Tag: jacob sharp

What Does Touring in 2023 Look Like for Most Working Music Creators?

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If you take recent touring industry revenue reports at face value, business is booming. 2022 was a record-setting year with an estimated $6.28 billion, up 37% from the pre-pandemic year 2019.

When the onion layers start to peel back though, noticeable is that $2.68 billion of that sizeable amount of 2022 touring money was from stadium shows. Also notable is that inflation is much higher than it was 3 years ago, pushing sums to new heights. The lion’s share of the money went to the top-grossing artists, and 2023 is predicted to be similar for those acts.

The data for the rest of the industry is not as robust. We do know that throughout the past few years, artists like Santigold, Belle and Sebastian, Black Pumas, and Animal Collective have opened up to their fans about the professional and personal costs of touring. Last year saw frequent cancellations of shows, tours, and in some cases like with Dr. Dog, the end of touring all together for some acts.

So what does touring in 2023 look like for most working music creators? The short answer is, that the road looks different to everyone. The longer answer takes a look at multiple perspectives. BGS spoke with artists and industry leaders to learn about the issues and potential solutions facing roots artists on the road this year.

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For the past two decades before the pandemic, live music was viewed as a sort of revenue redemption for music creators in light of the fact that the bottom fell out of the record business at the advent of downloadable and streamable music. For many working artists, this was a busy period of consistent touring. Jacob Sharp from the band Mipso shares what has become a common sentiment amongst touring artists, “For our band being on the road was a given. In a better time for touring, there was insatiable opportunity and demand, both where we had a following and where we didn’t. And there was an infrastructure that made sense then. But saying yes always locked us into a lifestyle and a business cycle we felt we couldn’t escape.”

Sharp says in the current touring landscape, “We are a band that has never been happier playing music together but are having frequent conversations about whether to break up due to the economics of the business. We know it has to involve less touring.”

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So what are the main issues negatively impacting the live music industry for roots and independent music creators?

Cost of touring and inflation

No doubt the current state of the economy is affecting the concert business with rising costs for fans and for touring artists. Label Manager of Single Lock Records and touring drummer for Cedric Burnside, Reed Watson, says, “Artists can’t afford it. Hotels are expensive, gas is expensive. Entertainment takes it on the chin when times are tight.”

Sharp puts a fine point on the economic cost versus reward saying, “It costs a lot more to be on the road between travel, flights, vehicles, hotels. Everything is so much more expensive. At the end of the tour we have less money in our pocket.”

Inconsistency of crowds

Before the pandemic, it was much easier to build a tour, a budget, and a future based on somewhat tried and true marketing formulas and audience engagement. During the pandemic, as venues started to open up, many had received pandemic aid to get artists back on stage and to get people in the doors. Not that this was an easy time for artists as they navigated cancellations due to illnesses and the rising costs of touring, but there was some cash to be had, and throngs of artists were out on the road again.

As the pandemic wore on and the aid money thinned, the crowds were not pouring back in as predicted. And even events that sold well didn’t necessarily translate to full houses as audiences were notoriously low day-of-show for many venues. This impacts merchandise sales, food and beverage, and parking for the bands and venues.

Reed Watson believes this continued unpredictability is largely now due to the current economic lay of the land saying, “The reason we are starting to see attendance crater is because money is tight right now. We are in this inflation moment and that is making more of an impact on touring than the pandemic currently.” Crowds are also buying tickets last minute which makes it hard to budget, market, and plan.

 

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Mental and physical health of artists, bands and crew

The stories of starving artists sleeping in vans on the road are romanticized and narrow in their telling of the difficulty level for the bands and crew enduring those hardships. And perhaps are only of remote interest to younger artists willing to risk their safety…and their backs. But for artists who have been touring for many years, traveling in discomfort for low yield and leaving behind their personal lives to do so is no longer an option they are willing to face. Recording artist Caitlin Rose shares, “I don’t want to tour needlessly. We could all tour and feel like crap for the first 10 years of our career, but it’s too tough now.”

Along the same lines, Reed Watson says, “I don’t believe in telling artists the only way they can tour is to sleep in their van. I also don’t believe in shaming artists who hold out until they can afford a hotel room and afford safety.”

Narrowing of live event opportunities for working musicians

In this era when so many independent venues and festivals are being swallowed up by conglomerates or shuttered, we have seen a general narrowing of traditionally viable opportunities for working musicians.

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And now that we’ve identified some of the underlying problems in the current industry, what are some potential solutions arising in 2023?

