- "Shaped by Sound" combines performance and conversation to capture the depth of the North Carolina music scene.

On the surface, Mipso is a tight-knit bluegrass and Americana group forged by friendship at UNC Chapel Hill, along with countless hours of playing together on the road.

But that's not the full picture of this group.

In fact, when you zoom in past those genres, you get something much deeper, brilliant, and unique.

Today on "Shaped by Sound", performing songs from across their catalog and in conversation with me, this is Mipso.

I was doing a little internet sleuthing on both of you before you came in, just so you know, doing my research.

Isaac and I were doing that, our story producer.

And obviously, we went through Wikipedia and I found something on there.

It was about little P in the miso.

Can we talk about that for a second?

- Yeah, we should set the record straight on this one.

This is 100% factual, very true story.

And the story goes, we wanted a band name, and we didn't want it to sound too overly folky 'cause we felt like there were a lot of bands with similar names in those days.

Maybe this is true in every era of music.

And we learned about a phrase, we went to Japan early on, played a little bluegrass festival in Takorazuka, Japan 'cause Jacob did some research over there for his senior thesis.

- Oh, cool.

- The third oldest Bluegrass festival in the world.

- Whoa.

- That's true.

- Okay.

- And a cool scene of like real bluegrass heads.

We found that there's an old phrase that's like they say, "Oh, there's a little P in the miso."

Which means it's traditional, it's something I recognize, but there's something a little off.

And we thought that was funny.

And so we put a little P and miso.

- That's awesome.

- [Joseph] There you go.

- It's funny 'cause I've had some people come up to me like, "So Mipso, what's the name?

"Where did that come from?"

And I was like, "Well, we found this thing on Wikipedia.

I think we gotta go to the primary source and figure it out."

- Yeah, you know, the number of times you've been asked that question?

We've been asked that question way more.

- I'm sure you have.

- But we brought it up upon ourselves.

- Yeah, well, that's awesome.

I think that's a really fun name, and it really makes a lot of sense for y'all too.

So also kinda wanna jump in so you're both from North Carolina., Can you talk to us a little bit about where you're from?

- Yeah, I grew up in Morganton in the Foothills, and was there for a while until a faded day in Chapel Hill when I met my triad brother to be.

- That's right.

Yeah, I grew up in High Point.

And we met on a college visit trip to Carolina.

We were I guess 18 in the spring of?

- Spring of 2008.

- 2008.

2008.

- 2008.

- 2008.

This is the funny part looking back to me, is that we both had our instruments.

We were visiting college together, and for the two day weekend trip, Jacob took his mandolin and I took my guitar.

And we were like, "Hey, you wanna meet in the courtyard and play some songs?"

- Yep, much more interested in talking about songs than talking about the potential future at school.

And talking about songs became our potential future at school.

- Yeah, it's true.

- That's so cool.

And so this is even like before orientation.

This is like you just were in high school, and went to go visit and you were like, "This is it, this is my moment.

I need to bring my instrument."

- I'd never leave home without it.

- And sometimes, you find your band mate.

- Yeah, if you're lucky.

- Yeah, little did we know.

It is funny.

- Yeah, and that's sort of where this journey for you all begins, right?

What was that like as you found each other?

Like, what was that moment like, and kind of how did it evolve?

- Well, that was a time in the wider and the North Carolina music scene, where there was a real boom in the acoustic music community, presenting songs less traditionally, Mumford, the Avetts.

A lot of people were kind of for the first time, I think combining some of the song craft that we found appealing about other music with the roots of the music that we had grown up around.

And so what we were thinking when we first met each other was just, what could our version of that be?

And how do you write a song?

How do you perform it?

And I think that quest is really what led the start of our relationship and led us to Wood and Libby as well.

- Yeah, yeah, we were super green.

I mean, we were kids.

We wanted to learn how to play music together, and really wanted to learn how to sing together.

And I think that's what kind of like jelled our interest in continuing to make something together with me and Jay 'cause that first time we played together, we sang some harmonies and it was fun, and also felt sort of natural.

- Yeah, and we would play at a coffee house, Jack Sprat.

- Jack Sprat, RIP.

