Going the distance with Ivy

To feel an Ivy song is simplistic bliss. Dominique Durand is modestly elegant in her Parisian enunciations as the music wraps you in a blanket of imagination. Everything feels possible under their umbrella. Even in the group’s realism, there’s comfort in the trio’s pop aesthetic that makes serious topics easily digestible.

When I first gave Apartment Life a spin, I was immediately mesmerized. The album made anything feel so easy. From the album’s title to the cover and inner sleeve imagery, the attraction harked back to ‘90s New Order and Blur albums focused on the aesthetics of material culture, place, and the philosophy of the “good” life despite human fallacy and fragility.

If Apartment Life was the impression (and what an impression it made), then Long Distance was the show-off piece. Culturally speaking, this album made more of an impact, with their signature song, “Edge of the Ocean” to be included on the film “Shallow Hal” and American television programs “Roswell,” “Veronica Mars,” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” It was also used in ad campaigns for American Airlines and Holland America. Some fans thought of it as a sellout, but the royalties helped fuel their existence. What you cannot deny is how much people not just loved that song but fell in love with the album. Rob Tannenbaum for The New York Times added “Edge of the Ocean” to his 30 most essential songs.

Long Distance was real, going from a feeling of escapism with songs on Apartment Life like the hyper optimistic “The Best Thing,” “I’ve Got A Feeling,” and “Get Out of the City,” to “Undertow,” “Disappointed,” and “Worry About You.”

After Apartment Life, the band was plagued by various hardships. Epic Records dropped the band from their roster. The New York City studio where Ivy regularly recorded music burned down. But bassist Adam Schlesinger kept the boat from straying to produce a rediscovered approach to their style. Schlesinger was still the orchestrator of the band’s direction, pulling in elements of New Wave into the music and less about folly. But with everything pointing to Schlesinger—a prolific songwriter who also enjoyed success in Fountains of Wayne—the album is really about the three coming together to form an entity going into the unknown. And that’s what made Ivy great. It was the comfort of knowing that Ivy was the sum of three people coming together to create mastery in music. Schlesinger went on to write songs for film, television, and Broadway. More than likely, there is something familiar in modern pop culture that Schlesinger touched. His death in 2020 from complications of COVID-19 sent emotional ripples in the music world.

From an external perspective, Long Distance is a way of processing during a time of uncertainty. Lyrically, it caters to being on the edge of the cliff and staring into the abyss. From the song’s motion, there is a shimmering beauty in Durand’s tone. The hooks that Schlesinger and Andy Chase wrote complemented each other. There is no other band that can replicate the moment that Ivy made. This reissue is only doing the world a favor by keeping the songs alive, be it through nostalgia or discovery.

With the reissue comes an incomplete song with Schlesinger and produced by Lloyd Cole. The band filled in the gaps, and we can now experience this Apartment Life-era song for the first time.

Chase writes about the discovery, “We put on one of the two 24 track reel-to-reel tapes we unearthed that had the title “Stupid Cat” scrawled across the outside of the box. This song started playing. It was so familiar to Dominique and I that we Shazam’d it, to see what it was called and which album of ours it was on. But when Shazam came up high and dry, we started remembering more and more of this song’s foggy, unresolved history. So, the master tape sat in our storage locker for the next 24 years, fully forgotten from our memories. After its reemergence, we had it transferred to digital, and I finally was able to do a proper mix of it in my studio in 2024. And yes, Lloyd is even playing some guitars on this song!”

Re-discovering this album and spending time again with it is a beautiful experience that feels like it was written for our world today. And even in the context of the song’s songwriting compared to their early material, it’s still escapism I will gladly embrace time and time again.

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