Ringdown was always going to do things a little bit differently. Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw weren’t interested in stillness as an artform – nor were they concerned with passing trends or fading aesthetics. By exploring the endless concept of possibility, they tapped into a creativity that spread like wildfire through their collective subconscious. They broached electro-pop’s radiant hues through a cinematic filter that favors measured catharsis over needless staginess. Their work is honest, intense, and completely subsuming in its sense of transition and movement.
On their debut album, Lady on the Bike, Shaw and Parpan explore these in-between spaces, these moments that linger like smoke in our minds, memories that color the histories we share with one another. It’s pop music for people that find infinity in the curve of a whelk shell or that fall heedlessly into the oblivion of a single musical note. Less dancefloor instigator than intellectual adjudicator, Lady on the Bike is a work of pristine intent, designed to burrow beneath our preconceptions and connect with neurons and synapses we thought were long since extinguished.
“I’ve thought for years about making a solo record that is in a more electro-pop vein,” explains Shaw, “but didn’t have the courage. Danni Lee finally brought that out of me, and I wouldn’t have taken this step if it weren’t for her. Ringdown is where I experiment with so many things I’ve wanted to try. I’ve also learned that being in a band and making your own record is much harder than playing a Mozart sonata and I will absolutely die on that hill.”
“I hope this album helps people feel whatever they need to feel,” Parpan says. “That when they listen to ‘Reckoning,’ they will consider bravely sending it to someone they love. That when they listen to ‘Two-Step,’ they will feel like dancing. That when they listen to ‘Run,’ they will feel inspired to fight for their rights, especially over the next four years.”
Recently, Shaw and Parpan sat down to explain and deconstruct the songs that inhabit the world of Lady on the Bike, crafting a conversation wherein they offer insight and backstory for each track. Read below as they expose the work and meaning behind the album’s incorporeal architecture.
- “The Mess”
Danni Lee Parpan: “‘The Mess’ has an opening sound that we’re in love with and wanted to open the record with. It’s a kind of cosmic swirling alien-landing black-holes-merging disco-ball-spinning gorgeous mess of a sound – the perfect welcome mat that says “hi, come in, welcome to our home, would you like a bowl of fruity pebbles? They’re gluten free!’ The TLDR is this song is about a time in my life when I really felt like I wasn’t being heard.”
Caroline Shaw: “I like how this song begins in chaos and ends a vacuum. We’re always trying to put the whole universe into our music and then take it away. Thanks to Aaron K Peterson for guiding this song into the right sonic realm.”
- “I Won’t Go”
Parpan: “Something we often talk about is whether or not multiple realities exist and if we find each other every time. It’s a deeply sad thought to think that we may exist in another timeline but we aren’t together. There is a really vulnerable and juicy sweetness to the way Caroline sings, and as the lyrics were happening, I knew they had to be sung in her voice.”
Shaw: “I recorded my vocals for ‘I Won’t Go’ right before the 2024 election, and while I interpret the song as being about this tragic imagined world in which two lovers never meet (which is sort of sweet I guess?), for me it also became about fighting against these relentless seemingly impossible odds in order to make the kind, humane, loving world that you want to live in. Like, ‘I am straining to find you, but I can’t hear you through the noise. Mute the damn click track’.”
- “My Turn”
Parpan: “I wrote the first verse of this song on tenor ukulele years ago, but it never felt quite right. So we resurrected it, and together, made it into what it is now. Our producer, Aaron, really knocked it out of the park on this one. For me, this song is about imposter syndrome. The track production became almost maniacal and when I’m singing it, I feel like I’m in a battle between my inner critic and my higher self!”
Shaw: “On another level, it’s about facing things you know need to change. And reminding yourself to stop sitting on your hands and do something. I loved the color of these two synth lines dancing around each other at different speeds, with a sort of odd rising chord progression (that we then reversed into a more delicious thing). And I like the sound of the gorgeous piano we recorded at the Muziekgebouw, just kinda pummeling through the center of the song like a thought you can’t get rid of in the middle of the night.”
- “Run”
Shaw: “‘Run’ channels rage about events and forces around us – the recent election, Supreme Court decisions rolling back civil rights, the rising oligarchy and patriarchy, the experience of being queer women now, and and and. At first I thought of the lyric ‘run’ as implying ‘away’, but now I think of it as running toward, ready to fight. (Or maybe running for office. Run! Get in there!)”
Parpan: “To us, this song is an anthem. It feels like a battle cry. It feels like The Handmaid’s Tale meets the US women’s national soccer team taking the field. Right now, more than ever, we need to be fueled to keep fighting for our rights. We hope ‘Run’ will help people feel inspired to stand up and fight for not only their own rights, but for their neighbors and fellow community members as well–especially over the next four years.”
- “Old Noir”
Shaw: “I recorded a long chord progression as an outro after ‘Run’, then Aaron and I each recorded several improvised layers over top. Then we took away the underlying chords and just let things float and drift for a while. (I never met a palimpsest I didn’t like.)”
Parpan: “I think of ‘Old Noir’ as a cool down after a workout! Coming off of ‘Run’, ‘Old Noir’ sort of floats down and around like watching a feather fall from the top of a skyscraper and landing right at your feet. It brings my heart rate back to a steady pace to be able to consume the following tracks.”
- “Teach Me”
Shaw: “The chords and lyrics for this song were written separately in two entirely different lifetimes and places, before Danni Lee and I even knew each other existed.”
Parpan: “This song was written from a round of ‘Voice Memo Roulette’ – a game Caroline and I play where you get to quickly scroll through the other person’s voice memos with your eyes closed, landing on one, and then you get to blindly send it to yourself. During this game, I received a voice memo of Caroline playing around with the chords inspired by a Hayden quartet and I thought they fit perfectly with some lyrics I had awkwardly sung into a voice memo on my own phone at around the same time she recorded hers – way back in 2017.”