- On Franklin Street, that was our first gig as a duo.

And then Joseph met Wood through a mutual friend.

- Yeah, one of my high school buddies.

And Libby, I met at a party in Carrboro.

She dated my brother for a long time.

So she was just sort of like one of our best friends.

And we were just friends making music.

There was no grand design of we're gonna plot a great folk band.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it was just, how do you do this that we've always loved.

I think we were all fascinated with bands.

Had grown up within families that whether they played music or not, made a lot of space for music.

And so we were kind of obsessed with different groups, and different groups for each of us, different types of groups, and we wanted to figure out how to do that, not because we thought we would actually be doing it 15 years later, but it just seemed like a fun basis for friendship.

And we got asked to play a show, and we actually have a recording of it, that first one, and it was so bad.

You can't believe how green we were.

But it's kind of cute.

We were earnest and having fun, and people, I think were having fun around it, people who were hearing it.

We were not the focus of the gig in a lot of ways.

- No, it wasn't a gig, it was a party with music.

- Exactly, but it got us excited and it kinda lit this little fire of how can you keep doing this?

How can you do it more?

And to do it more, you have to do it a little bit better.

And so that was kind of the basis for our friendship.

- I think also our second gig was also sort of party fundraiser for something, for a fraternity.

- Y'all got asked to do a fundraiser on the second gig?

- That was gig one.

- Oh, that was gig one?

- Yeah.

- I'm talking about the Oyster Roast.

Remember, they did like a big oyster roast, and we played in the corner on amplified, and it was like, we might as well have an excuse to play.

And they handed us an envelope with $200 in it.

And to record our first EP, we took it to one of my buddies who had a bunch of microphones and we didn't even open the envelope.

We were like, "We think there's $200 in here."

- Yeah, a one for one.

- Is this enough?

- Can you help us [laughing]?

- Like a mafia deal or something [laughing].

- It was very low key.

- So what did you all find?

Like, what was clicking?

And what were the things that you were like, well, it was working that you were like, wow, this could really be something?

- I think Joe's right.

It was harmony first.

That, I think was the first thing that we were, whether it was like working or not, it was the first thing that we've found our unique version of.

That feels like from the earliest recordings, and since, that's been like the most common thread, I would say.

- Yeah, it's the question of what's fun enough to keep you interested in it, to do it for a lot longer.

Because the only way to get better at something, I think is to do it for a long time.

We've done this for a long time.

When we started, we were not good at all, but we just had such a fun time singing together.

We were like, "This is worth continuing."

- And it seemed like at the time, I mean, you all were just becoming students of music then, right?

Sort of like self-taught, but still like, really trying to study and figure out, and work together just as you would in any sort of undergrad.

I feel like you were just doing that, but with each other and maybe the larger music scene?

- Yeah, I mean, all my band mates did take some music classes though that wasn't the academic focus.

But yeah, I feel like we, Mipso was my musical education.

We taught each other how to do so many parts of what we do now.

- Yeah, totally, and it was a great education in the personalities that make up this part of the state and the country that make this such an incredible place to make music.

We started meeting old folks.

Like I would go down to Pittsboro and hang out with Tommy Edwards, who's this incredible old guitar player, and would sit in his antique shop and he would flip the open sign to say closed, and he would lock the door and sit down with me and say, "Let's play some tunes."

It was an education face-to-face, person to person, and that's a cool way to learn something.

- Yeah, do you think that music can sort of provide a sense of place in a way?

Like, specifically what you're saying, right?

This time and this age and sort of like what you've came from sort of helped develop this sense that was just, this is North Carolinian music.

Do you think that's accurate?

- Oh yeah, I mean, I think especially in the years since as the culture and community has changed so much, the thing in Central North Carolina and beyond, the thing that I feel most bound to as a North Carolinian with identity is the musical core.

That's what I feel like we share and that no level of politics can change.

- Yeah, what do you think, Joe?

- Definitely, definitely, and I wonder too about even the landscape itself, this actual place that we live in was a part of what helped this music develop.

I mean, and not to get back into like, it's the combination of descendants of the slavery and people who came from Ireland and England and brought ballads over, but people who were in mountain communities really isolated from each other, taking these traditions and keeping them going and not because they were beholden to tradition or because they had some abstract stake in continuing something.