Creating an open dialogue with the audience

Since the pandemic, artists are seemingly having a more open dialogue with their audience about career and personal challenges than we’ve seen in the past. Reed Watson sees this is an overall plus for the industry saying, “I think it is the way of the world now for artists to be open and honest with fans. Fan bases for the most part are willing to take that ride with them. I think social media in general is very unhealthy. I think the impact on the business is ultimately not great. But seeing artists use it to their advantage and to do something good is great.”

Caitlin Rose says, “I think the complaining has become more productive to try and improve the discussion. Everyone can bitch now and that’s awesome, but people are actually trying to figure it out now. Priorities and guidelines are changing. What makes this worth it? I’m scared to do it again in a way that burns me out. I want to be happy.”

For Sharp and his band Mipso he says, “We want to set some boundaries and have a healthier balance with our working/touring life and our home life. Both financially, that is true for us, but really for our mental health, it will be easier to embrace and become a part of our lives.”

 

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Focusing on alternative revenue streams

Singer-songwriter Tift Merritt gave up touring before the pandemic to grow roots for her then 20-month-old daughter. She shares, “It was a very fraught and scary decision, but it ended up being really empowering for both us and my work. This is a situation that wrecks anxiety on a lot of women, how they are going to continue doing what they are doing. It is often a very lonely situation, and I’m glad that people are talking about it. I feel really proud of what my daughter and I have done and the decisions that we have made. It doesn’t mean I’m not a musician and an artist.”

Though this is not an economic reality for every artist, instead of touring, Merritt’s work has now shifted. “I’m no longer a road-based artist, I’m a project-based artist,” she says. Working on alternative revenue streams, she now focuses on her Substack called Nightcaps, as well as archival, historical, and site-specific music projects.

Stong independent venue coalition in NIVA

The National Independent Venue Association was founded in a moment of dire need during the pandemic to protect vital independent venues throughout the country and hit the ground running with impactful adovcacy work. It has found more raison d’etre in the wake of the emergency. Newly appointed as Executive Director of NIVA, Stephen Parker shared with BGS, “Aside from when venues had to be completely shuttered, running a venue or promoting shows was never harder than it was during 2022. The live music sector was back for some but challenging for all. With every act on the road simultaneously vying for ticket buyers, staffing shortages – both with the artists’ touring teams and the venues and festivals, and the rising costs of everything, the economics of the industry have never been more challenging. In 2023, my hope is that independent venues will continue forging a path toward recovery. While logistical and financial issues may continue to linger, independent venues remain committed to attracting staff, promoting and marketing shows in creative ways, and creating compelling and affordable environments that artists and fans want to show up for. NIVA is focused on helping them make that happen.”

 

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Pressure on conglomerates

Alongside the robust work that NIVA is taking on to protect independent venues, there is worldwide pressure zeroing in on Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In the wake of several public debacles in recent months, there are calls for investigations and legislation to curb the conglomerates’ questionable business tactics that leave both fans and artists with less choices and money.

Touring with less people

In an effort to trim costs, some artists are strategically focusing on more acoustic or solo sets, leaving band and crew behind for some dates. Caitlin Rose is opening up for Old 97’s on tour this year, and is planning on taking a full band on the road for a portion of the time, but will perform as a duo on the West Coast to lower the impact of tour costs.

Watson adds, “Artists are leaving bands behind and touring solo. It used to look like 80% band shows to 20% solo shows but is shifting to the opposite. That is what it will look like moving forward for a little bit until artists are paid more.”

Strategic routing and events

From residencies to regional and weekend tours, to corporate and brand events, artists are attempting to find ways to supplement income, lower costs, and cater to fans. For Mipso in today’s touring reality, Sharp says, “We are touring less and now we say no to many things that the younger band would have been quite happy to do. We see that as self-preservation. Each of these cities we play is a market and it is easy to oversaturate.”

Touring artist Nick Howard owns Bookable with his wife, Katelynn Silver Howard. The company connects artists to nonconventional local live events in Nashville like conferences, brand-sponsored events, and hotel bookings, providing opportunities for artists to make money in their region while not necessarily saturating the market.

Focusing on fan community and engagement

Building a live music career focused on building community and knowing one’s audience well is the focus of touring artists like Nick Howard, who has built a sizable following and touring career in Europe. He says that in the past few years, the saturation has made it more difficult to get people to come out to shows and says, “Social media following no longer translates to ticket sales.” To take out the middlemen and engage directly with his fans, he now rents out venues himself and uses a third-party ticket company. That way, he saves money on agent, ticket, and promoter fees. And by being in close contact with his fans, he says, “You know how big your audience is and work backward.”

