Zapruder Point’s Backyard Birds is many things. A meditation on memories made, lost, and regained. A document of the daily struggle between weariness and mindfulness. A tug-of-war between hope and the throwing up of hands. It is a celebration of holding fast, making one’s way, showing up, and coming around. 

The melodies range from the driving riff of the fight song “100X” to the sweetly melancholic “Must Have Forgotten.” “Again Again” interrupts the cheerful bounce of summer nostalgia with a wistful tone hinting at regret, blending them in the final lines. “Here Somewhere” barrels through a dozen ways of remembering even as the song trembles in the face of forgetting. And its reassurance that it’s gotta be here somewhere, evolves in the title song to ask “what’s in a name when it fades anyway?”

It is an album that rewards listening in order. Songs echo and connect; threads reemerge. The title of a song recalls an earlier lyric or predicts a later one. The losses (of words, connections, and nostalgic joys) in one song are recouped in another. Repeating phrases both lyrical and musical are nestled in unexpected corners reaching across songs in a way that reminds us of the persistence of connection.

Backyard Birds is an album that invites us to follow it past the surface of one who, in the words of “Up and Back,” is “suffering so well.” It reminds us of the dis-ease and disease that plagued 2019, 20, and 21. But it also urges us to wait on a patch of sun, to dive and to rise, and, in the closing song, to remember “the air that we happily share” – if not always, at least “for now.”

At the turn of the millennium, Dan Phillips created Zapruder Point, writing and recording under that band name for over 15 years in Chicago. Now in Cincinnati, Dan self-releases music and plays out as a solo act whenever he can. Dan's shared bills with Bill Fox, Jason Molina, Neal Francis, Bowerbirds, The Hiders, Shelley Short, The Rutabega, Anders Parker, Franklin Bruno, Canasta, Scrawl, Whitehorse, Coed Pageant, Flat Duo Jets, Terrible Parade, Earwig, and Benjamin Francis Leftwich.