Forth Worth, Texas-based duo Tipps & Obermiller released their debut album, Love (and Other Mysteries), in March of 2023. Now they are readying their next album, MacGuffin, to arrive on April 12th, 2024. Though soon after meeting, Hilary Tipps and Steve Obermiller quickly fell in love and started their lives together, it took ten years of navigating life’s other life demands before they started writing songs together.
Today, we’re very pleased to debut one of their new tracks, “Wait”, on Wildfire Music + News. It will arrive for wide release on February 23rd, 2024.
The new song casts the moment of falling in love and the decisiveness that goes along with it in dramatic terms by delivering soul-baring truths from one potential lover to the other. While not everyone would have such deep, dark secrets to share, everyone can probably relate to the question, “How well do I really know this person?” or “Who are they, really?” On the other other hand, there are the gnawing doubts getting into a potentially serious relationship about one’s own worthiness and whether the other person would finds our own secrets forgivable. Those two realities are equally balanced in the first and second half of the song.
If the song had delivered easy answers, it wouldn’t be so interesting an exploration of relationships, and the romantic way in which it acknowledges connection, affection, and even adventurousness, counterbalances the fairly shocking contrasts between possibilities. Will this person stay and make the other person happy or shatter their happiness in future? If even they don’t know, why should they be trusted? From the other perspective, what if they find that they can’t love fully, or they can’t provide what the other person is looking for? In a song like this, two wrongs do seem to make a right. In fact, if neither party were worrying about the happiness and success of the relationship, that might be a far bigger warning sign.
While the track drops immediately into this line of questioning, the duet vocals bring an almost operatic flare to these inner thoughts. There’s a tension to vocal delivery that highlights the moment of decision, and even suggests a bit of panic to these realizations. But the music forms a bedrock to the emotional landscape of the song and seems almost supportive by comparison, accepting and allowing darker and lighter tones to coexist. That may even be a hint, along with the final lines, that love, in spite of its dangerous aspects, wins out in the adventure of life.
Steve Obermiller shares about the track:
Hilary always says she was the last one to know that we were dating. Inspired by a story told by songwriter Mary Gauthier when she said the words, “Wait, before you kiss me!” And so the song began.
On “Wait”, Hilary Tipps provides guitar and vocals, Steve Obermiller also provides guitar and vocals. Aden Bubeck plays bass and Trey Ware plays drums. Mark Randall engineered and mixed the track. It was Produced by Nick Tittle and mastered by Todd Pipes. It was recorded at Blackstone Recording Studio in Fort Worth, Texas. Regarding artwork, the single art concept was created by Hilary Tipps, Steve Obermiller, and Becky Byrd Spicer and the single artwork was created by Becky Byrd Spicer using Hilary Tipps’ doodles.
Though Tipps & Obermiller can fall into the Folk or Americana fold, the duo are intentionally not “genre – specific songwriters.” They write “about every aspect of life and living,” and use “every style of music to suit the song at hand.”
