It’s no real surprise that the Chapin Sisters—Abigail and Lily—ended up playing music professionally. They come from a impressive family of musicians, including their father (Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Tom Chapin), uncle (late singer/songwriter Harry “Cat’s In The Cradle” Chapin) and grandfather (late jazz drummer Jim Chapin). In 2008, Abigail and Lily, along with half-sister Jessica Craven (daughter of horror director Wes Craven), released their debut, Lake Bottom LP, which came on the heels of the success the trio garnered with their cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Late last year, Craven left the band to care for her newborn daughter, so Abigail and Lily continued on as a duo, touring this summer as members of She & Him and, more importantly, recording their second Chapin Sisters album. Two (Lake Bottom) was cut at a family farm in New Jersey by Abigail and Lily with co-producers Jesse Lee (Gang Gang Dance) and Louie Stephens (Rooney), and it adds layers of electric guitars, keyboards, percussion and more to the duo’s patented acoustic, vocal-harmony-driven sound. The duo is currently in the middle of a U.S. tour supporting Two. The Chapin Sisters will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with them.
Lily: I read Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon a couple years ago, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the occult, the history of spiritualism in the West, the movement called theosophy and the roots of the “new age”—or anyone who wants to remember that every time period has its quacks and eccentrics! Even the age of “enlightenment.” This non-fiction story starts back in the 1800s, when the publishing of Darwin’s theory of natural selection set in motion a series of attempts to scientifically prove the existence of the afterlife. Celebrity psychics like the Fox sisters became a hot ticket as people lined up to communicate with family members who were deceased. What started as a way to reconcile spirituality with the rising secularism of science opened the doors for imitators and scam artists to swindle fancy ladies out of their pocket change and gain entrée into the drawing rooms of high society. Enter Madame Blavatsky, a bizarre character who used parlor tricks to make teacups disappear and caused magical letters (from mystics in the high mountains of Tibet) to materialize magically out of thin air in the most unlikely places (wherever she happened to be). “Theosophy” (as she and her partner Henry Steel Olcott named their cause) grew into an international movement, with star speakers including Annie Besant, who wrote a book called Parallelograms, which illustrates and describes the visible force fields created by human emotion (and later inspired a song and album by Linda Perhacs of the same name). Rudolf Steiner also dabbled in theosophy and was being groomed as a leader before he split off to found anthroposophy (my sister and I went to Waldorf school, so I found this part especially curious). Krishnamurti (a small child who Besant and her cohort Charles Webster Leadbeater “discovered” in India) was groomed to be and went on to become a famous spiritual teacher. Also, check out the book The Bostonians by Henry James (though it’s quite long, and not as compelling as The Portrait Of A Lady) if you want to get a fictional account of some similarly wild characters from that setting and time, with a feminist twist, although the main plot is devastatingly tragic and proves just how far the women’s movement still had to go.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6HCEErirMI
