Jesca Hoop doesn’t write songs so much as she conjures them. Her lyrics arrive like spells from a better-read witch, while the music slinks in with all the pomp and flash of a monk in meditation. On her album Memories Are Now, Hoop sounds stripped to the nerve. That’s no accident.
“Blake [Mills] was coming to my shows for years,” she says of her producer and longtime collaborator. “He realized the handshake really happens when there’s less information—when it’s just me and the words.” The result is a sparse record so minimal it practically dares you to look away. Spoiler: you won’t.
The title track is both mantra and middle finger, depending on how the light hits it. Hoop calls it a collection of “incantations or mottos,” adding, “It’s an affirmation and dedication to whatever it is you're pursuing.” And that pursuit, naturally, comes with the usual potholes and rejections. “I was only hearing the word ‘no’ when I wrote it. Roadblocks. That song was medicine for me,” she says.
Medicine is a recurring word in this conversation—rare for a musician who doesn’t peddle platitudes. When Hoop says it, she means it. Songs aren’t just songs, they’re salves, self-help audiobooks with a better soundtrack. “If something’s calling you, chances are it’s gonna come with a whole lot of challenges,” she explains. “So the song helps you stay in the work.”
Then there’s “The Lost Sky,” a track that flutters like a lullaby and spirals like a panic attack. Hoop refers to it as “a broken record for the mind that won’t get off the track,” inspired by someone who “wasn’t going to let [her] finish.” If you can’t heal the relationship, you can at least memorialize it in 3 minutes and 40 seconds of beautiful ache.
“The writing of that song was also medicine,” she admits. “About letting go of particular people who… if they won’t show up, you have to let them go.” So she wrote a song. Because sometimes the only closure you get is your own voice singing the door shut.
Don’t call it a breakup album, though. Hoop didn’t even realize she was breaking up at the time. “I thought it was more of a confrontation. Like, ‘Listen, if you don’t show up we might just have to break up.’ But over time… yeah.”
Much of Memories Are Now was born in the same orbit as her collaboration with Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. The timelines blur, but that only adds to the mythos. “Your songs are like bookmarks through your story,” Hoop says. “You can tell where an artist sat by the progression of their songs.”
She hasn’t completed a new song in a while, she confesses near the end of the call. “I’m curious to hear what that completion sounds like after having written with Sam,” she says, like someone wondering what kind of spells she has left in her grimoire.
If Memories Are Now is any indication, it’ll probably be devastating. And gorgeous. And sparse. And—let’s face it—better than whatever you’re listening to right now.
Hear the interview above. Peep "The Lost Sky" video below.