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The overview of touring in 2023 is that there is no roadmap. It will be trial and error as the industry rebuilds itself — but the show will go on, as Reed Watson so positively reminds us. “Touring is the one thing that the internet can’t replicate. You cannot replicate getting in a room with live entertainers.”

This Short Film Shows How a Fishing Bet Led to ‘The Mandolin That Made Mipso’

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We’ve all heard the fishing tales about the one that got away. But a new short film titled The Mandolin That Made Mipso tells another story altogether. Directed and produced by filmmaker Taylor Sharp, the film explores how a father-son conversation on a North Carolina fishing pier charted the course of Mipso musician Jacob Sharp. It’s now one of 12 films featured in the First That Last Film Series Competition presented by VisitNC. Voting concludes on September 30.

In this interview with BGS, the brothers recount that pivotal moment on the pier, the special family memories that go along with watching archival footage, and the ongoing fascination with mandolin.

BGS: What was the “a ha!” moment when you decided to make a short film about Jacob’s first mandolin?

Taylor Sharp: I’ve been to hundreds of Mipso shows over the years, and a funny thought that frequently comes to mind when seeing Jacob on stage is wondering if he would’ve ever ended up as a musician if it weren’t for our dad losing that fishing bet with him on the pier way back when. So when VisitNC reached out to me about telling a unique North Carolina story for this film series, I immediately called Jacob and we decided to finally share this family tale.

 

Taylor Sharp, Will Sharp, and Jacob Sharp

 

What was going through your mind as you were watching video footage from your childhood?

Taylor Sharp: Those days on the pier provided so many cherished memories for our family. After lunch, our mom would always join us and inevitably catch a fish on her first cast. And our Eastern North Carolina farming grandma would come at the end of the day, with her curly white hair peeking out of her visor, and she’d clean all of the day’s catch so that we could take them home to fry that night. Neither of these women are with us today, so memories of these special fishing outings hold extra weight nowadays. The archival home video section is a quick beat in the film, but it’s extra special to our family.

You’ve referred to this as a “Mipso origin story.” Can you explain why that’s a fitting description?

Jacob Sharp: Mipso is the odd and fascinating collision of me, Joseph, Libby and Wood. On the surface we have similar backgrounds but when you get into the details we have pretty different paths towards falling in love with folk music. If Joe hadn’t learned a Doc tune from his Grandma on the front porch after a Sunday lunch… if Libby hadn’t rebelled from her classical training and decided she needed to learn how to “jam” with friends… and if Wood hadn’t been open to applying his substantial jazz background to some friends of friends wanting to write songs. Lots of small moments where if you had taken a left instead of a right, your whole life would be different. For me, coming from a family who didn’t know a thing about bluegrass, it was seeing an electric mandolin being stretched to the limits by Michael Kang during the second set of a String Cheese Incident show and being fascinated enough to months later make an ambitious fishing bet with my dad. And winning the bet! And then our four worlds collided a few years later in Chapel Hill and the rest is history.

North Carolina also features prominently into this story. Can you share how the state has influenced you creatively?

Taylor Sharp: So many of North Carolina’s stories and storytellers shaped me, so I feel that the culture of this state is embedded in me. And Jacob now carries his mandolin — a symbol of North Carolina’s bluegrass culture — with him wherever he goes, as he travels the world with his band Mipso spreading the music of Appalachia, so this was a fitting film to make for VisitNC.

What is that experience like for you to watch this completed film now?

Taylor Sharp: As a filmmaker, it’s always a treat to get to tell a story that you know intimately well — and this family tale is certainly one of them. I feel fortunate to have been able to document this special story alongside my brother and dad and to now allow others to watch for years to come.

Jacob Sharp: It’s always wild to revisit things. I think when you’re less than secure, revisiting something can border on feeling like a regression. And I’ve always been unsure of where I fit in as a player in the mandolin world. I’m not as heady or fast or tone-driven as I could be, and there have been times where I wonder why this is my main vessel for expressing myself musically and for writing songs on. But when I watched the finished film and revisited those earliest moments and remembered just how random it was that the mandolin found me, I just feel grateful and inspired to continue my relationship with such a beautiful and odd little instrument.

WATCH: Mipso Get Experimental With “Let a Little Light In”

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Mipso’s sixth full-length release, simply called Mipso, marks an adventurous, exploratory turn for the group’s sound. Up until their most recent couple of projects the North Carolina four-piece’s music usually dwelt in the string band realm, but as this music video for “Let a Little Light In” will attest, the new self-titled album features more experimental textures and atmospheres. In the video, the members of Mipso revisit nostalgic memories that have a marked fuzziness and that strange cocktail of joy and sadness about them.