They loved these things, and they meant something and they told stories.

It was a way of telling stories with melodies.

And then in the early 20th centuries, they moved to mill towns, and all these different people from different communities were working together in these mill towns and this sort of new resurgence of a kind of string band thing was happening here.

I don't know, it happened here and it's still here.

And I think that it's like you say, everywhere you turn, there's old folks who've been carrying these songs for a long time, so.

- Yeah, and if you hear that song, and you could be anywhere else, you'd be like, "That reminds me of North Carolina, or this time in place, or being in college with my buddies, figuring out music for the first time."

- Totally, totally really proud to be associated with the North Carolina music scene very much.

- Yeah.

- So talk to me a little bit about how this started to evolve, right?

At what point was there?

So you meet Libby, and Libby comes in, and there's four of you.

And at what were you like, "This is something we want to get on the road with.

I wanna tour and I wanna try and really make this happen."

- Yeah, well, graduation put a real cliff to our comfy, cozy, do whatever you want with your weekends time as college students, so we had to decide.

- Yeah, it kind of built from that first gig to over those next two and a half years.

It was at first, one weekend a month, and then every other weekend.

And then basically, every weekend we were playing shows wherever we could get a booking across North Carolina.

And we would come back to Chapel Hill for these kind of once a semester banger shows at the Cradle is how it felt, where it's like we didn't know what to do with ourselves that that many people were coming.

We would literally be like cramming the days before of how do you put together a full set for this many people?

And we would look for ways to make it more exciting than just us two.

We had a mariachi band march through the crowd in between the openers at the second Cradle show, and we would find older musicians who we admired and try and convince 'em to open for us that we could kinda like have that side stage experience of learning from their craft.

And so we were getting all these peaks of ways that you could do it.

I don't know if professionally is the right word, but with maybe even more long-term intention.

And then as graduation approached, we thought how cool would it be to do this for a year, to be able to make a record like we've been listening to and we've heard about, and to have that time and space, and to pay for it by playing some shows.

And the first gigs we really could get were ironically in Japan through your opening question, because I had come back from a summer of research there and knew a lot of the promoters.

So, we went thinking this would just be a cool experience and we'll come back, we'll finish this record, we'll tour it, and then we'll probably get jobs or do something.

And we made a documentary with a friend of ours, Jon Kasbe, another North Carolinian, who's become a celebrated documentary maker since, and that film started doing well at "The Independent Film Festival Circuit".

And that was really the first thing that kind of people within the industry started to reach out to us.

And we saw these inklings of, oh, there might be a path here beyond this year of fun that we had, we thought was all it would be.

- Yeah, a lot of it is flukes of timing.

I mean, I think that the most honest way to tell our story is to not give ourselves much credit.

I mean, we've gotten very lucky at these sort of key moments.

And it was at the very beginning of streaming, which is such a double-edged sword.

A lot more people have heard about us.

It's also, I don't think a very positive way forward for the music industry at large, which is sort of easy to see in another topic.

But we put on a record that we really worked hard on and we got a bunch of buddies to help us with, Andrew Marlin from Watch House, and the Chatham County Line guys, and Bobby Britt from Town Mountain, all these great cool musicians who we looked up to that were very much a part of the North Carolina sound as we understood it.

And we made this album called "Dark Holler Pop" in a great studio called The Rubber Room in Chapel Hill.

And we started playing.

We were just playing coffee shop gigs, and it was a big deal for us when we went to like Greenville or Columbia, South Carolina, and maybe Charlottesville.

We were just barely getting outside North Carolina.

And about six months after the record came out, we played a 15 person coffee shop show at some place.

And then we went back to there six months later, and there were 65 people singing along, and we were like, "I don't understand how this happened."

We were grassroots, we were understanding, every time you go back, you get the word out, you do college radio, you put up more posters.

And right now, it feels like a very like antiquated, old fashioned version of the music industry that we looked up to these bands that were made in the '90s and that's how they did it.

And it was cool.

But this was something that was different.

And it was virality was happening, and we learned that we had gotten some attention on Spotify, which none of us even used yet.

