Ali Lipman’s mom used to clip Dear Abby columns and leave them around the house when Ali was a teenager. The plan was to parent indirectly โ drop wisdom in through other people’s voices when the direct route wasn’t sticking. It mostly worked.
Decades later, that same instinct of looking sideways at someone else’s life advice to figure out your own is the foundation of “Place Memory,” the title track of Cape Crush’s debut album, out May 1 on Wanna Hear It Records and just days away as of this week.
The song spins out from a 2011 Dear Sugar column in The Rumpus called “The Ghost Ship that Didn’t Carry Us.” A reader writes in worried about whether they want to become a parent. Sugar’s reply pulls in Tomas Transtromer’s poem “The Blue House,” which carries this image of the life you didn’t choose floating off as a sister ship bound for a different route โ one you can only wave at from the shoreline.
That picture stuck. Lipman, who had her own kid young and made that exact call early, wasn’t writing about parenthood. She was writing about the shape of any decision that doesn’t come with a clean answer.
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“It talks about the choice we don’t make becoming a sister ship bound for a different route,” she says. “One that we can only wave at from the shoreline.”
So in the song, she imagines a day with a sister from that parallel universe. They fix up a house โ painted blue, naturally โ discuss Robert Frost (because once you’re in the poetry, you’re all the way in), and at the end the sister sails out to sea while Lipman stays earthbound. They wave at each other until the horizon takes over.
It never happened. That’s the whole point.
Lipman’s been collecting advice columns the way some people collect records. “I think I’ve come to enjoy them as a way to calibrate my own moral compass,” she says โ sometimes the language even tilts poetic in its own right. That’s how the Dear Sugar piece landed. And it’s basically how she ended up describing her own songwriting process:
“I’m often looking for catharsis within my process. I love writing songs that speak directly to my younger self or even as a rebuttal to my former frame of reference. In a way, perhaps I’m indirectly parenting myself by reflecting backwards with a fresh perspective and drawing closure that way.”
The title itself works the same way. “A Place Memory is a residual haunting, or the idea that a place can form energetic grooves that can be played back like a vinyl record,” Lipman says. “I chose that as the name for the title track and the record, not because I’m spiritual or vastly interested in the paranormal, but because I love it as a metaphor for how we store our personal life lessons.”
Which lines up neatly with how the album actually got built. “Place Memory” the song closes with a crowd chant โ three hundred-plus voices yelling “Co-dy! Co-dy! Co-dy!” โ recorded live at Salem’s Bit Bar in late 2024. That was Cody Rico’s final show with the band; he stepped back from drumming for health reasons, and Mike O’Toole came in to take over. Rico’s drum tracks across the album are his last recorded work, and the chant was Cape Crush’s way of folding him into the record in a way press copy can’t really capture.
“Over 300 people came out, and many of them traveled quite far to get there,” Lipman says. “It was a massive showing of love for Cody, and his retirement from drumming. It always makes me smile to hear it.”
That kind of live-room residue runs through more than one song. There’s a track called “Sunny & Boone” from Cape Crush’s 2023 EP San Souci where Lipman sings a line about calling someone up to apologize for clinging to something they were barely part of, and somewhere along the way crowds started yelling “WHY?” in the gap between phrases. It became the best part of the live set.
“It’s my favorite part of our live set now because of how participatory it is,” she says. The song basically rewrote itself through being played.
The community thread goes deeper than crowd participation. Lipman is treasurer and co-founder of MOON, an all-ages community music org in Salem, Massachusetts, dedicated to expanding underground music access in the area. The “Place Memory” video was filmed at Moon Base One, the room MOON runs.
“These spaces are critical for fostering a creative economy, up-and-coming talent, and providing ever-disappearing third spaces.” The album’s guest list reads like a friends-of-the-room roll call too: Sam Johnson of Choke Up shows up on additional vocals for “Place Memory” itself, plus contributions across the record from Walker Bristol of Good June, Patrick DeWitt of Tortilla Katour, Tom Stevens of Oldsoul, and Zachary Glennon of Happy Just to See You. “Group singing and samples that bring the community and live setting into our songs,” Lipman says. “So while community is less present as a narrative theme, it persists within the arrangement of our songs.”
“Place Memory” the song was the last one written for the album. Lipman, James Christopher on guitar, Jake Letizia on bass, and Cody Rico wrote it together; Zach Weeks recorded and produced it at God City Studio in Salem, also handling auxiliary percussion. It’s also Lipman’s pick for favorite track on the record, for unexpected reasons. “I really love the chromatic pre-chorus with the secondary dominants (nerd alert!), and the acoustic chorus before the gang sing-along at the end. I think from an arrangement standpoint, it might be my favorite of our songs.”
If anyone’s keeping score, that’s a power-emo song built around music theory, four poets, an indirect tribute to a retiring drummer, a community space, and a metaphor about haunted houses. Ask Lipman to pick one song that defines what Cape Crush sounds like and this is the one she’d hand over. “It’s a driving power-pop song with a big sing-along chorus. It’s got big guitars, big vocal harmonies, and a big group-sing at the end. If someone asked what we sound like and I could only show them one song, it would be this one.”
“Place Memory” lands a few years after the band’s 2023 debut EP San Souci, which Lipman describes as “home to some of my oldest songs, and the first songs that we ever played together as a band. We were still feeling out our sound.” In the gap, Cape Crush put out “Blank Wall” last summer and a winter triple-split with Good June and Impossible Dog, picked up a Boston Music Awards nomination for Punk/Hardcore Artist of the Year, and racked up festival slots from Pouzza Fest in Montreal to The Fest in Florida โ fifteen club shows over the year on top of all that.
The shift Lipman describes between San Souci and Place Memory is mostly about whose ear she’s writing for now. “I have been more interested in narrative storytelling and trying to bring that into the structure of a song. I have also been more interested in how to write for the band, rather than how to write an interesting song for me to sing on an acoustic guitar.”
The opening singles bear that out. January’s “Calm & Delivered” leaned on a memory of a stranger on a porch giving Lipman pointers on the absurd pressure women carry to stay emotionally regulated when nothing around them is. February’s “Place Memory” the single grew that thread out โ using the Dear Sugar column as a launching point for thinking about what happens to the lives we don’t choose. Both share Lipman’s habit of borrowing wisdom from other voices and rerouting it into her own.
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Cape Crush spent the singles cycle playing out โ late February at O’Brien’s Pub in Allston with See You at Rogers, MK Naomi, and Hedge, then The Shaskeen in New Hampshire in early March with Cozy Throne, Donaher, and Fun City Fan Club.
Lineup as of Place Memory: Lipman on guitar and vocals, James Christopher on guitar, Jake Letizia on bass, Mike O’Toole on drums.
Album artwork by Katie Scarlett. Out May 1 on digital, CD, and vinyl through Wanna Hear It Records.
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“The best thing about being in Cape Crush is getting to do something creative every week with our closest friends,” Lipman says. “The second best part of being in Cape Crush is the music community we’re part of. Nothing is more motivating and inspiring than being one band in a wave of so many great people and talented musicians.”
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