I came down to Earth to write angsty, dark-angel songs: TLOBF meets Jesca Hoop

No one could accuse Jesca Hoop of having a mundane back story. This is not someone who ‘merely’ got into music at college, or started out by being forced into piano lessons as a child. Raised by Mormon parents, Hoop ‘escaped’ at 16 and lived as a homesteader on ranches in Wyoming, before becoming a nanny to Tom Waits’ kids. The godfather of introspection nudged the fledgling songwriter into her musical career and by way of an excellent debut album Kismet, she connected with Elbow’s Guy Garvey. So struck was he by Hoop’s bleak folk ballads, that the Lancastrian treasure suggested she relocate from LA to Manchester.

And so she did – which is why TLOBF is sitting in a Brazilian bar off the city’s Deansgate, sharing a beer and a chocolate bunny with the garrulous Ms Hoop. I am hoping to talk about both Jesca’s spellbinding new EP Snowglobe and her imminent third album. But things are never straightforward in Jesca World, and we chat tangentially about the Foo Fighters, faddy eaters and comparing her back catalogue to labour – she can differentiate her records between contractions, dilation and the actual crowning.

After the interview, I give Jesca a lift home (Hey, I’m all heart). She tells me that England is beginning to feel like home and while she now finds herself calling dinner “tea”, she remains confused by Manchester’s road network not being laid out like a US grid system. Jesca is delightful company – engaging and warm, endlessly self-aware but intriguingly obtuse – and I’m intrigued by her talk of her constant discontent and her dark idiosyncrasies.

Two days later and I’m back in Manchester for her hometown show. Replete with a full backing band Hoop is in exhilarating form. We get the tall stories about her late mother’s forays into pot-smoking and her brother’s putrid plaster cast. Her songs range from haunting murder-ballads to shuffling boogie tunes, and in her simple black dress and artful bird’s nest hair Jesca Hoop looks and sounds like a Gothic princess.

You’ve recently completed a short UK tour. How were the shows?

Excellent – they’ve been excellent. I couldn’t be happier about the people who come to the shows. It’s all about the kind of people who come. I’m trying out new songs on them and looking round – having eye contact – and seeing whether they are digging it or not. I’m really happy they seem to like what they are hearing.

Looking back over the last couple of years, what sort of impact has Guy Garvey’s friendship had on your life?

Well, he doesn’t really have to give me his support. It’s not something he has to do. The whole course of my life shifted as the result of one phone call with Guy and in more ways that just music – in a holistic sense. My whole life shifted in the best of ways. I think I am closer to the older world – the UK and Europe – and it is easier to work here in a lot of ways; a lot of times I was fed up with the United States. I get frustrated with how big it is, and how people are not given enough information. I love the cosy nature of the European countries. They have their own cultures that support each other. The US is one, big, diluted enigma.

You must be delighted for Guy at Elbow’s well-deserved recent success?

You know what? I am very, very, very, very happy that people are happy for them, because there are very few that reach that level of success and remain in favour. They are good people. That is having it all; having the people who brought them to that place still love them.

And how is Manchester treating you? It must be quite a culture shock after LA?

It is a great city and it is under a cloud and that it was maybe keeps it a best-kept secret. I was introduced into the ‘a friend of mine is a friend of yours’ thing, so I couldn’t have received a better welcome to this town. And, from someone I respect so much, I was willing to take his advice.

Your new EP, Snowglobe, opens with the track ‘City Bird’, which I believe was inspired your experience of homeless people in LA. Why did this strike such a chord with you?

I am from Northern California originally and homelessness is sparse. It downtown LA it is a way of life for a broad population of many different cultures. On that scale, it was a surprise and the first time I saw it I was confounded. But some of the best architecture in LA is downtown and it is abandoned. It was regenerated and professional people moved in.

http://vimeo.com/20584742

And what happens to the homeless population once gentrification has taken hold?

That’s the problem. I don’t honestly know. They were still on my block, when I was there. I was just witness to this situation. There was no benefit to me moving down there, but it was like a village and everyone knew each other. I loved that about living there. Just one block – and you knew everybody.

Do you require a certain ‘societal tension’ to be creative?

No, I carry enough tension in my own body – I don’t need to live in societal tension. I do appreciate human interaction. I don’t need isolation to write.

So, do you need to be unhappy to make your music? Could a contented Jesca Hoop ever make a great album?