On YouTube, singer-fiddler Libby Rodenbough posted, “It was really tempting to take this song in a kind of familiar bluesy direction, but we fought the temptation and tried to take into a weirder, quirkier zone.” Mipso is a unique step for the group, following very much in the footsteps of this single. In a press release, the band calls it their “most sonically adventurous and lyrically rich work to date, each moment charged with the tension between textural effervescence and an underlying despair about the modern world.” Watch “Let a Little Light In” below.

Photo credit: D.L. Anderson

Weird (Or Not), Mipso Keep Exploring Their North Carolina Roots

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To hear Mipso perform, it’s hard to believe that Libby Rodenbough, Joseph Terell, Jacob Sharp, and Wood Robinson didn’t originally get together with the intention of digging into bluegrass history or starting a band. But as the self-described “indie kids” played around with vocal harmonies and playful strings as students at UNC Chapel Hill, the traditional sounds of their native North Carolina beckoned.

“I had a need for exploring my own roots — the places I’m from and the traditions that come from North Carolina and the Piedmont specifically,” Terrell, who plays the guitar, tells BGS. “There’s a lot of depth to the music that’s been made around here, and because a lot of those folks are still making music around here, it’s still passed down in neighborhoods, at jam sessions and orally.”

As Mipso’s audience grew, its sound evolved, integrating elements of pop with traditional strings and vocal harmonies, and the foursome reckoned with more than just chords and lyrics.

“I was trying to make sense of North Carolina and being a more long-term North Carolinian — not just by birth, but by choice,” says fiddle player Rodenbough, of the early days. “There was so much context and story behind this traditional music. Every song, even if it was a modern creation, had little threads that tied it back to words that had been sung for decades or hundreds of years. It just felt like… well, in a nice way, a bottomless pit. Or, what’s a nice way to say that?”

“A well! An inexhaustible well,” offers Terrell with a laugh. And they’re still drinking from it: Last month, the group issued their fifth full-length album, a self-titled effort that embraced the band’s quirks and their past experiences.

“We’ve been living together so closely for the last eight years, and for better or for worse, we’re us now,” says Terrell. “We had phases of the band where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to be this, we need to make a song this way.’ This record, it was like, ‘Fuck it, this is how we make music.’ We like it, and we’re weird if we’re weird, and if we’re not, we’re not, but this is how we go about it. Here’s Mipso.”

BGS: Plenty of songs on this album feel like they were born from one person’s memory or experience; “Let a Little Light In,” for example, has specific lyrics about childhood. How do you bring a song from one person’s brain or notebook to the band as a whole?

Joseph Terrell: The lyrics and the melodies are certainly an important part of what makes a song, but I think when we talk about combining our voices, we’re talking about making a presentation of a song that makes an emotional impact when people hear it. “Let a Little Light In” is a great example of a song that really transformed in the studio. The lyrics mostly came from me, but Libby and Jacob and Wood had more to do than I did with building this cool, playful soundscape of dancey noises to make up a kind of funhouse mirror of childhood weirdness.

Libby Rodenbough: A lot of the songs are lyrically one person’s, or maybe two people’s, work. But we talk about the meaning of songs when we talk about the arrangements because the delivery of it has so much to do with the emotional meaning. There’ve been songs before that we’ve vetoed or decided to leave off a record because they felt too specific to one person — the rest of the band was going to feel like a backing band. Part of our standard for what makes a Mipso song is that we all have to find an in-road somewhere, something we can sink our teeth into.

You see a lot of bands packing up and moving to places like Nashville or LA, but you’ve held tight to the community where you came up in North Carolina. What makes it such a special place for you, as people and as musicians?

Terrell: For me, North Carolina is where the music comes from, and Nashville or Los Angeles is where the business comes from. In as many ways as possible, trying to keep and hearth and home on the music side of that equation is going to be really healthier in the long run.

Rodenbough: I would say, too, that there’s a part of it that’s arbitrary: Because I was born here and went to school here, and because I believe that there are benefits that you can only reap after a certain amount of time spent in one place, this is the place where I still am. It could have been somewhere else. But it’s North Carolina, because I’m a North Carolinian. This is it.

Terrell: There’s a part of you, a Libby-ness, that’s because you’re from this place. It gets a little bit vague and spiritual on some level to justify it, but I do feel that that’s true somehow.

Rodenbough: We formed the type of connection to a place that we have here by having been born here and having come of age here — by having returned here from every tour for seven or eight years. I have a more intergenerational community of people in my life. I’ve known people when they’ve had babies, and I know their kids now. I’ve met their parents and grandparents. You just can’t really rush that process.

