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.
Hunting My Dress is released on Last Laugh on November 30
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