(SOUNDBITE OF JESCA HOOP SONG, "LONG WAVE HOME")
ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
The music of singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop can be a little hard to pin down - folksy guitar riffs in one song, driving rock beats in the next. Sometimes it sounds almost like classical.
JESCA HOOP: It doesn't comply to genre. I - that's not something I really know how to do. I'm just, I guess, maybe too restless or not educated well enough in any one particular genre. I just basically cling to songwriting.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TLONG WAVE HOME")
HOOP: (Singing) Don't look to the night sky to know where you are. Don't look to the night sky.
NADWORNY: Hoop grew up in Northern California and left home as a teenager, going off the grid, living in the wilderness. In her early 20s, she got a job nannying for Tom Waits' kids. The gravelly voiced singer passed on her demo CD, the start of her music career. Now, some two decades later, Hoop is out with her seventh studio album. It's called "Long Wave Home." For this record, she decided to try something new. She produced it herself.
HOOP: I'd always been under the sturdy wing of a producer. And this time, I thought, if I'm going to grow and evolve, I should take off those training wheels. I should rely on my own judgment. To make it all work, I decided that I would travel to players rather than them travel to me. And so I set up my camper van and I hit the road, and I was out for about two weeks, tracking. And then I came back to my headquarters in Manchester, where we assembled the fruits of our forage.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DESIGNER CITIZEN")
HOOP: (Singing) Country. Going to laugh as I'm losing my country. Love a dirty joke. It's good to be in the know.
NADWORNY: Well, there are a couple songs on the album that seem to be about politics or current events. I wonder if we could listen to the song "Designer Citizen."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DESIGNER CITIZEN")
HOOP: (Singing) Fiction. Isn't truth stranger than fiction? I woke up to Elon's hands on my tweet cred. Shadow-banned for reading Ozturk's op-ed. If you wear the rag in this picture. One of these doesn't fit my country. Disappearing words and disappearing girls. What spotlight...
I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone who has a goal and a desire, but the information that comes their way gets them to act against teir own - their best interest. I was listening to individuals who have most recently lost their country to fascism and listening to the signs. And some of them were much more subtle than the ones you would get in, say, like, a pamphlet that gives you fascism 101. So I wanted to put myself in the shoes of someone who was willing to go that way.
NADWORNY: There are some songs that are political or have these kind of details of current events. But then there are also these songs that feel very personal and intimate, like "Love Is Salvation."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS SALVATION")
HOOP: (Singing) We built our home out of wreckage. There's a heronry up in the tree, a family of fox in the backyard. Every morning, we go walk in the green. Water comes up in the well.
The thing that holds that song together is what it takes to be a friend. As our friends go through things, it's important, I think, that each of us has a witness to what we're going through. And the song is, like, the ultimate, I've got your back.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS SALVATION")
HOOP: (Singing) Listen to me. I'm your witness. And I believe in who you are.
Sorry. I apologize for crying on radio (laughter).
NADWORNY: You're fine.
HOOP: But...
NADWORNY: Take a breath. You're fine.
HOOP: It's not a heavy song. It's self-assured. I think it's really important to have someone in your life that can see you clearly. And I guess that's what the song is - someone to just speak up on your behalf and know what about a circumstance is right and what's wrong.
NADWORNY: And you were this friend that helped someone else stay afloat in a time...
HOOP: Yeah.
NADWORNY: ...Of trouble?
HOOP: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not always the best at it, but making - writing a song is a good effort, I think.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CARAVAN")
HOOP: (Singing) Deaf to my mother's warning, I left the West behind. Woke to the darkling sun. Put new words on my tongue. What it means to love a man and give my body to this land. No sign of the troubadour.
NADWORNY: You grew up in a very religious family in a Mormon community in California. I wonder how music was part of your life growing up.
HOOP: Music had a absolutely central part in my family life. My dad was a folk - like, a guitarist. My mother was an amateur opera singer. I think music was our common language. It was something we did as a family, and it was absolutely integral into how we saw ourselves.
NADWORNY: I read in an interview where you said that music was kind of a thing that helped you get from point A to point B, like singing...
HOOP: Yeah.
NADWORNY: ...While you walked.
HOOP: Yeah. I had a lot of walking to do 'cause there was quite the stretch between my dad's house and high school. I was constantly singing.
NADWORNY: Are there any parallels to, like, leaving home when you were a teenager? You left home, you know, when you were young - like, 15. What were you looking for?
HOOP: Oh, I was looking for a way out of the Mormon Church - to find psychological freedom from the things that I was taught as a child, all the way up till the age of 14. Another thing I was looking for when I was a kid - I was looking for wild nature, and I was looking for, like, unbridled life. I was looking for, like, rough-and-ready, living off the grid. I had no plan. I didn't really have any structure. My life unfolded through each person that I met.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG STORM")
HOOP: (Singing) Today, I'm leaving. Big storm coming. Big storm coming.
NADWORNY: Well, it's interesting. So many years later, I find those themes are still in your music. Like, I really love the song "Big Storm," which feels like an anthem kind of declaring your freedom even now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIG STORM")
HOOP: (Singing) I am nobody's woman. Nobody's woman. Nobody's woman. I ain't got no man. I got my own plan.
Yeah. I think it's something we have to do time and time again because we are - we live in patterns, don't we? It's the warp and the weft. And it's these patterns that we are bound to until somehow we break the pattern. And I don't know anything about breaking patterns, Elissa, so...
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
HOOP: I actually might be breaking one now.
NADWORNY: With this album?
HOOP: With my commitment to it, because I had to commit to this thing that had a lot of potential pitfalls and I could have failed at. But I haven't failed so far.
(SOUNDBITE OF JESCA HOPE SONG, "BIG STORM")
NADWORNY: That was singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop. Her new album, "Long Wave Home," is out now, and she'll be touring the U.S. this summer.
HOOP: (Singing) Blowing at the back of me. Blowing at the back of me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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