Photo of Ivy in 2025 by Michelle Shiers
One of the greatest joys of my past week was reacquainting myself with Ivy, the indie pop band formed in 1994 by multi-instrumentalist Andy Chase, singer Dominique Durand, and bassist Adam Schlesinger. Schlesinger was a musical polymath capable of composing bangers in every form imaginable, from the cheeky new wave send-ups of his main gig Fountains of Wayne to the bubblegum bliss of the theme from That Thing You Do! to playing with every genre under the sun as the main songwriter on the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Yet nothing else in his musical career belied the stunning work he, Chase, and Durand would conjure up in Ivy: take a scoop of Stereolab, add a hint of Belle & Sebastian, top it with Durand’s airy Parisian purr, and you get catchy indie rock tunes with a French-inspired kick that feels impressively “grown-up”…pop music for adults.
Ivy dropped five albums of originals plus a covers LP before going on hiatus in 2012. That hiatus seemed permanent when Schlesinger died unexpectedly in April 2020, among the first Americans to die of COVID-19. But as Chase and Durand dug through their vaults for material for Ivy’s recent expanded reissues and archival demo releases, they found a number of old demos for songs that were never completed. The pair worked with Ivy’s old touring keyboardist Bruce Driscoll to select a number of songs in which they had recordings of Schlesinger’s playing and flesh the songs out into the ten tracks that make up Traces of You.
You might expect an album cobbled together from old demos to be full of songs that were justified in being left on the cutting room floor, but that’s not the case here. Traces of You is a worthy addition to a catalog that’s already pretty much pure pop perfection, from the doo-doo-doos of the infectious album opener “The Midnight Hour” to the slinky groove of “Fragile People” to the jaunty horns of “Heartbreak.” Though Ivy wisely wanted to steer clear of making the album a eulogy, there is a layer of melancholy to many of the lyrics, a sort of grappling with the grief of having lost something important. This does not make it a dour record, but one full of life in all its complicated emotions. An excellent album, on par with their very best. | Jason Green
