Born in New York City during 1945 as the son of jazz drummer Jim Chapin, Tom Chapin is the younger brother of the late Harry Chapin. Following a pattern of regular musical performances with his siblings throughout adolescence, he later gained recognition alongside them on the Greenwich Village club circuit. The Chapin Brothers group came to an end in 1964 after Tom departed the United States, yet a decade afterward he resurfaced with the solo album Life Is Like That in 1976. Mother Earth appeared three years later as his initial foray into children’s recordings, an area that would occupy much of his subsequent output.
Chapin thereafter alternated between adult-oriented and family-friendly material while also spending five years as host of the television program Make a Wish. Subsequent releases include In the City of Mercy (1982), Family Tree (1988), Moonboat (1989), This Pretty Planet (1992), Billy the Squid (1992), Zag Zig (1994), and Common Ground (2001). His seventeenth album, Some Assembly Required, came out on Razor & Tie in 2005. Additional contributions to audiobooks earned him Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album for Children in 2001, 2002, and 2004.
Beginning in 2006, Chapin issued recordings on Sundance Records, which marked his seventieth birthday by releasing the folk collection 70 in 2015. Twelve of the album’s fourteen tracks were written or co-written by Chapin, while the remaining pair consisted of covers of songs by Pete Seeger and Steve Goodman; longtime associates Jon Cobert and Michael Mark supplied support, joined by guests that included bluesman Guy Davis, John Guth, daughters Lily and Abigail of the Chapin Sisters, and others. Threads, his twenty-fifth album and a collection of adult contemporary folk, followed in 2017.
