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| JESCA HOOP (TOURED WITH ELBOW) |
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| We are sorry but JESCA HOOP
is not due to perform for a while. |
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Album 'Hunting My Dress' out now on Last Laugh, includes Whispering Light
"Like going swimming in a lake at night" TOM WAITS
“Simply the most beautiful voice” GUY GARVEY (ELBOW / BBC 6 MUSIC)
“Friends in high places never hurt, but Jesca Hoop hits the heights all by herself” Mojo
“Shape shifting vocals, Celtic folk, jagged alt-rock and an earthy sensuality that sets her apart” Q
“By turns soulful & contemplative, spirited & witty, Hoop effortlessly shifts emotional gear, a striking ability to meld the traditional and the contemporary & her forceful, crystalline voice the constants” Time Out
"Good enough to compare to the more wholesome elements of The White Album, Joanna Newsom's Ys and Elbow's quieter moments" (Guy Garvey sings on Murder of Birds) - THE GUARDIAN
"So startlingly original, whose writing is so stamped with her personality and history. Hunting My Dress, confirms her as one of alternative folk-pop’s most arresting recent arrivals, sings like an outcast angel and writes like a restless explorer" CULTURE - THE SUNDAY TIMES
Jesca has toured the UK with Elbow and used to be Tom Waits' nanny!
“Genuinely gorgeous… the likes of which come along all too rarely” Music Week
It has been quite a year for Jesca Hoop thus far. Tipped by a diverse range of publications from Uncut (“excellent”), Time Out (“bewitching”), OMM (Tips for 2009), The Sun (‘Single of the Week’ for ‘Murder of Birds’), Esquire, Music Week and a two page feature in The Times on the back of one limited self-released UK debut EP. Interspersed shows and radio sessions for the likes of Marc Riley have had to maneuver around the recording of the follow up to her US-only debut album from 2007. This arrives in the supremely elegant and unique shape of Hunting My Dress due to be released on November 30 2009.
The above are far from being on their own in nailing their allegiance and trumpeting the emergence of someone very special. She has received notable endorsements from Tom Waits and the nation’s new Humphrey Lyttelton-in-waiting, one Guy Garvey. He became so enchanted by her music that he invited her onto his radio show. They got on like a house on fire, so he continued his open house policy by extending an invite to join the Elbow US tour in April 2008, which led into a UK tour in October 2008 followed by another US tour in August this year. He also lends his subtle yet inimitable vocal strength to ‘Murder of Birds’
These notable artists are not ones to bandy plaudits easily and neither should they. So what you may ask binds these people together? Maybe it is the darting melodies and sense of play nestled next to a capacity for wonder… Or maybe The Times summation gets somewhere close as “her voice swoops and pierces the high heavens and then the song soars down low”. Or maybe it is simply her ability to roll up the sleeve and get on with things and not wait for anyone to open that elusive door. She has toured relentlessly across the US and Europe, gaining fans in abundance wherever she goes. She is a force of nature that plays her intricate tunes for the right reasons. And what tunes they are. Brave and bold you can assign to her. Shrinking violet you can’t.
www.jescahoop.com
www.myspace.com/jescahoop
www.last.fm/music/Jesca+Hoop
MORE ON JESCA HOOP
Neil Spencer
The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009
"A Californian resident in Manchester, Hoop comes hotly tipped, helped by a CV that includes a spell as Tom Waits's childminder. Waits's description of her music as "like going swimming in a lake at night" proves apt for her crystal vocals and the shimmering, booming backings on, say, "Whispering Light", or of more spartan, psych-folk pieces like "Murder of Birds". Hoop's a shape-shifter, though, comfortable with blues flavours or a murder ballad ("Tulips"), while her melodies and nature-inspired imagery have the relentless, angular quality of Kate Bush or Björk. An assured innovative, impressive piece of work."
Will Dean
The Guardian, Friday 27 November 2009
""Tom Waits's babysitter" seems a fairly arresting way to describe a new singer-songwriter. In Californian Jesca Hoop's case, it's bizarrely true. Thankfully, that's not the most interesting thing about her. Hunting My Dress is a nine-song collection of beautiful, pastoral compositions that sounds as if it could be the soundtrack for an autumnal Scandinavian vampire movie. Natural elements rear their head throughout – in the lyrics and literally, as in the case of The Kingdom, which features twittering birdsong. It's good enough to compare to the more wholesome elements of The White Album, Joanna Newsom's Ys and Elbow's quieter moments (Guy Garvey actually lends subtle backing vocals to the gingerbread-sweet Murder of Birds). Enchanting in parts, Hunting My Dress sounds like the sprouting of a wondrous new talent."
