If one were to chart North Carolina string band Mipso’s career over the past decade on a line graph, you’d see a steadily rising, ever-growing musical output and an ever-burgeoning audience for their brand of grounded-yet-dreamy folk pop. This journey through roots music has paralleled their peers – bands and artists like Watchhouse, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, and Della Mae – but they’ve outlasted more than a few similar ensembles that have fallen to the wayside over those years. Strikingly, even while enjoying near constant growth since they coalesced in 2012, the band has eschewed higher echelons of the Americana star-scape, choosing instead to scale their business and their art intentionally and deliberately.
Theirs is a sound and musical aesthetic ready for the “big time” – they’ve garnered hundreds of millions of streams – but Mipso (made up of Wood Robinson, Libby Rodenbough, Jacob Sharp, and Joseph Terrell) seem very happy with where they’ve landed since their consecutive popular and critically-acclaimed releases Coming Down the Mountain (2017), Edges Run (2018), and 2020’s Mipso. Each album saw the group gain traction, gain fans, and gain notoriety. Still, they aren’t defined by their ambitions; and their ambitions don’t seem to ever be conflated with conquering anything. Instead, this is a band building something.
Mipso’s sixth studio album, Book of Fools (due out August 25), certainly speaks to this phenomenon. The group feels perfectly at home with one another; they’re a chosen-family band – together, they’ve been through their college days, their road-dogging era, their “I think this might not just be a pipe dream…” successes, landing with a crystalline point of view that’s expansive, complicated, and rich, but doesn’t feel like it has anything to prove. There’s no desperation here – to claw back pre-COVID reality, to tour arenas, to brand and merchandise their way to an empire. As songwriter, guitarist, and singer Joseph Terrell puts it in a press release, “Book of Fools feels more relaxed, more confident, more us – like we’re wearing our favorite clothes and telling our favorite story and it feels exciting again.”
“The Numbers,” the second single from Book of Fools, winks to this measured, black-and-white view of their own jobs and careers – versus “real jobs,” let’s say – and the economic access that’s never been a hallmark of either roots music or the generation to which Mipso’s members belong. By prioritizing building art and community over bottom line, Mipso demonstrate a class consciousness that places themselves and their music in alignment with workers, laborers, and the every-person, making the message behind “The Numbers” palpably genuine.
“I looked around at this cruel place where we live,” Libby Rodenbough explained via press release, describing the U.S. and the stock market, “And I felt forlorn that the NASDAQ offers anybody any kind of comfort. How do I know things are bad? Because I feel it, and I see it.”
Who are “The Numbers” supposed to comfort? And what exactly are they supposed to indicate? Mipso utilize their post-modern string band trappings – in a similar fashion to Nickel Creek or Crooked Still – to explore these ideas in ways that the forebears of bluegrass and old-time did as well, in their own time and within the social and political issues of their own days.
Genre-wise, Mipso may have traveled a great distance from their bluegrassy early days as a string band quartet dripping with North Carolinian roots music traditions, but again their journey, in this regard especially, does not feel overtly aspirational. These are not sounds and production values adopted in order to sell out bigger rooms or fill bigger stages. The music of Book of Fools (and really any LP in their catalog since Dark Holler Pop) is as intentional as the messages within it, so one can feel and enjoy the old-timey touches that underpin these fully-realized sonic landscapes.
Mipso hasn’t lost touch. They haven’t lost sight of how real the stakes are outside of their own experiences – and within them. While they may not be building a business model reliant on “sheds” and arenas and radio hits and dynamic ticket pricing to be “successful,” you can feel the gratitude they have for their own daily lives and careers, even while they apply critical lenses through which to talk about the social and political issues they and their community face.
It’s exciting, encouraging, and energizing, to appreciate an album that isn’t merely a rung on a career ladder, but is meant to be its own constituent journey – both for Mipso and their listeners. Book of Fools speaks to a trajectory that is neither predictable nor totally quantifiable and isn’t merely about consumption or facilitating an ever-deepening appetite for consumption. That this could be said about almost any release by this prolific foursome speaks to exactly why we’re so pleased to name Mipso our August Artist of the Month.
Watch for our Artist of the Month feature to come later in August and for now, enjoy our Essential Mipso Playlist.
