Tag: wood robinson

“Love Is Listening,” and Other Lessons Mipso Has Learned Over 10+ Years Together

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Mipso’s new album, Book of Fools, pushes and pulls away from and toward the band’s sense of home, musically and geographically. There is a kinetic energy in this collaboration that is only achieved from years (10, to be precise) of hard-won work and the evolution of four people who choose each other. Though their sonic palate has shifted from earlier folk and bluegrass influences, this is less of a sea change and more a showcase of transformation and exploration amongst a group that has purposely allowed itself the space to shift. 

Speaking with members Wood Robinson, Libby Rodenbough, Jacob Sharp, and Joseph Terrell is a fresh reminder that a band, no matter how harmonious their music may be, consists of individual humans with their own needs, their own ideas of home, and their own personal evolutions. Bands that survive and thrive through the grueling work of creation to commerce are those that carve out the space for people to move and change and shapeshift. 

BGS reached Wood and Jacob via Zoom in their homes – in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, respectively – and some days later spoke with Libby and Joseph on the phone from a van in Virginia at the start of their tour.

BGS: You all clearly have so much reverence for North Carolina as home base but you’ve also shifted around a lot, geographically. How have the changes of being rooted in one place, but then shifting around affected the music and how you operate as a band?

Jacob Sharp: There was a moment there where we all intentionally spread all across the country, all four in different locations. But the Triangle is home. Almost always, even when tours don’t start in the Southeast, we meet there to regroup and rehearse before we hit the road. And it is pretty obvious that whether we are there or not, North Carolina is the centerpiece spiritually and musically, too. We look behind and see our music and a lot of our search over the first couple of albums was peeling back the layers of what we thought we were supposed to be, being from North Carolina and playing acoustic instruments. Since then it has been about taking away things and adding things that actually feel more like us. These last two albums especially feel like we are honing in on that side of it. What is the North Carolina that we are a product of and that we hope we are creating? What is the new North Carolina? It is less about reinterpreting the past. 

Wood Robinson: Life kind of inevitably draws you away from the place you are originally from, where you identify as your home. Even though I live in Utah and Jacob lives in California, we still feel like North Carolina is the home that will always be home. Fortunately for me, I still get to go home about six times a year. But spreading out doesn’t make our logistical lives easier. 

Joseph Terrell: It’s frustrating. I wish we lived in the same place. We’d be able to play more. We’d be able to write and practice more. But what it has given us is the ability to take time and get together really seriously and for it to feel like summer camp when writing or touring. 

Libby, particularly with the song “East” off this record, I was thinking about this question and how that plays into it. How have the geographical shifts affected the music for you?

Libby Rodenbough: What’s important about the geographical changes is less about where anyone went and more that we’ve had some separation in our personal lives, which has certainly been useful, but logistically complicated. Getting together for tours or during COVID was pretty difficult. In terms of what the overall course of our lives has been over the last decade, it was pretty important that we feel like our lives can have twists and turns and changes and that the band could accommodate that. Symbolically, what it means is just as important as the actual physical space between us. 

Jacob, I had the pleasure of speaking with you earlier in the year for BGS to talk about the state of touring in 2023. I wanted to hear from you all about any differences you foresee in touring this new record from past record cycles, or if you feel like it is going to be similar. 

WR: We haven’t done more than 10 days at a time on the road in about a year and a half. We are all very excited about it. Before then, we had all reached a point where it just felt like going to work. Which is fine, most people do it every day, but this new tour is really exciting. We are playing a lot of really cool rooms. And for the first time in a long time, we are really trying to be intentional about every little thing. Artistically it is really exciting. Logistically, not much has changed. It is still going to be difficult. It is still going to be trying on relationships like it always has been. And there is no panacea for making it work financially other than the grind but you do all of it in spite of those realities. You find a way. 

JS: It is funny, because I can imagine ways for touring to be easier, but I can’t imagine doing it because it wouldn’t feel right ethically or artistically. There was a while when we weren’t really aware we were making all those decisions for the same reasons when we were saying “No” to certain things, or looking in a different direction than what was being presented as the high growth strategy. Now it is very clear to us what we are willing to do and what we are not willing to do. 

JT: I just had some boiled peanuts from a gas station in Virginia.

LR: So basically nothing has changed. 

One thing that is different for us is that we are doing an acoustic pre-show event where people can pay extra money and spend more personal time with us. We’ve been noticing a lot of bands doing this and I think it is mainly because it has been harder and riskier, post-COVID, to tour. Not that tours were ever not risky. It is to pad out the tour budgets, but we are looking forward to it because it is giving more personal contact to the touring experience and helps us to feel like we are doing something new and alive every night. When you only just leave the green room to go to the stage and back again, it can be harder for it to feel that way.