Terrell: I had dinner on the porch with my grandparents three weeks ago — they’re 92 and 94 — and my grandma gave me a CD of my great-grandmother telling stories. It was recorded in 1985. So I’ve just been driving around in my car listening to this CD, and it’s about all these places that I still go. I feel a spiritual connection here that I can’t exactly explain. Yet I would hate to think that this answer could be spun in a way that means, “If you weren’t born in a place, you’re not valuable to that place,” because certainly the reason I love Durham is because of the immigrant community. There’s lots of ways of being from a place.

 

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One song that feels especially prescient on the new album is “Shelter.” I think a lot of people can relate to the idea of seeking out a place to be safe and accepted. What do those lyrics mean to you?

Terrell: That song came from Wood, primarily. He had this great melody that reminded us of a British Isles folk melody. Some of his family in Robeson County in Eastern North Carolina had been really impacted by one of the bad hurricanes, and he had the idea of telling that as a snippet of a story. But instead of making this about one very specific scenario where you’d need shelter, you have four different scenes that land on the same phrase or message — kind of in the tradition of country songwriting. Whether you’re a kid, an immigrant, a person facing natural disasters because of global warming, or the richest person in New York City going up into some big tower, this is a human need for shelter. We all need it, and therefore, we should all think of ourselves as tied together.

Rodenbough: And I think that a lot of the strife — to put it really lightly — happening in the country right now comes from an anxiety about lacking shelter, lacking a feeling of safety. That applies to people who are very clearly lacking in physical shelter as well as people who seem to be lacking for nothing. Our country has failed to provide that for people from every walk of life for a long time now, and so I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s unfortunately especially relatable right now. We all feel untethered. We all feel like we don’t really have a home.

Mipso’s sound developed in part thanks to in-person communities at places like festivals and neighborhood jams. Do you feel like there’s a way to emulate that in online communities?

Rodenbough: For so many subcultures, the internet has given people the gift of knowing that others like them exist. It is very empowering, and in some cases, that’s a bad thing — there are a lot of internet subcultures that we wish probably didn’t have that vehicle. But, for better or for worse, it makes something that probably felt very geographically disparate, and therefore disconnected, feel really strong and unified.

One example during COVID has been a Facebook group called Quarantine Happy Hour: They do a concert every night, or even a couple of concerts every night, and I’ve watched more bluegrass and old time music since [joining] than I did probably in the couple of years prior. It’s like a who’s-who, especially of contemporary old-time players, with bluegrass too. Every concert, no matter how well-known the performers are, has a couple of hundred people, and folks are tipping like crazy. And it’s interesting that it took a pandemic to make that happen, because we could have done that all along.

Even before the pandemic, though, Mipso was really harnessing the power of the internet to reach new fans — even listeners who maybe never considered themselves fans of traditional music.

Terrell: I think we’re probably more like a gateway drug into bluegrass than a haven for diehard fans. We have played a good number of bluegrass festivals and traditional-oriented-type venues, but I think we’re on the fringe of what they consider to be part of that world. If people find our music and like it, they might say, “Wait… there’s something in this that’s leading me towards all these other artists.” But there’s certainly not, like, a big tag we’re putting on our foreheads to weed out bluegrass or non-bluegrass fans.

Are there any misconceptions you think people have about bluegrass or traditional music — things they really get wrong?

Terrell: I mean, I have two things. The first is the idea that it’s white music, which I think is a really pernicious and awful myth. So much of this, the only reason we’re doing this is because it came from slaves who were here, and it came from African American music.

Rodenbough: It’s one of the nastiest and almost most ridiculous perversions of the truth, that white supremacists have used this type of music as an example of anglo-cultural achievement.

Terrell: The other [misconception] is that it’s tame or like, “stripped down.” For me, the best way to understand bluegrass specifically is that it was rock ’n’ roll right before rock ’n’ roll. It was high-energy and rip-roaring — the banjo twanged right before the electric guitar. It was the head-banging music of its day. [Laughs]

Rodenbough: This was a wild music — bluegrass in particular was not an old folky hokey thing. The way that we divide up the genres of traditional music comes straight out of marketing. I think it can be useful to understand how one style of music informs another that came later chronologically or something, but it’s not necessary to draw hard lines between old time and bluegrass in order to love stringband music or to love fiddle-centric music. All the borders are so blurry, just like with everything in history and in our overlapping cultures. I think that’s so wonderful, and I wouldn’t want to try to clean it up. That would be missing what’s so special about not even traditional music, but vernacular music — music that non-professionals make in their lives, about their lives.

