Listening to Super Ego, the upcoming new EP from Jacob Lampman’s Ego Death, it’s pretty clear the types of music the band is into. I immediately picked up notes of jazz greats like Django Reinhardt and Joe Pass, as well as classic rockers like Traffic and Pink Floyd.
“Those were bands that were extremely formative for me when I was in college,” said Lampman. “If you've been to college, you've probably turned off all the lights in your room and listened to Pink Floyd for an hour and a half at some point. Yeah, that's actually Music 101.”
The other thing you notice is the band’s name, which came out of a conversation Lampman had with his friend and frequent musical collaborator, Joel Sires.
“I was sitting on my couch at about seven or eight in the morning and I was experiencing, I guess what you would call an ‘ego death' at the time,” said Lampman. “I was crying and I was like, 'you know when you just feel like everything's happening and you just can't explain it?' And I was kind of really gushing to him and he goes, ‘This is great, this is awesome, (but) you need to stop. I'm at work, but you should call your band Ego Death. I gotta go.'”
Lampman has been playing guitar around the Waterloo-Cedar Falls area for years. He’s been the guitarist in Sires’ band and has also played with David Lee Paul, Rush Cleveland and others. During his time as a student at the University of Northern Iowa, he met Jake Giddens, now the lead guitarist for Ego Death, and Hannah Carr-Murphy, who plays flute. Carr-Murphy left the area for a while, but Lampman and Giddens began their musical partnership almost right away.
“I met Jacob my freshman year of college because I went to Bob's way too much,” said Giddens, referring to the now-closed Bob’s Guitars in Cedar Falls. “We ended up jamming, and then pretty much did it enough that we became attached at the hip.”
Giddens ended up working at Bob’s for a time, and discovered that Lampman had been working on original music in a unique way: it was being used as the entrance music for customers visiting the store.
“They were things that he would play as a kind of hold music between things happening at the shop,” said Giddens. “So I had heard a few of them before I even realized there were supposed to be vocals, or that they were going to be songs, until he started showing me stems. I was like, ‘Oh, it's a thing. It's like a real thing!’”
For Lampman, bringing in other musicians made all the difference. “Trying to be a one-man band and playing all the parts didn't turn out to be what I wanted from the project. When my friends are extremely talented music school graduates, it made it a lot easier to get the songs to turn out,” he said.
One of those friends was Carr-Murphy, who had returned to the area in 2024. “I came back and I was like, ‘I need friends,’” she said. “And I started showing up to gigs that (Jacob) would be playing with Joel Sires, or with another band that he and Jake were in. And we just started hanging out again and he was like, ‘You still play that flute?’”
The band released a full-length album last September and then began work on the upcoming Super Ego EP. It’s the first set of songs written with the full band in mind. Lampman specifically refers to Giddens and Carr-Murphy as the “left hand man and right hand woman” of the group.
“It was happenstance that my close friends played a guitar and a melody instrument, because it freed me up to play just the rhythm and the bass, and then Jake could take the solos,” said Lampman. “I trust Jake as a soloist to do what I would hope I could do. And then Hannah plays it by the rule book so well that we had someone who's grounded when we were trying to play the songs the same way over and over.”
“We've played together long enough that I didn't really have to try hard on any of the parts to get at least something that appealed to (Lampman), even if it wasn't what he was thinking,” said Giddens. “Most of the time, my first idea is the one that lands.”
“I came from a really classical background and a little bit of folk music as well. So all of this was very different for me, very new for me genre wise,” said Carr-Murphy. “I was scared, but I think Jacob was a really supportive person. He was just excited for me to get better because there was a learning curve for a classical player.”
“Jake and Hannah couldn't be further apart in terms of how they approach the music, but it felt like I was a great bridge between that,” said Lampman. “I needed someone who could play a melody with a lot of detail and consistently, and then I needed somebody to bring the kind of improvisation and the creative guitar playing that I couldn't do all of at the same time.”
The new single, “Sore Eyes,” from the Super Ego EP is streaming now, along with the previous full-length album. Currently, anyone wanting to support the band financially has an unconventional option. Instead of the traditional t-shirts, stickers or physical CDs, Jacob Lampman’s Ego Death is selling — hot sauce. There are two flavors: mango habanero and blueberry lemon cayenne. Both are delicious, and both are available at Ego Death shows or at Hansen’s Dairy locations.
“I tell a lot of people that we're actually a lot like the California Raisins,” said Lampman. “Because we simply exist to sell this product. That is a joke, but the hot sauce has become part of the identity (of the band).”
You can check out the music, and buy some hot sauce, at the official Super Ego release party that happens on Saturday at Octopus College Hill in Cedar Falls. The third annual Dog Daze Festival, hosted and curated by Lampman, starts at 8 p.m. with a $10 cover. Joel Sires will also be performing, along with fellow Iowa singer-songwriter Todd Partridge, who had high praise for Lampman’s music on Facebook about a week ago.
“(It’s) like a dreamcore movie soundtrack where the main character inadvertently eats a pot brownie and starts spinning eclectic, jazz folk, and Americana records,” wrote Partridge. ”Trying to categorize this music, to pigeonhole in a genre, is like trying to staple grandma's green Jell-O with fruit and vegetables to the wall.”
Having listened to Super Ego, I can confirm this makes perfect sense. Hope to see you there!
