Aaron Lipp has 'Nothing to Lose' 

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The road to musician Aaron Lipp’s home in Naples already felt remote and rural before it turned to dirt and narrowed to a single lane under a thick canopy of trees.

His house, a two-story number he began building from the ground up six years ago that doubles as a recording studio called Temple Cabin, was hard to spot on its perch on a steep hill in the middle of a forest.

But there was Lipp to greet me, looking every bit like an artist who lives in the woods, with his close-cropped beard and olive-toned clothing topped by a brimless fleece cap. Nearby, lumber lay about waiting to be turned into a larger studio.

“The setting absolutely has so much to do with the sounds that come out of here,” Lipp said. “Because all music is is emotion, vibe. When you listen to music, that’s all you’re getting from it.”

Born in Prattsburgh to a carpenter-musician and a nurse, the 32-year-old Lipp is among the preeminent roots musicians in the Finger Lakes, and is fresh off the release of a new solo album, “Nothing to Lose,” a collection of laid-back rock and folk that he called “probably the most original thing I’ve ever done.” It’s as close to a pop record as you’ll get from him.

“There are a lot of people who are going to listen to that, and it’s going to be not what they expected,” he said. “And that’s what I want.”
Lipp got his start as a teenager playing keyboards for Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, before carving out his own niche with the jamgrass band The Cabin Killers by combining bluegrass-style licks with rock ‘n’ roll drums.

Today, he plays bluegrass and folk with Bobby and Douglas Henrie and Mount Pleasant String Band, rockabilly with his band The Slack Tones, and roots music with Ben Haravitch and Dirty Blanket’s Max Flansburg as the Temple Cabin Band.

On Oct. 13, he is scheduled to play Bop Shop Records in Rochester with Southern singer-songwriter Ric Robertson.

Lipp is a multi-instrumentalist — he plays guitar, banjo, organ, fiddle, and drums — who doesn’t fit neatly into any conventional country-musician stereotype and tries like hell to avoid being pigeonholed into any one genre by playing with people’s expectations.

“I don’t even like the word ‘genre,’” Lipp said.
His studio is busy with 17 instruments and a full drum kit, and sound equipment that makes an audiophile jump for joy: high-fidelity boutique microphones from Schoeps and Stager, Tree Audio preamps, and even an old Concertone magnetic tape recorder.

“If you have a good sound at the source, and you put a nice microphone on it, you can't go wrong,” he said.

His goal with each recording, he said, is to capture everything as it is in the room — the emotion, the vibe — whether he is producing for himself or other musicians.

Haravitch, who met Lipp six years ago when he sought him out for banjo lessons, recalled Lipp’s approach to teaching as steering clear of mechanics and technique and focusing on harnessing the spirit of the music.

“He’s just sort of like the burner that moves the energy around in the stew, as the stew is cooking,” Haravitch said of Lipp’s place in the Finger Lakes music scene. “He’s like the flame beneath it all.”
Next to a futon in a far corner of Temple Cabin Studios is a bookshelf crowded with eclectic titles: “The World of Duke Ellington,” “The Art of Tim Burton," the autobiography “Scar Tissue” by Red Hot Chili Peppers’ frontman Anthony Kiedis, the photography book “American Music” by Annie Leibovitz, and “Stories of the Buddha.”

Given his library, Lipp’s musical influences aren’t surprising.

A metal head in his youth, he learned the guitar by playing along to songs by Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, and Green Day. Later he was turned onto classic ’60s rock and psychedelia through Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, and Jerry Garcia.

Eventually, he was bit by the bluegrass bug and delved into vintage country sounds and old-time music.
“I really enjoy breaking down barriers between, especially being someone who was so kind of obsessed with traditional styles for so long, but also making original music,” Lipp said.

“I mean, there is no end to making original music,” he went on. “There is no end, ever. We can only get better within ourselves.”

Daniel J. Kushner is CITY’s arts editor. He can be reached at [email protected].