- “Ghost” (feat. Sō Percussion)
Shaw: “The song explores the loneliness of living in a world where we have the ability to immediately reach anyone anywhere, yet we are rarely shown authenticity or experiencing true connection. A previous version of ‘Ghost’ was released in 2024 and we knew we wanted to include it on the full-length album, but we had also always dreamed of doing a version with Sō Percussion, so we decided to create this version for the record.”
Parpan: “Caroline has been collaborating with Sō for years and Ringdown was featured on their (now Grammy-winning!) collaborative album, Rectangles and Circumstance. We’ve been touring on and off with Sō since, and they feel more like our brothers at this point. If you need help with homework or navigating something difficult in life, you go to Adam. If you want to figure out the best way to store your gear or learn something new about your computer, you go to Eric. If you are being bullied and you need someone to stick up for you, you’re gonna wanna call Josh. If you need to look really cool or want relationship advice, you call Jason. And if you need literally anything ever or just a friend, we know they would all four equally be there for us in a flash.”
- “Reckoning”
Shaw: “‘Reckoning’ is the first song we wrote together. It’s an unabashedly heart-on-sleeve love song.”
Parpan: “The original chords were written on a funnily tuned electric mandola in my old tiny apartment above the Alberta Co-Op in Portland, OR. I hope that when people listen to ‘Reckoning’, they will consider bravely sending it to someone they love.
- “Crazy”
Parpan: “I grew up listening to Patsy Cline’s version of ‘Crazy’, and it’s also my mom’s go-to karaoke song. It’s a heartbreaking song and for me, a commentary on how women are often made to feel like our feelings aren’t valid and we are overreacting. Belting this song is therapy for every time a woman has been called crazy for expressing her feelings!”
Shaw: “The opening samples come from a bunch of archival material I’ve loved over the years, mixed with new bits recorded in the studio. The collage changes every time when we perform it live. I was in Winchester, Virginia, for a gig a couple years ago and I walked by a house that said ‘home of Patsy Cline’. I pulled up her music and kept walking around the neighborhood, crying to the sound of her voice. I didn’t know much about her life, but her voice spoke to me. ‘Crazy’ in particular is one of my favorite song species — crushing & devastating. I wanted to make the sound of that swirling, manic collection of memories and thoughts and glitches that are the relentless undercurrent of heartbreak.”
- “Emotional Absentee” (feat. New Body Electric)
Shaw: “New Body Electric is a band we love. We’ve played shows together a few times in Portland, OR, and became friends. The band is fronted by our wonderful sound engineer and co-producer Aaron K Peterson. His partner in both life and creative projects, Leah Vautar, is the drummer and also helped shape some of the sound of this album. Evan Smoker plays electric guitar and bass.”
Parpan: “We love the vibe of the music they make and when Leah and Aaron sent us a voice memo of an improvised drum pad and microKORG beat, we knew we wanted to turn it into this song. The original place-holder title was ‘A raccoon stole my backpack’, which I wanted to keep, but was out-voted four to one. The lyrics for this song were written about four years ago after dealing with a particularly emotionally absent human. The moral of this lyrical story is when someone shows you who they are, listen and when they tell you they’ve changed, run. It’s rare for me (and maybe most people?) to sit down and listen to an entire album from beginning to end—especially in the last few years where we have been programmed to only give about 15 seconds to something before moving on! New Body’s recent album captures my attention from track 1, through the flip to side B, and all the way til the end! This was one of the main reasons why we wanted to not only work with them on this entire record, but collaborate with them on a track. We feel really lucky to call them friends.”
- “Two-Step”
Shaw: “’Two-Step’ is about letting go of your inner critic and trusting your own intuition. It’s about forward momentum toward things that feel good. It’s about trusting that sometimes what may seem like a wrong turn could be the best route you’ve ever taken.”
Parpan: “Also dancing. It’s about dancing. ‘Two-Step’ was the first song I wrote the lyrics to that was from a perspective that wasn’t my own learned experience. It was really the gateway drug for me discovering that I could write about something more than just heartache.”
- “Thirst”
Shaw: “I like to joke that this is our cover of Brahms’ ‘Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major’. The piano part is sampled from two bars in the second movement that we heard together at a music festival in Finland.”
Parpan: “The chords just felt so modern to me. I asked Caroline to loop them and then we layered the first verse of lyrics, which I had written down years before but just never felt right paired with my tenor ukulele. They fit perfectly here, so the rest of this (love) song was written in the dark in the dressing room of Järvenpää Hall in Finland.”
- “Trigger Warning”
Parpan: “This song is one of the first songs Caroline wrote and shared with me and I literally couldn’t hear where words would fit – it haunted me for over a year. I channeled past relationships to finally find the right words. Before meeting Caroline, I had about a decade of terrible dates and toxic relationships, but at least they make for great lyrics!”
Shaw: “I am really glad ‘Trigger Warning’ isn’t about me! Haha.”
- “Could’ve Been”
Parpan: “Every time we are getting ready to leave our house in Portland, Caroline – who is always ready first and has to wait for me – will sit down at our old upright piano from 1924 and perform a score for my ‘process’. Sometimes it’s quippy and funny and musical theater-style, sometimes it’s very Caroline and deeply moving. On one particular day it was deeply moving and struck me so hard. I stopped getting ready and we played the chords several times and improvised some lyrics.”
Shaw: “We were 45 minutes late to where we were going, but we wrote something! This one always stabs me in the heart. The wondering, the yearning, the weird liminal space of beginning to begin to understand the scale of time that is your life. It’s direct, simple, cavernous.”
Lady on the Bike is out today on Nonesuch. You can order the album here. Follow the band on TikTok and Instagram.