Artist:Jacob Sharp Hometown: Los Angeles, California Song: “Other Side” (feat. Aoife O’Donovan) Release Date: May 26, 2023
In Their Words: “I wrote this song in early 2020 when I was finally still enough to wrap my head around some of my emotions buried deepest. This one’s about a friend losing a battle with addiction, what I wish I had said more, and what I’ve been trying to say to all my people since. For me, music is for making and sharing with people. It’s why I love bands and being in Mipso. I talked myself out of releasing my own music so many times over the past few years, but when I realized it made for a good opportunity to collaborate with dear friends for the first time, it started to feel alright. I got the band of my dreams together and we recorded this one, mostly in separate locations in 2021.
“There is an amazing winemaker, Jude Zasadski, who is my neighbor in Mt. Washington – it’s a little oasis in the heart of Los Angeles – and he is someone who constantly inspires me. I love that dude so much. When I got the final mix for this tune, he was one of the first people I shared it with and he had an immediate vision for how we could show some of the fuzzier sides of memory whilst memorializing the preciousness of time and those moments when you feel your feelings again. We strolled around the neighborhood, got burgers and milkshakes, and then set up a projector in our friend’s garage. And one of my favorite filmmakers, Brady Lawrence, has been a friend for over a decade. His art always gets to emotional depth quickly and he was the perfect person to edit this video.” – Jacob Sharp
Photo Credit: Cate Parker Video Credit: Jude Zasadski (director and videographer) and Brady Lawrence (editor)
Artist:Joseph Terrell Hometown: Durham, NC Song: “Tallest House of Cards” (featuring Charly Lowry) Album:Good For Nothing Howl Release Date: May 5, 2023 Label: Sleepy Cat Records
In Their Words: “Charly Lowry is one of my favorite singers in North Carolina. I love her voice and her presence and I really admire how rooted she is in her community in Eastern North Carolina (AKA “down east” AKA the most interesting part of the state with the most swamps and collard greens per capita). We met up in Pembroke, NC at Charly’s bar, Credentials Social Club, and she helped me record a beautiful version of this song from my album … thanks to Charly for bringing it to life. Directed by my great buddies Sandra Davidson and Cameron Laws, we made a day trip out of it, got Mexican at Charly’s favorite spot beforehand, and then Cook Out milkshakes afterward (banana pudding). It was a pleasure all around.
“‘Tallest House of Cards’ is about some great duos who burned hot and bright for a little while. You know Bonnie & Clyde, Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers. Y’all maybe don’t know the story of Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon, the surveyors who drew the famous line, but they were a wild pairing, too. I’ve got some other verses (Bert & Ernie, Siegfried & Roy) that I might bust out live.” – Joseph Terrell
Video directed by Sandra Katharine Davidson and Cameron Elizabeth Laws
Libby Rodenbough’s second solo record Between the Blades sees the fiddler and songwriter further stretching from the bluegrass and old-time style of her band Mipso. Born in Greensboro, NC, music was just another activity that Libby did along with soccer and going to Girl Scouts. She played violin in her school’s orchestra and thought she’d be a music major, until a college professor let her know that her playing was not up to par with those who studied classical music at a collegial level. She found herself at local bluegrass jam sessions and meeting her future Mipso band members, which led her to discover that music could be a creative outlet and a means of expression.
On the new record, Libby is processing and coping with the death of her mother, who was diagnosed with an incurable cancer and died about 5 months before she began recording the album. Created amongst North Carolina musicians, she found herself nestled in a group of people who were also dealing with loss of and serious illness of loved ones. This gave the sessions a heavy and contemplative feel, but also comforting to be around friends who felt the existence and love of those who were no longer alive in the room. Libby is open, honest and real. We get into lady-things and cat-things. Hope you enjoy Libby! Her new album is wonderful.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
Americana duo Violet Bell‘s new album, Shapeshifter – out October 7 – tells a story of the mythological selkie, a mermaid-like creature from Celtic folklore that embodies a form that’s half woman, half seal. In their retelling and reshaping of this ancient folk narrative, they tease out its connections to the transatlantic journey of American roots music, to the cultural and social melting pot of the “New World,” and to agency, intention, and self-possession.
