New York’s soft rock lone cowboy Harrison Lipton has released his sophomore album Between Us There Runs a Tether via Amuse. An album that almost never was, its origins trace back to a breakup in 2021 that then saw Lipton pack up all his belongings and leave LA to move back to New York heartbroken. Inspired by those few weeks of driving aimlessly cross-country, he returned to the upright piano in the living room of his family home in Connecticut, and in one take holding back tears, wrote the song “All For Granted.”
“This album is a snapshot of my late 20s,” Lipton shares. “Feeling down and out, feeling pressured to find the right person to be with, trying to figure out where to go from here, looking in the rearview mirror and seeing the trailing end of a rope connecting the dots between highs, lows, mistakes, heartbreak, joy. And then at the same time, looking forward and seeing that same rope stretching into the future with all the endless possibilities and realizing that I’m just at one point on that line, because Between Us There Runs a Tether.”
Recently, Lipton has built up his songwriting and producing credits for other artists including MICHELLE, Yot Club and Morning Silk. His growing experience as a collaborator informed and shaped the artistic process as he revisited his own music:
He said, “I, in turn, wanted my own project to obsess over and tweak ad infinitum, an outlet to express myself. My circumstances of broken relationships and self-defeat meshed with my growing interest in the paradigm of the down-and-out songwriter, the lone cowboy who lost everything, and propelled me toward leaning into my own take on the soft-rock sound of the late ‘70s. I had finally allowed myself the space to create a record that felt very, very me. This is the truest manifestation of my love for music, and I hope it serves as helping people recognize that this is what a Harrison Lipton song sounds like.”
The initial concept of the album saw the gut-wrenching “All For Granted” as the closing track, but as Lipton sat with his work, he realized that after surviving the emotional gauntlet of the previous few years, the LP needed a more accepting verdict.
“As soon as I wrote ‘The End Of The Line,’ I knew it was the proper album closer,” Lipton explains. “Taking the lyrical themes of the previous songs and giving new meaning to them, it’s a story about moving forward and turning the page. Only twice on the album do I sing the line ‘between us there runs a tether’: first, on ‘Tether,’ when it’s a wishful thought at maintaining connection, and then on ‘The End Of The Line,’ when it’s followed by ‘but I chose the open road / and I’m alone again.’ Also harkening back to ‘On My Own,’ the thought of being alone now is freeing, and at the end of the record I’m released from the aspect of the tether that was tying me down.”
As he artfully meanders through every stage of grief and recovery throughout, the album is tied together by a down-the-road perspective knowing he’s better off than he was when he first began.