Photo credit: D.L. Anderson

The Show on the Road – Mipso

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we feature one of the leading roots-pop bands working today: Mipso. An affable and endlessly-creative quartet formed in Chapel Hill, NC, they are made up of fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson.


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Despite the anxious mood of their swing-state home base, it’s quite an exciting time for Mipso. Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Libby and Jacob (via Zoom of course) to discuss their lushly orchestrated, self-titled record which just dropped last week; and if you walk down 8th Avenue in Nashville this week, you might catch a billboard with their sheepish grins large in the sky.

How did they get here? It’s hard to find a group where every member can effortlessly sing lead and write genre-bending songs that fit seamlessly on six acclaimed albums — and counting — in under ten years. Earlier standout records like the breakout Dark Holler Pop, produced by fellow North Carolinian Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange, and Edges Run, which features a veritable online hit in the broken-voiced, emotional “People Change,” show how Mipso appeals not only to folk fest-loving moms and dads, but also their edgier kids, who appreciate their subversive turns of phrase and playful gender-ambiguous, neon-tinted wardrobe.

As Z. found out during his conversation with Libby and Jacob, the band nearly broke up after a series of grueling 150-shows-a-year runs, a scary car wreck, and the pressure of putting out Edges Run for their rapidly growing fanbase. The forced slower pace of this last year and a half has been a gift in several ways — allowing the group to catch their breath and hole up to write more collaboratively than ever. The shimmering sonic backdrop that gifted producer and musician Sandro Perri was able to bring to the Mipso sessions at Echo Mountain studio in Asheville really makes the songs feel like they could exist in any era.

You wouldn’t be alone if you heard the connection between the honey-hooked newest record with the timeless, mellow-with-a-hint-of-menace hits of the 1970s (looking at you James Taylor and Carly Simon). Songs like “Never Knew You Were Gone” show off Terrell’s gift for gently asking the deepest questions, like where he might go when he transitions to the other side in a “silvery fire,” or the sardonically nostalgic “Let A Little Light In,” which wonders if the soft-focused images we have of the peaceful, boomtime 1990s (when Mipso was growing up) could use some real scrutiny. Rodenbough’s silky fiddle work stars throughout –and her courageous, vulnerable lead vocal on “Your Body” may be the most memorable moment on the new work.

Stick around to the end of the episode to hear mandolinist Jacob Sharp introduce his favorite contribution, “Just Want To Be Loved.”

Photo credit: D.L. Anderson

WATCH: Mipso Show a Different Angle on Loss in “People Change”

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At the crossroads of traditional acoustic music and contemporary songwriting, you’ll find Mipso. This four-piece group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has made an admirable career for themselves by blending their folk and bluegrass roots with a modern writing style that is reminiscent of groups like The Postal Service and The Head and the Heart.

Of the song’s sensitive lyrics, band member Jacob Sharp explains, “A lot of what I write is centered around articulating loss. My mother died when I was young, and I’ve had a normal amount of romantic relationships end… ‘People Change’ is a different angle on loss, that of a friendship fading away. In some ways it’s a lot more difficult to process because the loss feels more within your control — the situation less futile — but the impact of the absence is pretty much the same.”

The band enlisted Jake McBride to create the illustrated video, of which band member Libby Rodenbough says, “‘People Change’ is about the kind of growing apart that is not vindictive or righteous or one-sided—about the untraceable ways your world disconnects from another’s world. We wanted a video that would convey the quiet tangle of feelings that comes along with that variety of heartbreak. It’s not accusatory, not an explosion of emotion, neither brightly colored nor totally dark. I think so much of your struggle with yourself and other people is like that as you get older.”

Their fifth album, Edges Run, was released in April 2018, and they’ve signed to Rounder Records for their next release. In preparation for an upcoming fall tour through Europe, Mipso just released an animated video for the song “People Change.”

Feeding Pigeons and Eating Pizza with Mipso

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It’s a mellow Fall afternoon in Carrboro, NC, shortly before the early-evening hustle to get home. A lot of students make up the little town’s population thanks to the adjacent town of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, but Carrboro is also a home to artists and other creatives — its cheap living, easy-going attitude, and compact layout make it an attractive spot to set up camp.

The roots music upstarts in Mipso call Chapel Hill home, though they hang out more in Carrboro. Singer/mandolin player Jacob Sharp sits in a small brewery downtown, as the band’s new record, Old Time Reverie, pours out of the speakers. Sharp is quick to admit it’s weird, but that’s one of the perils of the area’s tight-knit music community — it’s as common to hear locals’ tunes playing on shop stereos as anything else.