A concept album of sorts, the music is remarkably approachable and down-to-earth, while the stories and threads of the record tell equally ordinary and cosmic tales. At such a time in American history, with fascism once again on the rise and attacks on bodily autonomy and personal agency occurring with greater frequency at every level of governance, Shapeshifter offers a seemingly timeless lens through which to engage with, understand, and challenge the overarching social and political turmoil we all face on the daily. Moreover, it’s an excellent folk record, demonstrating Violet Bell’s connections to North Carolina, Appalachia, and the greater communities that birthed so many of the genre aesthetics evident in the album’s songs.
Shapeshifter is a gorgeous exercise in community building, an artful subversion of societal norms, and a stunning folktale packaged in accessible, resonant music with a local heartbeat and a global appeal. Read our interview with duo members Lizzy Ross and Omar Ruiz-Lopez and listen to a brand new single from the project, “Mortal Like Me,” below.
BGS: I wanted to start by asking you about community, because I know it’s always very present in your music making. I feel it, definitely, in Shapeshifter. Not only because you’ve got Joe Terrell and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso), Joe Troop, and Tatiana Hargreaves on the project, but because I can feel that community is a tent pole of this record. What does community, musical and otherwise, mean to you in the context of this project?
Lizzy Ross: It was such a wild time to be making the record because it was March of 2021, so vaccines hadn’t quite happened yet and we had all been on lockdown for about a year. We were obviously really missing our community and the live music community. There was also this strange thing, where our friends who would normally always be on the road all the time were at home. So we had an incredible opportunity to call up people, like calling up Tati and Joseph and Libby and Joe Troop – who lived in Argentina but came home because of COVID! The way that it worked out, people were around and we were able to convene and make this album in circumstances that probably wouldn’t have been possible, because everybody would have been on the road.
Omar Ruiz-Lopez: Or, [we would have had them] recording remotely. Which is not the same. One of the reasons why I play music is because of the community. That ability to bring people together and share music and hold space together, the energy that comes from that is so vital to the human experience. Getting to create that space, to bring an album to life, there’s not much else in this world that I live for, besides that. Getting the opportunity to bring everybody together, especially after such a big isolation, was so life-affirming and helped bring me back to why I make music in the first place.
That’s definitely palpable in the music itself, but also in the overarching viewpoint that y’all have within this record. I also find that it’s very grounded. You might have heard BGS just released our first season of a podcast called Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s history through music. One of the through-lines that keeps coming up in all of our interviews is that North Carolina specifically has such a strong sense of musical community. Even though this is kind of a story record and kind of a concept record, it feels very grounded in North Carolina and in the South.
LR: Omar and I are kind of mongrels from the non-South. But we’ve come and steeped ourselves in this land and these traditions and this community, so I think that what our music reflects is the internal sort of “musical diet.” Our musical diet is probably atypical when you consider what most people think of as North Carolinian or Southern music. The music we were listening to going into this even, we were listening to a lot of Groupa–
ORL: Groupa is a Scandinavian folk band that makes these albums based on music from different countries, like Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. I feel like anything that’s not from here is called “world music,” but their brand of folk music is very beautiful and out there and organic and grounded in the different traditions they represent on their albums. It’s mostly instrumental music, it’s pretty powerful. We were listening to that a lot, as well as Julia Fowlis, a singer who sings in Gaelic primarily. Those cultures – Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian folk – they’re related to the music here like old-time, bluegrass, and Appalachian folk traditions of fiddle and banjo.
To bring it back to the question, I’ve been here for twelve years. I was born in Panama and raised in Puerto Rico listening to Spanish and Latin folk. When I say Spanish, I mean Spanish-speaking, the language of our colonizers. But there’s something still not-from-Spain in the native, Indigenous musical and cultural influences in that music. Like in Bachata and Cumbia. Then I moved to the States and fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll and more of the singer-songwriter tradition here.
LR: Originally I came here for school. I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where I didn’t really find a musical community. There was one, I just didn’t find it. When I came to North Carolina it was the first time I saw people gathering together over a potluck and music, with like shape note singing and like the Rise Up Singing book. Having this experience of big, group harmonies I had this realization more and more that music could be a part of my daily life in a way it hadn’t been as a child. Or, rather, as a way of public, shared daily life. Because it was always part of my life, but it was part of community life here in North Carolina. That was a big element of how music and North Carolinian music in particular drew me in and captured my heart.
