Ivy's Apartment Life at 25: A Forgotten Album Gets A Second Life

Plus the "claxonomy" of traffic, a reader poll, and the beautiful collision of aviation & music

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Welcome to the 5th issue of Liner Notes for 2023. Liner Notes is a paid segment of On Repeat.

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1997 seems like a lifetime ago, and in many ways, it was.

I didn’t know it then, but I spent that summer almost as a last hurrah; lots of road trips to nowhere around the west and a great swing through most of New England & the Mid-Atlantic.

It was a very specific moment before coming home and starting a job I thought I’d only have for a couple of years while figuring out what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Twenty-five years later, I still haven’t decided.

While I was bombing up and down I-95 that summer, Ivy was putting together the final touches on their Apartment Life record.

A follow-up to 1995’s Realistic, the trio of Andy Chase, Adam Schlesinger, and Dominique Durand didn’t know it then, but they were putting together what many would consider their best record.