It may seem a strange thing to say of a musician whose singing is so startlingly original, whose writing is so stamped with her personality and history, but Jesca Hoop is still trying to make sense of her talent and find her own voice. The 33-year-old Manchester-based Californian, whose remarkable new album, Hunting My Dress, confirms her as one of alternative folk-pop’s most arresting recent arrivals, sings like an outcast angel and writes like a restless explorer. Her songs are both ancient and modern, dark as night and suffused with light. But she’s terrible at espousing her own worth; lucky, then, that a growing number of prominent supporters (including Guy Garvey of Elbow) are prepared to do it for her.
Hoop was raised on folk, opera and choral music in a strict Mormon household of five siblings, until the collapse of her parents’ marriage made her reject the church and go wandering around the American wilderness. She eventually got a job as the live-in child minder to the children of Tom Waits, who describes Hoop’s music as “like going swimming in a lake at night”. Such details make for good biographical colour, certainly. But they run the risk of over-shadowing Hoop’s innate gifts. She may once have needed the leg-up such nuggets provide; now, though, her songs speak for themselves.
That’s what her fans think, anyway. Hoop, though, while fluent in self-doubt and deprecation, seems still to be battling with the strictures and structures of her childhood, lessons she has yet, she says, to fully unlearn. Just a sentence or two from her on the period in her adolescence when her mother built a theatre in the basement is enough to explain why Waits, so drawn to the wilder shores, felt compelled to champion Hoop’s early songs.
“The time the theatre was in my house,” she says, “was across the period when my parents were splitting up. And all of a sudden, there were a lot of gay men in my basement, tap-dancing, including the man that was the straw that broke the camel’s back in terms of my mother. She fell in love with a gay man and converted him into heterosexual behaviour for a moment, and into the Mormon religion. But it didn’t hold. And according to my mother, there was a woman ghost that would hang around our theatre at that time, too; she saw her.”
What Hoop has not been able to cast off — and nor, she stresses, would she want to entirely — are the harmonic and melodic disciplines of the music she grew up singing. She has tried, she says, with a wry chuckle. “Melodic integrity and narrative complexity so often get in the way of me writing something that is just fun. I get bound up in writing things that are almost like lacework. I would love to write a song that everyone knows. You know how people don’t really sing along with Björk? Or Kate Bush? I do find myself wondering if there’s a certain type of personality — the type that knows where it’s going, that knows what everyone can relate to — and that they’re the ones that can write the songs everyone can sing along to.” Does it matter if she can’t? “I don’t know,” she laughs. “But I’m not sure you can be abstract and still do that.”
“Abstract” makes Hoop’s music sound much more impenetrable than it is. Like Bush and Joni Mitchell, the two singers she was exposed to when she first rejected the church and whose unshackled creativity her own music recalls, Hoop has a born writer’s watchful, recording eye. The rich and sometimes opaque language and imagery in her songs coexist with, rather than obscure, sentiments that are identifiably universal. Ambiguity about a relationship, and fear over what an encroaching sense of entrapment may bring out in her, produce lines as ominous as “A snake in a defensive coil” and “The cobra locked outside”.
Musically, too, her new album is voracious, stopping for supplies here in folk, there in madrigals, a tangent towards garage, another to Weimar cabaret, forwards to hymnal, the backing singing conjuring up American-Indian vocal semaphore one minute, sacred song the next. It’s a thrilling, haunted ride.
“What I’m really trying to do,” Hoop says, “and it’s not the easiest thing — in fact, it’s a real balancing act for me because I’m a folk singer at heart — but my aim is to throw all sorts of impurities into my roots.” Does she feel she has succeeded? “Oh, I call myself a fraud. I write, but I’m not necessarily a writer. But I don’t know what makes a writer. The fact that they do it all the time, I guess. I think about it all the time.” On her new song Murder of Birds (on which Garvey guests), Hoop sings: “I’ve got demons, when I need ’ems.” That’s such a writerly line, I say: detached from proceedings, dipping into emotion when the need arises, manipulating everything in your path. “But writers have to,” Hoop exclaims. “How can you expect them to be any different? They’re just putting things in capsules for the rest of us.”