Can you talk a bit about the central storyline of this album and how you picked up the mythos of the selkie and turned it into this project?
LR: The story of the selkie came to us and it’s something that is in the culture, it’s floating around. Many folks have seen the movies Song of the Sea or The Secret of Roan Inish. The first song that came to me, Omar and I were at the beach one day and I was playing on the banjo and this song came out. It was “Back to the Sea.” We were in the Outer Banks of North Carolina at that time, at the ocean, and I was kind of just listening for who this character is and what they are saying. It was a selkie. It was a selkie singing of getting to return home.
I would say that coming home to ourselves is one of the central themes of this album and one of the themes the selkie story really brings into focus. The whole myth is centered around a being, a mystical ocean being, who gets yanked out of her native waters and forced to live in a world that doesn’t understand her and wasn’t built around her existence. To me, there’s a really clear connection. That story is a medicine for the cultural wound of when we don’t fit into the prescribed paradigm of power. If we don’t fit into white supremacy or if we don’t fit into normativity or if we don’t fit into patriarchy. It’s the sense of feeling like we have to cut off parts of ourselves that aren’t compatible with those power structures so that we can be acceptable to the power structure at-large.
This story says, “No, don’t do that.” You can reclaim the parts of yourself that you’ve had to orphan in order to survive. You can reconnect to those pieces of you and you can come home to yourself. It speaks to integrating who we are, the characters of the land and the sea in this story are really powerful to me. The sea, to me, is this cosmic force. It’s a pervasive, creative, destructive, loving, mysterious force that the selkie comes out of. It doesn’t follow the rules of the land-bound world. To me, it’s like the structures and hierarchies of our culture – whether it’s capitalism or something else.
One of my questions was going to be about how queer the record is, and not just Queer with a capital Q, but also a lowercase Q, the idea of queerness as just existing counter to normativity. But it’s not just a story of otherness, it’s a story of otherness in relationship to embodiment. In the South right now especially, but in this country in general, embodiment is under attack. Whether we’re talking about COVID-19 or abortion access or trans rights. There’s something in this record that speaks to all of that.
LR: I think one of my experiences [that informed this music] is that I’m in a female body. There’s a line in one of the songs, “I Am a Wolf” – that song is two parts. First is the fisherman speaking, he’s kidnapped the selkie, taken her out of her native waters, he’s made her come be his bride, and he’s like, “Why isn’t this working?” It sucks, he’s lonely, he thought things would be better. The second half is the selkie responding and she says, “I am a wolf, not a woman.” That’s the first thing she says. That was something I said at one point, when I was connecting with a sense of deep grief and rage within myself around what I felt were the prescribed cultural parameters of my existence.
ORL: The people who made this album were mostly by BIPOC people and [people who fall outside those norms]. Joseph Sinclair and I are not white and Joe, Tati, [Lizzy], and I are not straight. I feel like a lot of different perspectives went into making this album. We didn’t just get white, straight dudes to make this album and it felt good that way, getting different musical perspectives on this. We could have just made it ourselves, that’s the other thing. I’m a multi-instrumentalist and Lizzy is a harmony singer, we could have overdubbed to kingdom come. Part of the reason why we got all these people together into the same room is because of their unique perspectives on the traditions they brought to the table.
LR: This thread about embodiment is really important and by asking this question you’re helping me articulate something that I’ve been sitting with for months, a year, as I’ve been thinking about the writing and the words and characters in this story. And also, what is it for me in this story that I’m trying to unravel with this album. Also on a cultural level, what are we talking about here?
The selkie, her skin is taken away from her in a moment of innocent revelry. The story starts with her dancing in the moonlight on a rock and that’s when the fisherman steals her skin. When I think about the people that I know and love, I think a lot of these systems are violent towards people whether or not they fit within the system’s perception of dominant power. When I think about the six-year-old version of a person or whatever version of a person was able to un-self-consciously dance or feel good or go into their mom’s closet and put on her clothes and makeup and not feel ashamed – there’s a different version of this for literally every person and what that means. That innocent revelry, it’s experiencing oneself not through the eye of an external observer but through the juicy presence of embodiment and joy and a sense of wholeness and rightness in your being.
