from the crumbling relationship bleed into his lyrics, his songwriting process and style shifts from the vaguer and more general to the specific, personal details of his own life. As he sings “I put you in a box on the floor of my closet last Thursday,” he recounts the moment in which he finally puts an end to his struggling relationship, thinking about his fading role in his partner’s life as he repeats “and I’ll fade away like I meant nothing at all.” In this track in particular, Luppen’s powerful and emotional vocals evoke the feeling of heartbreak within the chest of every listener.
In contrast to the direct lyrical approach to “Murderer,” the second piece of this month’s two-part installment, “Vampire,” takes a more abstract angle to address the self-sabotage that comes with being thrown into single life while facing one’s own mortality. While the lyrics align with a regrettable one night stand: “do you want me to come back to your room / just lie to me I’ll lie to you / I think the jig will be up soon / but can it wait till the morning,” Luppen still suggests the fleeting and pointless nature of life which he felt so strongly at the time. The song was written around the time of his diagnosis, “that was around the time we played Bonnaroo, so I was playing the biggest show I had ever played in my life while I was under the impression that I was dying,” so he really did feel at the time that his “jig” would be up soon and any prospect of love or success was ultimately a lie as he would not live long enough to see it through to fruition, hoping it would last just long enough for a brief, transitory sense of fulfillment. The alignment of all of these unfortunate events created “a very strange dichotomy of being thrown into single life while also thinking that I might have a terminal illness.” This interior confusion and frustration are reflected with the fragmented nature of the track, broken up by programmed drums and artificial sounds.
It is no easy task for an artist to allow this amount of openness and vulnerability to appear in their work, but Jake Luppen has done so successfully, using the writing process as an opportunity to address the issues of his personal life, grow through the record, and come out on the other side better for it: “at the end of the day, I am thankful for all those experiences because I learned so much from all of them. In the process of making the record, I feel like I learned so much more about myself.” In this project, we see the full progression of Jack Luppen, from the sweeping synthesizers and melodic admission that his life is in shambles of “Harbor,” through the thunderous recurring artificial drums that continuously disrupt the narrative, to the beautifully fitting final track, “NZ,” where Jake “waves goodbye to that time in his life.” While the project was an extremely important path to self-discovery for Jake Luppen, it will also serve as a beacon of hope to others sharing the same feeling of hopelessness. In Lupin, Jake Luppen demonstrates how the seemingly shattered pieces of a life can be therapeutically patched together in the form of artificial sound bites and synthesized melodies to create a beautiful mosaic, a fractured self-portrait from a difficult period of time now passed.
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