Bio : LP Giobbi

For each of the last several years, LP Giobbi has spent 300 days on the road, jet-setting between massive festival stages and crowded club floors, between intensive board meetings and cutting-edge studios. Her time at home has come only in incremental slivers, with two or three days that allow just enough space for laundry and repacking. LP Giobbi’s hectic schedule stems from the fact that she has become one of the world’s most interesting and important producers and DJs, a jazz-trained pianist who has not only become a remix powerhouse known for re-imaginings of her beloved Grateful Dead and Taylor Swift but also a song builder with unerring senses of momentum and melody that define her own original pieces. 

She too runs Femme House, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that advocates for gender inclusion and equity in the electronic world, and Yes Yes Yes, her pantheistic record label that recognizes few artistic bounds. The global music director for W Hotels and a wilderness enthusiast who sometimes tours in an Airstream, LP Giobbi seems like a perpetual motion machine. Still, the lifestyle is a far cry from her childhood in the Oregon woods, raised by two devoted Deadheads in a very close family of four. Life on the road is a luxury, of course; she pines, though, for the stability and intimacy of home. 

Dotr—her kinetic and thoughtful second album—is an attempt to capture some semblance of home while in motion, to create a 54-minute musical world that radiates the comfort and warmth that the luckiest of us have found in anything. Seamlessly built from candid recordings of friends and mentors, vocal lines from peers and heroes, and melodies that feel alternately like parasailing or stargazing, Dotr is both a celebration for what one has and a recognition of what one has lost. There are songs of love and reconciliation, hymns of grief and belief, and anthems of anxiety and ecstasy. LP knows that the industry move in her globetrotting world of bright lights and massive parties is of streaming singles, not anachronistic albums. But she had a story to tell about her life and knew that others might recognize and even share pieces of it. Named for the way she signed notes to her parents as a kid, Dotr begins in loss and then turns forward with hope for what comes next.

During a three-month span in 2023, as LP Giobbi’s star rose, she lost three crucial women in her story. First there was Patricia Lynn, the mother-in-law she had known for a dozen years before she died in March 2023. And then there was Carolyn Horn, her piano teacher since second grade and an early electronic music student at the University of Oregon. She taught LP not just what it was to play and compose but what it was to create without inhibition. Horn died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease in April. And, finally, there was Suse Millemann, a longtime friend of her parents who was the only professional artist she knew as a child and, so, a lodestar for turning artistic passion into a sustainable path. She also died of complications from Alzheimer’s in May.

This triumvirate of personal heroes are the tentpoles for Dotr, opening with a final birthday voicemail from Lynn before Sofi Tukker’s Sophie Hawley-Weld drifts in with a bittersweet melody, written as a birthday present for LP. The last piece Millemann ever wrote shapes the reflective mid-album interlude, a hint of “Stand by Me” giving it recognizable grace. And LP recorded one of her final conversations with Horn, a joyous discussion of composition and existence and whatever comes next. It undergirds “Carolyn,” a fireworks show of a finale that feels like an ode to chances unapologetically taken, to lives fully lived. It is pure exaltation, absolute energy. 

That is the feeling of Dotr at large, a record whose tentpoles may be those of grief but whose overall structure is one of reveling in being alive at all. She collaborates here, after all, with some of her favorite singers, turning their words and gifts into the cores of these tunes. She first fell for Brittany Howard, for instance, when Alabama Shakes performed more than a decade ago at Oakland’s Fox Theater, where LP was working. Partnering for this theatric, cascading version of the Shakes’ “Don’t Wanna Fight” was a dream for LP; the result feels like an epiphany, Howard’s processed voice rising above spirals of synth like a prayer delivered onto the dancefloor. And when LP learned that Danielle Ponder was indeed a living soul singer and not some late sampled great after months of playing her collaboration with The Blessed Madonna and Joy Anonymous, she leapt at the opportunity to work with her. Based on Ponder’s true tales of Hinge folly, “Is This Love” is wonderfully cinematic disco, Ponder’s curling hook stretched over the rhythm with all the allure of a come-hither stare. 

LP will tell you in an instant that her favorite band ever is Portugal. the Man. That’s singer John Gurley sashaying over the swollen keyboards of “Bittersweet,” his falsetto rising through the Chic-like funk. And both the stuttering escapade “Been Such a Long Time” and the piano-anchored two-step “So Nice to Be in Love” are partnerships with Mascolo, a new artist she’s signed to Yes Yes Yes. Their collaborations sport the same heart-on-a-sleeve tendency that separates LP Giobbi’s best work from that of her peers. Even the instrumentals here—like the dizzying violin triumph “Succession” or the sample-based, blissful head-nodder “& Happiness”—feel romantic and grand, transmissions from a musician who recognizes what a gift it is to do any of this at all.

But still, all those shows and all that time away from the place LP calls her own can be a lot. These days, almost any time she gets on a plane after a set to shuttle to the next one, she puts on the studio take of the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace.” She cries. She’s not sure why, really, whether it’s happiness or sadness or simply a bit of processed disbelief about the momentum and direction her career has taken. But its lines about home and coming to rest amid life’s ceaseless grind always bring her back to the place that sent her into this world, even when she won’t see it again for weeks. It’s all here on LP Giobbi’s Dotr, which LP concludes by singing for the first time on record, using her own voice rather than that of friends and heroes: “Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come/Since I first left home.” This coda is a fitting testament to the whirlwind of her life, to one of the most exciting arcs and outlooks of anyone making electronic music right now.

Dotr is the follow up to her debut, 2023’s Light Places, the album that earned her the title of DJ Mag’s Best Producer of 2023 and placed her among NPR’s Favorite New Musicians of 2023, Spotify RADAR’s Artists to Watch, Amazon’s Artists to Watch, and TIDAL’s Artists to Watch 2023. With 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify and 340M+ streams across platforms, LP Giobbi has graced massive festival stages — Coachella, Portola, Tomorrowland, Electric Forest, Kappa Futur, Arc Music Festival, Lost Village, Lollapalooza — and crowded club floors while touring with the likes of Mochakk, DJ Tennis, John Summit, Diplo, Dead & Co, Black Coffee, and frequent collaborator Sofi Tukker.