[Cover photo credit to Virgo Moon Media]
Musical duo Tipps and Obermiller focus on writing emotionally engaging songs with tight vocal and guitar harmonies. After ten years of marriage and handling life’s challenges, in 2022, Hilary Tipps and Steve Obermiller made the decision to fully commit to songwriting and performing. Since releasing their debut album in 2023, they’ve made live performance a big part of their lives. This has taken them from local stages in their hometown of Fort Worth, Texas to becoming touring artists playing listening rooms, house concerts and festivals across the country.
They’ve previously announced that they will be releasing their third album, Little-Kid Heart, on July 10th, 2026. They spent the previous two years writing, workshopping, performing, and re-writing dozens of songs to select these ten for this album. When it came time to record, they chose producer Taylor Tatsch (Maren Morris, The Droptines, Rich O’Toole) to take create an album that “evokes the beauty, pain, hope and joy that life brings.” Two tracks from the album, “Love Letter” and “Little-Kid Heart” are out now.
Today, we’re very pleased to premier the new album track “Gravity” here at Wildfire Music + News.
“Gravity” is a unique song both in sound and vocal delivery, and its lyrics are wide-ranging, including a scintillating blend of images that help us understand analogies between two beings who are pulled into relationship with each other by strong forces, but are certainly not a perfectly matched set of identical beings. It’s not quite an “opposites attract” situation, but something more nuanced, like human lives often are. Something expansive and interesting about the lyrics is that they could apply to just about any inter-personal relationship that’s close but encompasses differences, perhaps distances, and maybe even large swaths of time. While romantic relationships are probably the first thing to come to mind, there might be plenty of meat on the bone in this song to reflect on sibling relationships, parental relationships, or even best friends.
However, the song shakes off any easy interpretations, and another key idea might be the importance of difference. For instance, as couples, or family-members, or friends, grow and change throughout their lives, they become even more individual and original. Everyone needs room to do that. Becoming more different in the eyes of the people we love is not a bad sign, it’s a sign of growth. The real test is whether there’s enough gravity in that relationship to keep pulling us back together. What if your best friend from college decides to become a portrait painter out of the blue? Do you support them in that? What if your bereaved parent realizes that they ought to go out with their high school sweetheart again, or someone they just met? How much understanding can you bring to their development as people? This is summed up in the chorus lines “I don’t belong to you, You don’t belong to me.” Ownership is not relationship.
The vocal delivery of the song from Hilary Tipps is not at all predictable and brings the song a lot of emotional nuance, toeing that line between pain, heartbreak, acceptance, hope, and even determination. When it comes down to it, the vocals feel like a tribute to speaking one’s truth. How are you really feeling? Are you able to communicate that to the person you feel that way about? How would they receive it? The song opens in a beautiful, melodic way, putting strings forward, but those then retreat to leave room for the story in the song, returning for reflective interludes. A third movement in he song brings in a duet with Steve Obermiller that adds dimension, and possibly a little hint of positivity, as both parties make self-defining statements. If we can talk about ourselves to others, surely that’s a step forward in being known. The song musically weaves together two elements that have seemed separated and distant, and builds up a picture of important communication. The chorus and key line, “Thank God for gravity,”, speaks to the invisible ties that bind and enable intertwined stories to keep moving forward.
Tipps and Obermiller share about the track:
We wrote this as a conversation between the ocean and the moon—two forces pulling on each other without ever really belonging to one another. It’s about love that moves in cycles, coming close, pulling away, and finding its way back again. There’s a rhythm you can’t control but can learn to trust. In the end, it’s not about holding on—it’s about the dance itself.
For this new track “Gravity”, as well as on the album Little-Kid Heart, Hilary Tipps provides acoustic guitar, and vocals, Steve Obermiller provides acoustic guitar, electric guitar, MandoGuitar, and vocals, and Taylor Tatsch plays guitars, mandolin, bass, keys, drums, and percussion. Tatsch acted as Producer who handled engineer and mixing on the album, which was recorded at AudioStyles, and Todd Pipes handled mastering.
Little-Kid Heart is a record “about what we all carry—old wounds, quiet hopes, and the parts of ourselves that never quite grow up, no matter how much life asks us to.” This also includes the idea of identity, who we thought we’d be versus who we are now.
The idea of resilience looms large on the album, “not the loud, triumphant kind, but the quieter version that shows up day after day.” Tying it all together is the reality that no one really navigates life alone. There’s connection that enables us to keep going even when things don’t turn out exactly as we have planned them to be.