But this is hardly the most exciting thing going on for Sharp and his cohorts at the time: The day before, the newly released Billboard charts featured Old Time Reverie at the top of its bluegrass listing, at number 20 on its folk chart, and number 23 on its Heatseekers chart. The band spent the previous 24 hours fielding dozens of phone calls about the feat, but they didn’t see it as a big deal. For Mipso, the chart numbers were merely a passing recognition of something the band has already put years of hard work into, and its members hope that Old Time Reverie will help push them along even further toward a sustainable, long-term music career together. Guitarist Joseph Terrell, bassist Wood Robinson, and fiddler Libby Rodenbough join Sharp to discuss the band’s work up to this point and what they hope lies down the road.

Joseph, you mentioned in another interview that bluegrass was a big tent, and I think we’ve all talked about that together, at some point. Could you talk about that a little more and how y’all fit into that?

Joseph Terrell: I think there are a lot of great young artists that we’ve gotten to know, touring over the last couple of years. We have great respect for some of the early bluegrass guys like Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers, but don’t feel like loving them and respecting them and playing music that feels informed by them necessarily means playing music that sounds exactly note-for-note like them.

Jacob Sharp: Within the context of the charts, it’s funny, because we’re also on the folk one, which is probably how I think more people would understand this album if they hadn’t seen the tags beforehand. I would think it’s a little more naturally under that point. I think it’s cool for Billboard to put it up on a couple, and I think it’s good for bluegrass that — as a genre and as a home — it’s become broad enough to sneak over there because, previously, that probably wasn’t as much the case. There were enough bands that pulled heavily enough from bluegrass to get cross-catch, but I don’t think any of us would really say this is a bluegrass album or that we’re a bluegrass band. But we’ll totally take being on the charts, and we love learning from that place and being a part of that community.

JT: I think it’s interesting from the charts' perspective, too, because the folk charts have Jason Isbell and Ryan Adams’ 1989 album. And that’s rock ‘n’ roll. They’re all a bit blurry, I think, right now. And I can imagine traditional bluegrass people saying, “Wait a second: If you’re not going to use this as a bluegrass chart, then why have it? If you’re going to broaden it to be acoustic music, then call it acoustic music, not bluegrass.” So I can understand how the terms get frustrating when you try to really understand what they mean.

You’ve spent a lot of the last year on the road. How has that been? Do you feel like you've gotten into the swing of it now?

JT: It’s definitely been a big adjustment. We live in Chapel Hill, but to say we live anywhere is kind of a stretch. At some point in a touring musician’s life, when you’ve been a musician for a long time and traveling a lot — for example, like we were talking about earlier, when you wake up on a Tuesday in the middle of Iowa in February, you have that sense of, “How did I get here? Where am I going? What am I doing?”

JS: That question of “How did I get here, where am I going” is in both senses — like, “Where was I yesterday? How did I actually arrive in this location? And what happened over the last two-and-a-half years of my life that I thought this was rational? What major glitches in logic have I found?”

JT: There are great things, too. We’re all grateful for having gotten to know so much of the country. I think that sounds like you’re trying to find a way to make it sound good, but genuinely, it’s been super cool.

Before you hit the road, how much of the Old Time Reverie was done? How did you fit recording and writing into your touring schedule?

Wood Robinson: The songs were pretty much written before we got in the studio in December of last year. We had a week there, and another week in early January, and a final week in early February between the Northeast run and the Midwest run. It was basically all done before the breadth of the year happened.

JS: When we were touring in 2014 — Summer and Fall — that was really our transition into full-time touring. We had carved out time. We wanted to understand the motions of touring before getting into the studio.

Libby Rodenbough: There were very discrete sections. We had to very intentionally set aside time for recording, and it was very scheduled. I know some people who record as they’re on the road, and they do a few days here and leave for a few weeks, and do a few days here. For us it was like, “This is now studio time,” and then back to the road again after that.

Many contemporary folksy bands style themselves to be sort of old-timey looking, and y’all definitely don’t do that. Has that been a really conscious choice?

LR: It is not really that important, and I don’t think that we spend so much time thinking about it. But it is kind of tricky to negotiate that. I find myself wondering sometimes if I’m playing too much into a stereotype. I think, even though we dress in regular 21st-century clothing, it’s also kind of influenced by our general aesthetic tastes. It’s not a mistake that we’re all from this area, and we all listen to some acoustic music, and we like leather boots. We like rural-influenced-type clothing — it’s not like we’re dressing up like cowboys all the time, but we have those inclinations.