And so I think once we started to see more people at shows outside of Chapel Hill, we were like, "Maybe this isn't just a year of fun.

Maybe we should keep trying to take this seriously."

- Yeah, what was it like?

I feel like there must have been so much energy behind that when you go into a room and there's all these new people, and all of a sudden, everything's starting to change a lot faster.

How did you sort of ride that energy?

How did you kind of continued forward from there?

- We just said yes to everything.

- Yeah.

- I mean, lesson learned would've been to put a filter on a little sooner maybe, but we just kept going.

And one of the things I will take credit for, 'cause Joe's right that a lot of it was this kind of random timing, right place, right time, right people around us who were lifting us up.

But one thing that we did do well was we four just banded together and said, "Let's just give this everything as long as we can."

And it's the most defining struggle and achievement of the band is keeping for people whose lives were changing, whose musical tastes were changing, aligned enough to keep saying yes to each other.

And I think that was why it worked.

- Yeah, through our 20's.

- But we felt all this pressure too of, as soon as some attention started coming, I think we felt a desire to really put our stamp in a specific way and to craft that.

And sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

I mean, I think the records always sounded good, but sometimes after the fact, we would be like, "Oh, that felt a little forced.

What's our version of it?"

And we would find on stage then our version again, and that would inform the next record.

- Well, so you were like workshopping things on stage.

- Totally, and I think in some ways, we did things out of order.

We had a lot of musicians you think of as like okay, they workshop for years.

They're in training and they study with the teacher, and eventually they reach a point where they're being on stage more often.

We got an opportunity kind of backwards from that to be on stage a whole lot as we were learning to play music.

And I mean, I think it's cool, it can make it difficult because you're like, you're getting like audience validation and that can be mixed up with personal, artistic pursuit validation.

- Interesting.

- But we also got like a lot of, I think the only way to be comfortable on stage is to just be on stage for more time.

And we spent a lot of time on stage.

And also, that's a really deliberate and intense way of getting to know each other musically.

So we've really formed a band sound in a way that I don't think happens when you're casually playing together in spare time.

- Yeah, y'all were putting in your 10,000 hours.

- Yeah, as a group, yeah.

And individually, yeah.

Mainly on stage.

I mean, that's how we thought of ourselves at the time as a touring band.

We were living in the same house, which was kind of irrelevant because really, we were living in the same van.

We would be gone for between 250 and 300 days a year, and we'd play four or five nights a week in those early days.

And it started to change quickly how our DNA almost like fused.

- Yeah, and you must have really liked each other to spend that much time together, or maybe not.

- I mean, yeah, we did at first.

[all laughing] It's very sibling like, somewhere between polygamous marriage and being siblings.

[all laughing] - But it must have been really interesting because I feel like at that time too, you were bringing a lot of people into this bluegrass, Americana tent that maybe hadn't been there before.

Do you feel you were doing that as you were touring and getting this music out there again at the beginning of streaming?

I mean, it seemed like you were striking at a very interesting time with that genre of music.

- Kind of unbeknownst to us, the records were classified as bluegrass records by Billboard, which was helpful to us 'cause we could kind of have an outsized impact in that small pond.

But then we would go to the bluegrass festivals and we were the least bluegrass band there.

And we kind of liked that idea of being a gateway drug between the two communities, bringing younger fans who maybe were less familiar to that more traditional community and bringing traditional fans into a more, not pop, but popular music space.

- That's the little P in the miso.

- There you go.

- Yeah, actually, two of my uncles are great banjo players.

And I was talking to one of 'em, Hugh at the time, and was like, "Hey, Hugh, why do you keep playing banjo for years and years?"

And was really active touring in the '70s.

And I was like, "Why do you think there's such a resurgence of," to me, this was like a new thing in 2012.

We were obsessed with the Punch Brothers, whatever.

"Why is there such a resurgence in this kind of like, bluegrass music?"

And he was like, "I don't see a resurgence.

It has been here all along."

And maybe that's part of the distinction of being from here.

It's part of the infrastructure, the personality, the architecture of the people that make up this place.

And so we were lucky to be here, and had a lot of people that could really show us the way.

