Americana Highways is hosting this video premiere of Tod Lippy’s version of the song “Adam” (words and music by Alexander Giannascoli). “Adam” appears on Lippy’s recently released EP Midterms. It was recorded and produced by Tod Lippy; mixed by Jeff Lipstein; and mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at Peerless Mastering in Boston.
“Adam” is Tod Lippy on vocals, guitars, and keyboards; and Serafim Smigelskiy on cello.
The video was created by Tod Lippy, incorporating footage from The Prelinger Archives (https://archive.org/details/prelinger) of the 1952 film “The Bully” (Centron Corporation, Public Domain). The video sheds light on the twisted dynamic involved in bullying, using sharp contrasting light and darkness in the repeated footage from the movie “The Bully,” as the song unfolds slowly and darkly over haunting low cello and the morose dreamy vocals by Lippy. Tod Lippy has a real knack for crafting the tragedy of the human inner dark side.
I have loved Alex G’s “Adam” since I first heard it a decade ago—it was a bonus track on his 2012 album Trick. The song is a beautiful/sad/creepy take on a bully’s obsession with his victim. It’s tragic when someone is so tied up in knots psychologically that they are compelled to torture the person they love, and my goal with the cover was to hone in on the sadness of that situation by reinterpreting the original track as a ballad with a cello riff by Serafim Smigelskiy (Tesla Quartet). The video takes one short sequence from a 1952 educational film called “The Bully” and then repeats it over and over as a sort of visual mantra, meant to evoke the obsessive nature of the abuser’s attachment to his victim. — Tod Lippy
For “Adam” single: https://songwhip.com/todlippy/adam. For Midterms EP: https://songwhip.com/todlippy/midterms