Seed of Wonder, the song that first got Hoop noticed when the influential LA DJ Nic Harcourt played it on his radio show, is a euphoric celebration of the writer’s gift. Hoop resists any sifting of her lyrics for autobiographical gold, but she does point out that it was written because she couldn’t write at the time (which any fan of her work will recognise as a typically circuitous Hoop route). More often, she says, “Because I come from an intellectual place in writing — you know, ‘Please write something of worth, please communicate something’ — I have to let myself just put them out, and go, ‘No; no substance here; just let it be fun.’ And I like dumb.”
She has, predictably, been saddled with most of the adjectives applied to female singers who issue music from left field. “Quirky, whimsical, the crazy girl? Yup,” she sighs. “People say that. I would still consider it a compliment, because… it is. They may not mean it that way, of course, but to me it means that you are inventive, you are using your own antennae rather than what’s been fed to you. I’m not crazy, I’m very practical in a lot of ways. I rather wish I was crazy, then I could come up with the kinds of things that really crazy people come up with.
“I’m expressive, but I’m not expressed. I feel constantly frustrated by how able I am to express myself yet how able I am to not express myself.” She laughs again. “If that makes any sense at all.” She should stop worrying. It makes as much sense as her music. Which makes a lot more sense than Jesca Hoop seems to think.
JESCA HOOP
By Dave Freak
Though yet to make her name, American songwriter Jesca Hoop already has some fans in high places, notably her former boss Tom Waits and Elbow's Guy Garvey.
"Guy was given a mixed tape by a friend with one of my songs on it," recalls Hoop. "He called me to do a phone interview for his BBC 6 Music radio show and that conversation lead to a small tour in the States which I joined as the support act, which then lead to our collaboration on my song Murder Of Birds, which then lead to more touring."
Alongside a couple of Elbow tours, Hoop has also opened for Andrew Bird and Sinead O'Conner, a career path she never have imagined pursuing as she grew up in her native California. One of five children, she had a strict religious upbringing. Her mum was an opera singer, and the family enjoyed singing folk songs together, but it wasn't until much later in life that Hoop discovered the exciting world of contemporary pop music and the wonders of MTV. Leaving home, she worked as a farmer, a carpenter, and in a youth rehabilitation centre before taking up a position as nanny for cult musician Tom Waits, who later paid her a grand compliment by describing her songs as akin to "going swimming in a lake at night".
"Homesteading was my plan A - growing my food and living on a piece of land in a very basic fashion," Hoop says of her initial life-plan. "This didn't involve the music biz! I hadn't chosen music as a career. I was living a rather rogue life style when I realised I wasn't applying my strongest tools - writing and performing - to my life's plan. I wanted to ramble with aims and arrive with something to share, something beautiful, something that sustains me, if that makes sense. I would say that music is a means to an end - if there is an end - while I pursue a life's fulfilment."
Listing her influences, Hoop name-checks Kate Bush (circa The Dreaming and Sensual World), Piaf, Waits, Leonard Cohen, Cat Stevens, chamber music, gospel, blue grass and "any music that is good".
"I am encouraged every time I hear the real deal, music that was drawn from vision. I appreciate musicians that approach music as a craft - music is good when something is truly experienced when creating it."
To that list she should also add Elbow as not only does Garvey contribute vocals to the track Murder Of Birds on Hoop's recent album, Hunting My Dress (her first UK release), but she's since traded sun-kissed California for Elbow's home city of Manchester.
"There is just too much sunshine in South California!" she smiles of her relocation. "Really though, I moved to Manchester because all signs pointed me in this direction, as though I was ushered in. Love and work ...life! The bigger picture - that's why I moved to Manchester ... and I am happy I did."
Initially released late last year to a raft of rave reviews, Hunting My Dress is a beguiling, accomplished and subtle collection, layered, dream-like, sensual.
"The theme of death acts as a thread in this record. Love also. And sex. And the title of the album - beside it coming from the final track on the record ... I get the sense that it comes from the search for true love."
And she’s proud to say she’s found love in the North of England with one of Elbow’s crew, which makes one ponder how her next album will sound.
“It’s too soon to say - I am just beginning the writing now,” she says. “I am curious how Manchester living will affect my next record, though. I'll keep you posted." |
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