Everybody’s had the experience of having their “skin” stolen from them. When you get yanked out of your sovereignty, your joy, your bliss. You get catcalled, you get shamed, you get this or that. There’s violence done to you, whether it’s physical or not, there’s that sense of losing your skin, when we start to separate from ourselves and regard parts of ourselves as less than. I think that dysphoria is a really important part of this story and this album. When we don’t experience ourselves or feel ourselves as the cultural perceptions tell us we’re supposed to be, whether it’s a question of gender or color, this feeling of not being at home in our bodies, I think that was a lot of what really resonated with me, even unconsciously, about the selkie. One of the ways that it took root and grew in my consciousness and eventually in our shared consciousness, between me and Omar and the folks who are on this music.
As a picker I have to talk about “Flying Free” and “Morning Girl,” because I think having instrumentals on this record makes so much sense. I have some ideas about how they fit into the story, not just based on the titles, but also based on how the tunes are so evocative like the rest of the project. Why, on a record that feels like a concept record, why instrumental tunes?
LR: Words are our inheritance from so many of the same structures that can oppress us. And they’re also our freedom. Words allow us to develop and communicate concepts and they also contain hierarchies and power structures that we may or may not really need. The name of the song, “Flying Free,” and the fact that it’s instrumental, to me it’s like this somatic sensation of the selkie plunging back into the sea and the joy of being reunited with her home waters. Which to me is her sense of self, her sense of worth and safety and agency.
ORL: Sound, organized sound inside of space, one of the powerful things about it is that we are able to attach emotion to it. It’s kind of beautiful how two people could feel similar things listening to one piece of music. When it came time to put together the songs for this album, there were a handful of tunes that came up that weren’t asking for words. But that totally helped paint the picture of the world of the selkie and what she was going through.
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.
We are so excited to bring to you the BGS Radio Hour podcast! Since 2017 the BGS Radio Hour has been a weekly recap of the wonderful music, new and old, that we’ve covered here on BGS broadcast over the airwaves in Murfreesboro, TN, southern California, and around the country. Now you can check back in every Monday to kick your week off with the best of BGS in podcast form, via the BGS Radio Hour.
Our North Carolina-based friends Mipso bring us another track this week from their fifth, self-titled album. They are just one of so many excellent North Carolina artists we’re featuring throughout November for #NCMusicMonth.
Kentucky-based singer-songwriter Josh Merritt brings us a song about his mother, highlighting maybe not the best time in her life, but focusing on both the ups and the downs — and, at the same time, using it as a coming of age story.
The formerly Bay Area-based, now Nashville residing Front Country are back with another fantastic release: Impossible World. They took the chance to curate a Mixtape to talk about the inspirations behind this album, their departure from 2017’s Other Love Songs, and how it all came to be.
More music from North Carolina! Darin & Brooke Aldridge, one of the most recognized modern duets in bluegrass, bring us this song from their recent release, Inner Journey.
Aoife O’Donovan was featured on the site this week in celebration of her birthday! We pulled a video from the April Whiskey Sour Happy Hour performance archives, in which she is joined by Eric Jacobsen on cello and Colin Jacobsen on violin.
November 2020 Artist of the Month (and all around modern blues hero) Shemekia Copeland brings us this track from her new album, Uncivil War. If you’re following along with us, you’ll see more exclusive content from Copeland all month long!
“Florida and beyond!” based bluegrass outfit The Sharp Flatpickers bring us a once-Irish, now bluegrass classic this week, courtesy of Mountain Fever Records.
From Asheville, NC, Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters’ 5+5 interview details their pre-show/pre-studio rituals, their dream meal with a musician, and their songwriting techniques.
“My Truth” comes from Nashville’s The Wild Feathers via Medium Rarities — an album made up of all the songs they love which fell through the cracks in the making of their previous records.
10-time IBMA award winner Becky Buller has released a new album, Distance and Time. We sat down with Buller to talk about fiddling, songwriting, and the inspiration behind all of her impressive collaborations.
Originally sci-fi, now turned to a lost love song, The Suitcase Junket’s “Last Man on the Moon” was released on November 20 on a new album, The End is New.
Photo credit: (L to R) Becky Buller by Jason Myers; Front Country by Michael Weintrob; Aoife O’Donovan by Rich Gilligan.
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.
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
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