Chandler Travis Branches Out

ORLEANS – The making of Chandler Travis’ new album, “Branches Out,” was colored by loss, creative differences and an unprecedented global health pandemic. Yet through it all, the veteran Cape songwriter may have come out the other side with the best record of his long career.

 “This is very different from anything I’ve ever done before,” Travis said of the record, which was officially released July 24 on his own Iddy Biddy Records imprint.

 The origins of “Branches Out” stem back more than a decade. The project started as a musical that was to be penned by the late Cape playwright Gip Hoppe, founder of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.

 The musical was inspired by Hoppe’s years growing up in Wisconsin, where Travis said he befriended a farming couple. Together they invented a game where they would act out scenes inspired by articles they found in old National Geographic magazines.

 “The whole thing was about the transformative power of theater,” Travis said. “I just loved the original plot of it.”

 But Hoppe’s aphasia diagnosis left him unable to work further on the musical (he died in 2025). Travis also was left to deal with the loss of another close friend and engineer, leading he and his longtime collaborator, David Greenberger, to pivot away from their initial musical concept.

 “It was just trying to get everything perfect,” he said. “In part because of Gip’s health problems, we stopped working on it as a musical and started working on it as an album.”

 After taking a break from the project, Travis enlisted the help of his quartet, the Chandler Travis Three-O, as well as his Chandler Travis Philharmonic for the new record, which also includes appearances from Jennifer Kimball, Zoe Lewis and Patty Larkin. Some of the songs that make up “Branches Out” date as far back as 2015, while much of the record was recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

During the process of making the album, Travis also parted ways with Greenberger, with whom he has collaborated for more than 40 years. He said the two had creative differences as to what direction to take the new songs, with Greenberger pushing for a sparser approach.

“But I love this album,” Travis said. “That’s why I’ve stuck with it all these years.”
 With his band the Incredible Casuals (now the Invincible Casuals), Travis has long built a reputation as one of the Cape’s top purveyors of wild and loose rock and roll. But “Branches Out” hits differently, touching upon the themes of loss and aging that were foundational to the record’s original musical concept. “Every Letter Sent,” for instance, dials down the rock in favor of lush arrangements, allowing melodic piano and horns to take center stage.

“It’s a really straightforward ballad about yearning, really,” Travis said of the song. “A lot of people have picked up on it having sort of a John Lennon kind of vibe. It’s just a beautiful tune, and who would you rather be compared to than that? So it’s kind of nice.”

And while Travis and Greenberger have gone their separate ways, at least for now, “Branches Out” still bears some of the latter’s influence. Travis said the new record drew inspiration from “The Duplex Planet,” Greenberger’s acclaimed, long-running magazine centered upon the lives of residents of a Boston nursing home.

“He was in the habit of asking very strange questions,” Travis said of Greenberger. “My favorite was he asked a bunch of people ‘What do you prefer, coffee or meat?’ Very non-sequitur kind of stuff. But you got to know these people.

“When you read that magazine, you just think about people in a nursing home in a different way,” he continued. “You get to know them as individuals, and I hope this album has some of that same quality.”

Looking ahead, Travis is keeping busy with the Casuals, with whom he continues to make new music. And he also hasn’t ruled out revisiting the musical that first laid the groundwork for what became “Branches Out.”

“I’m just so happy to get some of these songs out,” he said of the new record. “I hope I get more of them out someday.”