If you want to know about Mipso, just hit play. After all, their songs do say it best.
“Just a couple of kids with a lot of love,” they croon in their hit single “Louise.” It really does say it all, and “everything about it takes a little luck” rings especially true considering the band went from a group of college kids playing music at frat parties to a prominent feather in the “dark holler pop” cap who is releasing their sixth studio album later this summer, it’s safe to say their success has taken equal parts of love and luck over the years.
“We have achieved a type of love that I don’t have anywhere else in my life, which is somewhere in between or some amalgam of siblings and terrific business partners, and lovers,” Rodenbough said, locking eyes with Terrell.
“Sort of like if you married your cousin,” Terrell agreed with a cheeky smile, but just seriously enough that one might wonder if he believed it.
Love is the only way you can tell the story of Mipso, considering it’s the thing that started it all in the first place.
“We didn’t mean to be a real band,” said Terrell.“We were just friends learning about music together.”
At first, Mipso was a trio: Terrell, Sharp and Robinson. The kind of friends who played for anyone who would listen, the folks playing fraternity parties, sharing the stage with a keg in the corner. Robinson on bass, Sharp on mandolin and Terrell on guitar found their missing piece in Rodenbough and her fiddle. Her feminine edge seemed to round out their three-part harmony. At first, even though it “wasn’t promising” as Rodenbough and Terrell emphatically agreed on, it didn’t take long to catch on: there was something special here.
Special, and at least a little weird — in a good way — are the best way to describe the band and their sound, even though they rarely describe it themselves. It’s all in the name “Mipso,” allegedly taken from a Japanese phrase meaning “something familiar, but that’s a little bit off,” an anecdote on their Wikipedia page, and the version of the story Terrell insisted told it best. They wouldn’t definitively comment on their sound, their memories, or even what makes them “good”, but that’s on purpose. They don’t want to set the record straight, they want the listener to come to it all on their own.
“If we could explain it, we wouldn’t need to play it,” Terrell said. “It’s like you asking me to describe like, what’s your daughter like? It’s like, well, there’s so much, there’s so much I could say that a stranger would be better.”
Mipso plays songs beneath the glow of a traveling spotlight, never singling out one aspect of the Americana-bluegrass-folk or one member of the band for too long.
It’s hard for them to pinpoint exactly what makes it work, but this fluid focus just might be the key to achieving an element of peace in the creative process. They compare it to making a sitcom TV show, to filming episodes of “Survivor”, but whatever they’re doing works. The machine is well-oiled enough that a new album,”Book of Fools,” is releasing August 25.
This time, though, they did it differently.
“It took a longer time,” Terrell said. “We ended up recording it in a way that was a lot more loose and forgiving, and I think like willing to leave space for improvisation and changes in the arrangements as they happened.”
Again, Mipso and their process is best explained in their own words. According to their website, “Rock, country, indie-Americana: genre descriptors try but miss the point, which is that these four people and only these four people could’ve made this album. Only a decade in the van could’ve made this album. Only four personalities held in sustained, frictional balance could’ve made this album with its sizzling energy and unlikely cohesion. Mipso did it again. These are searching, driving songs from a band that’s still trying to say something different, still going somewhere new.”
After creating five albums together, they didn’t just want their sound to be different, they wanted their process to be different, too, reflecting the changes they’ve all undergone over the last decade.
“We were more on the side of wanting to make something that we love,” he continued. “We know it’s gonna happen if we spend the time with each other to let it happen, rather than forcing it to happen.”
They found their “something new” in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
“The day that we arrived, a beautiful six inches of perfect white snow fell in a way that we’ve never experienced in North Carolina,” Rodenbough said.
Their environment was just as integral to their creative process as anything else, as they shuttled between California and Wisconsin for months, but it was the time between takes that stood out the most.
“In Oakland, when we were recording the bulk of it, we would step outside in the hot California sun and just sort of bake and bask. And it’s such a nice feeling to have the sun beat down on you and then return to the cave to tinker with your instruments,” Terrell said. “And then on the opposite side, when we were in Wisconsin, we were huddled by a wood stove together and that was really nice. That’s another kind of cozy, warm togetherness feeling that’s nice for making music.”
This is how they’ve learned to approach this album. It’s about the process, not about hitting a specific target goal or benchmark. It’s a freeing mentality but one that took time to learn: just let the song be the thing that it is.
“It’s a calling, not a job,” Terrell said. “I think of it as catch and release. You get one, you have to give it back to get another one, or return it to the river.”
But before this newest album is returned to the river for public consumption, they touch on the one thing that they always come back to, even when it feels like they’re swimming upstream. From sunny California to snowy Wisconsin, they’re still the backyard-band that was born in a sticky summer season in Carrboro, playing music just for the sake of playing music.
“Hell yeah, we’re a North Carolina band,we’re all from North Carolina,” Terrell said. “We went to school here. It’s where we played all the greatest shows of our career.”
On this, like most things it seems, they agree.
“I think our music makes sense here,” Rodenbough said. “I don’t think we could make it anywhere else”
Jade is originally from Southwest Florida but has lived in North Carolina for over a decade. She graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in Political Science and Artistic Management, spent most of her time in college campaigning for local and state elections, and is a proud alum of The Daily Tar Heel. Today, she works in public communications at UNC. You can find her on Twitter here and read more of her work here.
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