Before Jesca Hoop became a nomadic musician, she was a teenage vagabond.
During one summer in the 1990s, the singer-songwriter lived alone in an apple orchard in Sonoma, California. She’d come of age and left her unhappy childhood home. Ms. Hoop found an abandoned workers’ squat, which she likens to a chicken shack, and fitted it with a bedroll. She cooked outdoors over an open fire. One could euphemistically call it a rustic lifestyle.
“It was romantic in a sense, but it was a very lonely period of time,” says Ms. Hoop. She recalls wondering: “What do I do with my life? Where are my friends? Where is my family?”
Why We Wrote This
Distance affords singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop perspective on her country and life. Her new album, “Long Wave Home,” leverages that viewpoint.
Ms. Hoop’s music often explores those very same questions. Her latest album, “Long Wave Home,” focuses on tenuous interpersonal relationships and, relatedly, what constitutes a sense of belonging. As for Ms. Hoop’s existential question about what to do with her life? She found that writing songs offers meaningful fulfillment. They’re a hub for communal experiences with fans around the world.
“If you have a purpose, you have a home, I believe,” says the musician.
Ms. Hoop, who was born and raised in Northern California, has lived in many places. During her 20s, she was a wilderness survival guide in a program for troubled teens in Arizona. Hiking in the parched mountains, Ms. Hoop sang for her trail companions but wasn’t yet ready to pursue singing or songwriting as a vocation.
“It took me a long time to rationalize the notion of putting myself in the center of a room and asking people to pay attention to something that I had created,” says the artist.
After several years of never spending more than six months in one place, including that summer in the Sonoma orchard, Ms. Hoop decamped to Los Angeles for a longer haul. While there, she landed a deal with Columbia Records for her 2007 debut, “Kismet.” Not long after, Ms. Hoop moved to Manchester, England, where she has lived for the past 18 years. She has released six more albums, not counting a one-off collaboration with Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine.
“There’s no genre that I fit in completely,” says the songwriter, whose self-released “Long Wave Home” was praised by Mojo magazine as “her most assured record yet.” Its inventive arrangements don’t map onto predictable musical topography. The album incorporates orchestration, brass instruments, and a thumb-picked guitar that can almost sound like an African mbira.
“She has an absolutely unique guitar style,” says renowned British music producer John Parish, who helmed Ms. Hoop’s previous two albums, “Stonechild” and “Order of Romance.” “I’ve never worked with another guitar player that has never sort of strummed … She doesn’t really play chords. It’s all melodies and rhythms, countermelodies and rhythms.”
One example of that is her recent single “Big Storm.” Propelled by a springy guitar figure and a trampoline drumbeat, the bouncy song chronicles Ms. Hoop’s attempt to escape an unhappy situation by uprooting her life. She sold many of her belongings, including her car, and purchased a one-way plane ticket. When a storm grounded all the flights, she realized that she needed to take responsibility for her happiness.
“I had to address what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t end up leaving.”
Mr. Parish, who has produced artists such as PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning, and Tracy Chapman, says that Ms. Hoop’s second-greatest strength is her lyric writing. Her songs often recount incidents from her life with startling candor yet universal resonance.
“Long Wave Home” includes two protest songs about former homes that are no longer recognizable. The first, “Designer Citizen,” offers a wry perspective on America’s politics from an American living on the other side of the Atlantic. “It causes me to look at what’s going on around us from another angle that I didn’t necessarily have access to from my upbringing,” she says.
The second, “Playground,” is an anguished response to a video clip of barefoot children in Gaza playing soccer amid rubble.
“I said, ‘I have a song to write,’” she says. “Let’s just sing in the kitchen while I cook, and let’s record what I sing. And whatever melody comes out, I’m going to use it exactly as it comes out.”
Her improvised tune had an unexpected Middle Eastern cadence that she adapted to guitar.
“A song generally takes me about a month to write, of constant writing,” says Ms. Hoop. “‘Playground,’ I wrote in two days.”
The title track of “Long Wave Home” is about how digital screens have interrupted engagement with one’s living environment, family members, and friends. She says the information we see on our devices has both roped people together and led to estrangements because we’re not always communicating with each other directly.
One place where people can still commune without digital filters is at concerts. For the itinerant musician, it is a space in which she fulfills purpose. A home away from home.
“It’s absolutely my favorite place to be,” says Ms. Hoop. “The stage is one of those timeless places where you are meant to be. There’s no past or future.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.csmonitor.com ’
