North Carolina’s acclaimed indie-Americana quartet Mipso release their fourth album, Edges Run, on April 6th, 2018 (AntiFragile Music). The band will begin an extensive North American album release tour on Edges Run release date, hitting 30+ markets throughout the United States through mid-May, with summer dates still to be announced. Visit www.mipsomusic.com to view the current list of Mipso’s upcoming tour dates.
Mipso has always been a creative democracy, and on Edges Run the band takes this ideal to greater lengths than ever before. “We’re four personalities with different ways of telling stories who hope to tell a stronger story collectively,” says vocalist, fiddle player and songwriter Libby Rodenbough of bandmates Jacob Sharp (vocalist, mandolinist and songwriter), Joseph Terrell (vocalist, guitarist, songwriter) and Wood Robinson (vocalist, bassist). “Working so closely forces all of your edges to rub up against each other.”
“We’d all seen a lot of change in a short period,” says Sharp of the time between the band’s recent 2016 release, Coming Down The Mountain, and Edges Run - recorded in early 2017. “Three of us moved out of the Triangle area and into other places. We had relationships end and deaths of friends and family members.”
Those events alone could account for the deeply introspective themes on Edges Run, recorded during the dead of winter in Eugene, Oregon. “We were beginning to feel, probably for the first time, that youth was more behind us than ahead, and so I think we were all feeling different pressures closing in,” says Sharp. So the band took a step back to consider their songs-in-progress — and took a leap of faith in traveling far from their North Carolina comfort zone to record in Oregon with producer (and bassist) Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Andrew Bird, Anaïs Mitchell).
They carried with them into the sessions a desire to stretch themselves beyond previously known roads of composition and performance. For the first time, Mipso came to the studio with sketches of songs rather than fully-fleshed arrangements and decided to co-write songs together, also a first for the band.
“We decided to let ourselves explore new ideas and new sounds for this album, not knowing quite what that would feel like. We had to trust that the end result would sound honest, would sound like us,” says Terrell.
Call it a new level of confidence or a developing collective consciousness, but with five years as a band and hundreds of nights on the road together, with the release of Edges Run Mipso retains its traditional roots while becoming thoroughly modern, intuitive musicians with the ability to transcend conventions and embrace what lies ahead.
“We have a better idea of what we can do, and how we want to do it,” says Sharp.