Well, my producer asks me ‘how are you doing?’ and I’ll say I’m fine and he’ll say ‘are you happy?’ and I’ll tell him ‘no’, and he says ‘good’. He wants to make records. I’m not content – there is a level of frustration that I always carry. That frustration, that hunger, is necessary. There are so many examples you can hold up of being comfortable and how expression no longer translates. On a fundamental level, you don’t care what they are talking about any more, because they are too comfortable. You are gonna have to interpret what I’m saying right now – you are going to have to translate.

I understand what you are saying, but isn’t part of life learning to accept what you have, and worry less about what you haven’t got?

I do work on that, but I cannot claim to have mastered that art form. I am no Buddha. I didn’t come down to Earth to be Buddha; I came down to write angsty, dark-angel songs. Contentment doesn’t have much to do with it.

For me, the standout song on Snowglobe is the title track. I believe it is about your mother’s death and was written some time ago. Why did you choose to include it only now on the EP?

It is true that I wasn’t ready to record it at the time when I wrote it. It is a very abstract piece of music in terms of the way I have arranged it. It some ways it is a lot like the experience of someone’s passing. Your response to someone’s passing cannot be organised – you just have to let it be exactly what it is. That’s just what it is – a rollercoaster – and the song is a rollercoaster. The song changes tempo three times and it is all over the place. There is a tension in the song but it does things that the rational mind would tell you not to do and I think just now was the time to work on it. A producer might have told me not to change tempo and not to change time signature and then I maybe I’d have thought that I shouldn’t respond to my mother’s death that way. Maybe I should have not expressed the nature of that experience that way – but of course I should have. There is something to be said about translating that experience to someone else for better of for worse.

If I may piece together your past experiences, what sort of nanny were you?

I always called myself the wicked twin of Amelia Bedelia but you guys don’t know her [I subsequently discover her to be a fictional accident-prone housekeeper in a series of US children’s books]. She is an incredibly charming but incredibly flawed character. She would set fire to the curtains but then bake a brilliant cake to make up for it. But, we are not going to say ‘nanny’ in this interview. We are not going to mention my affiliation with the children or the family. We are just going to mention the music.

Oh, okay. But I was also really interested in your time working on ranches as a homesteader – can I ask about that?

Yes! It was one of my favourite parts of my lifetime. I really loved living outdoors and I loved growing food and not earning money. I loved not using money as a currency and all the things that came along with a very simple construct of living.

Were you contented? Why did you stop living like that?

I was not content. I have never been content. Who would be? Contentedness is for – well it doesn’t happen for people under the age of 55. I stopped because I wanted to play music for people and I know idea what that meant. But you never do when you set out to do something, do you? You think of the picture that has painted for you, but, in reality, the picture is quite different.

How is your new album shaping up?

It is written as much as I have; in terms of you never finish writing. I have concentrated on simplifying, to some degree, my language. You know when you are speaking with someone you have never spoken to before, you might try to find the common ground a little bit more. You might try to hold off the things like a certain area of your sense of humour or a certain element of your dark side and curb it just a little bit. Let’s just say that my pool of idiosyncrasies is really deep, and if I want to, I can become really illegible and unrelatable. I have worked on my communication skills a little bit more and how to take my same, very honest views and communicate them in a way that aren’t so challenging for the listener. I want to simplify and reduce.

How easy was that for you?

It has been so easy. I’m like ‘damn it, this is much easier’; the songs are becoming a little shorter and to the point. My songs in the past have all been between four and six-and-a-half minutes long and, not that I found them tiresome, but I’m naturally going towards shorter songs, which is a surprise to me. I also want to use more common denominators, but without – what’s the word – what came to my mind was ‘shitting where you eat’. Know what I mean? My effort is to communicate but not compromise.

But you seem to be communicating pretty well thus far in your career.

Yeah, but I really do want to communicate and do this for a living. Communication is a real craft. That’s what I’m up for.

After some high-profile tours with Elbow and the success of your last album Hunting My Dress, have you a different set of expectations for your next album?

My expectation for this album are that I reach a fuller bloom and for people to see a fuller bloom. If you heard the first one you saw a kind of dilation, and then on the next one you saw an increase in contractions and with this one I would like to see somewhat of a crowning. If you ask me, I think that three albums in I would like people to see an artist that is more like a crowning. Not the full birthing, no, no – I’m not there. We are just getting a hint of what this babe might look like.

Jesca Hoop – While You Were Away