Rebecca Schiffman – The Mercenary

Out July 25, 2025, Rebecca Schiffman’s upcoming full-length, Before The Future, is introspective and bookish.

It’s somewhat ironic that her new single, “The Mercenary,” sparked as a product of a book club assignment, and is the album’s most frolicsome moment.

It came to life while the New York City native – now based in Los Angeles – reflected on a novel as part of a songwriters’ reading group, and the digital reggae laced instrumental teems with playful brightness. “Hiding in their hotel rooms, feasting on the spoiled remains of their ambitions,” Schiffman sings over mallet-like synthesizer plucks and a shuffling beat in the second verse. “The Mercenary” is a technicolor exception to an album that typically favors earthier sonic hues.

On the the single, Schiffman shares: “A friend invited me to join a rare Los Angeles-occurrence of the Bushwick Book Club: a Brooklyn-based group where members not only read a book each month but write a song about it. The chosen book was Jonathan Ames’s neo-noir thriller, ‘You Were Never Really Here.’

I had already been performing the song solo for a while, and written that sitcom-like chorus guitar riff. The reggae feel was not introduced until the studio, I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but I would guess it was Luke and the rhythm section experimenting.

We started the recording by live tracking the band at Altamira Sound in Alhambra with Rob Shelton engineering. Luke Temple, producing, put on a beat on his triton synth for everyone to play along to – Kosta Galanopoulos on drums, Doug Stuart on bass, and Steve Marion on guitar – Steve played a certain melody with a certain guitar sound that I loved, it reminded me of Scritti Politti’s ‘Cupid & Psyche 85’ which is one of my all-time favorite albums.

This is my first time making one of my own music videos. It’s a collage of iPhone selfie footage of me singing, heavily cropped and edited scenes from the movie, and stock footage.”

#rebeccaschiffman