 I think it has to do with family history, but also, in our lives, we’re drawn to many things like that. I studied a lot of folklore in school, and I’m drawn to the traditions of the South — musically and culturally, generally, and also aesthetically. So I think that’s part of the way we dress, for sure. But you don’t want to be too thematized in a band in a certain genre. And I think that has to do, too, with the fact that we don’t want to be pigeonholed as playing a particular type of music exclusively. And if we were to dress a certain way and have a banjo in our band — there are certain cues you can give your audience, and we don’t want to give them those cues.

JS: I think style, like everything else you do from day to day, the more you do it, the more you think about it in more nuanced and critical ways. Going into this album process, we were thinking about the imagery of the cover and the clothes we were wearing in a different way than we had previously. Libby thinks about that stuff a lot, individually, and we thought about that stuff, collectively. This time, we worked with Dear Hearts, from Durham.

LR: I think it is worth noting for someone like me — who spends way too much time and way too much money on clothing anyway — I would be doing this regardless of whether or not I was a performer. It’s just a passion of mine. But when you get to be onstage and wear some of this stuff, there is some semblance of justification for it, which makes me feel better about myself. I would say it’s one of the perks of being a performer that, if I buy, for example, gold sequin pants, I can be like, “Well, this is for the stage! This is just a business purchase.” I don’t write it off, but I do buy some things like that with a very slight sense of justification, and I appreciate that.

JT: An example for me is, I recently saw a band performing with a microphone that was as big as a dinner plate. I said to the other guys that I thought that it was a real failure of the microphone that it amplified the voice well, but it distracted from the performance completely. If I wore gold sequin pants, and someone left the concert and all they thought about was my gold sequin pants, I think that would be a failure of my style. I want people to leave our concerts thinking about music and thinking about our songs. That being said, it starts to make sense to be thinking about how your clothes play a role in what people think about you. I don’t think it’s wrong to wear something you think is cool, but we’re not David Bowie exactly.

LR: We are the David Bowie of bluegrass.

What do you see for yourselves in the next year-plus?

LR: I think a lot of what we see is the same … but more. The same … but better. Probably hitting a lot of the same areas and doing a similar level of touring, in terms of how many days on the road, but hopefully better gigs and better attendance and cooler venues. The things that we see happening already — the people that we’re meeting, the bands we’re getting to play with and stuff — leads me to believe that that will happen. It feels like we’re headed in the right direction.

JS: It’s a funny thing to be learning about. You start to understand it in these cycles that are, like, 16 months in the future. This album was done in January, the songs are just now new to the stage but they’re old songs to us. We’re excited to get into the studio, but we understand that when that happens sometime later next year, there’s no way it can come out before February of 2017. You start to understand stuff in a weird world, these chapters that kind of have a slow roll.

LR: Somebody asked me recently, “Is it full-time?” I thought, it’s way more than full-time. It’s full life. It’s what I think about all the time. When we’re on the road, it’s pretty hard to fit anything else into your brain that isn’t band-related. I would love to have the time and, thus, the brain space to remember the other parts of who I am. I love being invested in the band, but I think it can get a little too much and, if we’re looking at longevity as a group, I think that actually depends on having some individual focuses that are far afield.

WR: There are only so many years you can tour 180 shows, which translates to, like, 220 days a year. You just can’t. You physically reach a wall, and we’re young enough to maybe prolong that wall a little bit further down the road. But it feels good to be consciously making changes in that regard.

Do you find it difficult having to balance thinking about all these long-term things with being present in everyday life?

WR: The one thing that catches up with me — it is my life, so it’s relevant and it isn’t just business. But, often times, when I call a friend, I don’t want to talk about music. And that’s impossible if that person is in music. It feels fake or something like that, sometimes, when you’re talking about your career, because it feels like you’re having a business talk about your hopes and dreams and stuff like that when you’re talking to a friend you’ve had for years. It subconsciously happens. You’re not actively trying to push your career on other people, but that is basically everything we do, so that is what’s been going on.

LR: And you get used to conversations that are kind of about you, and they’re uncomfortable, a lot of the times. There are a lot of conversations after shows, where you’re trying to learn how to gracefully reply to a lot of compliments that start to feel kind of meaningless. I find that when I return to talking to a friend who doesn’t give a shit that I play shows, it’s refreshing but also kind of disconcerting. I sort of snap out of a fog I’ve been in on tour. And, when you have those moments, you realize a certain kind of unreality or different reality that you’re in when you’re on tour. But sometimes it’s not other people imposing it on you. You can’t get yourself to stop talking about work. I’m in my own head, fighting with myself, like, “Stop talking about the band,” but I can’t think of anything else, because it’s all I do and think about most of the time.

Photos by Katie Chow for BGS