JT: It is really hitting home for me more in the past couple of years that this system of touring and music making and profit generation around music is fundamentally not designed to benefit the artists. Our very first album release show in October of 2013 was, to this day, the most physical media we ever sold at a show. It didn’t make us a ton of money, but it paid for the record. It was easy to see; you make a thing that people want and they come and buy it and they have a good time together and that’s part of how you do it again. We paid ourselves back. It is so much more difficult to do that now. 

LR: It is true on a general, larger scale, culturally, that everyone deserves to be able to live in the richest country in the history of the world. It’s logically obvious that that is possible. I’m not trying to propose an alternative economy myself, but it is obvious that we could do what we are doing and be comfortable and everyone could and should. That’s morally true.

There is a palpable sonic evolution on this record. What are some of your current influences as a band or as individuals (that can mean musical, literary, visual arts) that played into the shift?

WR: All of us are kind of obsessed with Kim Stanley Robinson. He’s the most important science fiction author of our time. He is not only dystopian but he also is very utopian within his visualizations of the future. You have to see the bad in the world we see today while simultaneously imagining how it can be infinitely better. 

Right, otherwise what’s it for?

WR: And I think the process of making music is inherently hopeful. You have to find the light at the end of the tunnel. 

JS: We all really like Big Thief and take a lot of comfort in how they eschew the industry and the model. It hasn’t cost them anything on the success side. That’s definitely a band whose music and the way they center themselves ethically within their career, we really look up to them. 

LR: Another book that I’ve been thinking a lot about for the last three years is The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It is a review of the last decade or so of advancements in understanding early human civilizations. It is a very hopeful book. It is a great time in history to be cynical, but that book allows you zoom out and remember the truth, which is that the things that are fucked up about now are not necessary or essential to human life. And it could work in a totally different way in the future and that’s really essential to believe. I would say that was an influence on some of the songs I wrote for this record, like “The Numbers” and “Book of Fools.” 

JT: I’ve been thinking a lot about the feeling of playing together when something is really happening, not when you are just reciting your line but when something emergent and effervescent is taking place. In the last year or so I’ve been heavy into The Band, The Fairport Convention, and The Grateful Dead. Those are some bands that do this beautiful dance of communication on stage. 


You’ve just passed the decade mark of being a band this last year. And this is in an age when so many bands fall apart because of the economic realities of music or interpersonal relationships, the extreme hardships of touring… What is the glue that keeps you together, or if you want to frame it this way, what advice would you give to bands that haven’t been around for a decade?

JS: We are acutely aware of how hard it is right now to keep it on the rails. It is something that we talk about. It is a part of the ride. We’ve made some mistakes, but the one thing that hasn’t been a mistake is that we are always willing to slow down to make room for how someone has changed and how you need time to understand that. To have ignored it would have been the end. It is crazy that we get to do this. Four really good friends continuing to find ways to share our music with each other and then to share it with this global community that we’ve built. It is so wild that it exists.

WR: I think that also, you have a limited number of years of being “Yes men.” Every “Yes” is at a cost. My worst days on the road have always been ones that end in a show where I’m not thinking about the music I’m making. And if everything else in life is getting in the way of the main thing that you are supposed to have absolute, unbridled joy in doing, then it is worth re-evaluating. I think we are at a high point now of really being able to cherish those moments together. 

LR: Just like in any kind of relationship, there are certain rewards that you can only experience after years and years and years go by. I remember reading this Joni Mitchell quote about why she likes to have long-term relationships as opposed to an endless string of short affairs. She talks about how falling in love at the onset is more about falling in love with yourself. But as time goes on, you learn to actually love another person. Loving another person is a long-term pursuit, foundationally.

The work of the four of us loving each other has been some of the hardest work of my life and then some of the most rewarding. There is a lot of freedom in quitting things. Growing up I felt a pressure to never quit. That was a bad thing because it made it harder for me to understand my own internal compass. I think people should leave situations that are causing them harm, for sure. But another equal and different truth is that if you can find a way to still have enough space for yourself, working alongside people long-term is a beautiful possibility in life that not everybody gets to do. 

JT: The main ingredient of love is listening and it has made me a better person to listen to these friends of mine for a long time. That is also what I love about being on stage with people that I know so well. All of us have lived a decade of huge changes in our lives. It’s one of the best things you can do with your life and the hours of the day, is to listen to somebody else. 

(Editor’s Note: Continue your exploration of our Artist of the Month, Mipso, here.)

Photo Credit: Calli Westra

Artist of the Month: Mipso

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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.

Photo Credit: Calli Westra

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

Posted on by Editor

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

Posted on by Editor

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

Feeding Pigeons and Eating Pizza with Mipso

Posted on by Editor

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