The early 1980s were “such a fertile time for New York,” Ted says. “I felt like I was a student by day and this creature of the night in these clubs. People wax poetic about that period because it really was unparalleled in many ways.”

Ted and Susan grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where both of their families were part of the city’s large Italian American community. “It wasn’t clear whether we were related and how we were related,” Ted says. “It was always this weird thing”—an early bit of kismet. The two were high-school friends and connected through a shared love of music, occasionally jamming together on the Farfisa organ at Susan’s house. Ted’s big album, then and now, was David Bowie’s Low (1977), the first release in the star’s so-called Berlin trilogy and a radical departure from his earlier, more traditional pop and rock songwriting and instrumentation. At first, he found Low’s strangeness off-putting—“I used to separate it and keep it in a different place than my other records,” he recalls—but in time, it became his creative lodestar. “All roads lead to David Bowie,” he says.

After high school, Susan enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, while Ted joined another hometown friend, John Dugdale (BFA 1983 Photography), in applying to SVA, but the two Ottavianos’ musical collaboration continued long-distance: When Susan formed a post-punk band with classmate Jade Lee, Ted contributed songwriting and the group’s “intentionally raunchy” name, Head Cheese. (“My father owned a deli,” he explains.)

Ted also wrote music on his own, occasionally bringing his musical efforts into his photo and art classes for critiques, where he found a receptive audience.

“They understood, in a weird way,” he says of his instructors and classmates. “Even though you had a major you were concentrating on, if you were going to exist in the current fabric, you had to be open to being ‘multimedia.’”

After graduating from PCA, Susan and Jade moved to New York City, starting Book of Love—named for the 1957 song by doo-wop group The Monotones—with Ted. He would become the group’s primary songwriter; he and Lee would play keyboards; Susan would sing. “I had this idea for a new sound,” he says—a more synth-based music, built with “simple and naïve” parts and lyrics that were “like nursery rhymes.” But it was not until Johnson was added as a third keyboardist a few months later that the band fully gelled.

“We were looking for a fourth member and I remember saying, ‘Lauren’s perfect for the band,’” Ted says. He and Johnson had gotten friendly through seeing each other in class and the clubs, and she was always interested in hearing about his music. “I think we just hit it off,” he recalls. “Lauren just radiates, and we just had so much in common in so many different ways.” But he didn’t know if she even played an instrument when he asked her to join. As it turned out, she didn’t.

Features

The SVA alumni of the synth-pop band The Book Of Love look back.