But I do think if you weren't familiar with that stuff, maybe we were like showing it to some people for the first time.

- Yeah, so everybody in the band can sing and harmonize and you all write songs.

What's that like?

What's the dynamic like for you all?

As you're thinking about a record and you're out there workshopping and things, how does that work together?

- It's changed for each record, how it is that we've approached and found that alchemy.

But it generally starts with the same question, which is, what are we all excited about individually and what's the overlap there?

From songs that we've been writing on our own, ideas we've been throwing around together, to move away from song form just to like types of groove, types of sounds, that was kind of generally the first question ahead of a new record.

And we would use both that answer.

And then also a lot of it was just what was practical.

There were times where we had very little money and very little time to make a record.

And so we didn't have the luxury of space to determine it.

It was like, "Okay, we got 10 days between these two tours, we need a day off and then we're gonna make a record."

So yeah, it has changed each time.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, and I think part of our secret formula has been never coming up with a formula.

In other words, we sit with each other with like broad, vague possibility of all the different albums you can make for as long as it takes for one to emerge.

And that means that it's different every time we get together because we're different people every time we get together.

But it was resisting a type of record that we make that kept us feeling like we could make something fresh and new.

It's difficult because most, I think bands have a sort of central point either in the songwriting or the singing that other musicians can wrap their sound around.

And without that, I think that the challenge for us has always been how do you keep multiple voices and multiple musical sort of fabrics to weave together without seeming like a songwriter in the round.

We're not just taking turns.

We have different singers, but one sound.

- "The Book of Fools", the most recent studio record that process is when I'm really proud of, separate from the record itself.

It was the first time we really had time to get together and let songs change.

And we started out, we were mainly in North Carolina for those writing sessions, and we would kinda like in around show off different things that we had been working on.

And sometimes, it was a full song, sometimes it was just a line, sometimes it was a couple bars of a groove, and we would see what connected with somebody else.

And if it did, we had the time to workshop with them together and to see what could build.

And that was one of the few times that we really had enough space and the luxury of time to water things and see how they could grow together, which was really fun.

- Yeah, we started with 50 songs.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

- Or 50 ideas, 35 of which were like full songs.

- 50 seeds.

- Yeah.

- I mean, a lot of which were full songs that didn't make it.

- We could have made tons of different types of records from that batch.

- And from that batch, it wasn't, what are the best songs?

It was what's a group that feels like they're telling a cool story together?

And that's kinda how we think of ourselves as a band too.

How is it that we can tell a unique story?

Not, what's the best, but what's the thing that only these four people in this room would be able to do?

- Yeah, I'm wondering, what do you think that story is now?

- That's why we're filming this special, so everyone can see for themselves.

- [James] Yes.

- Yeah, what's the story of the latest chapter of the thing we've been building?

It's really funny 'cause we're in our like early 30's.

I guess you can say early 30's until you turn 35, then you're mid 30's.

- Yeah, I'm solid mid.

- Jacob's mid 30's.

- I'm solid mid too, so we're all there.

- And we've been doing this together almost 12 years.

- I don't know, it's interesting, I think we often think of our stories based on album cycles.

And right now, we have an album that's coming out in a week that's a live album.

And it's so different than a studio album because often on studio albums, when the music is all done, we've had these disappointing experiences with the industry where they're like, "Okay, what's the story?"

And we're like, "Well, the songs are the story."

They're like, "Okay, well yeah, but did anybody have a problem?

Was there a car crash?

Someone addicted to drugs?

Was there a breakup?"

And we're like, "No, it's just the music."

And this has been a refreshingly different thing because the story is who we are as a live band, which is what we felt like the most all along.

And with the songs that we picked and the performances we picked, we wanted to, for the first time tell the full story together, not just what's new, but what's new about what's old too.

We have our oldest and our newest songs on this record.

And we think they make sense together.

- Yeah, and again, the album's called, "Gas in the Tank Live Across America 2324", which feels sort of like a Grateful Dead sort of thing, which is cool.

- Woo!

- Nailed it.

What were you trying to capture with the live record?

I know you kind of talked about it a little bit, but as far as going through the songs and curating the songs, what was the thought process there?

What were you trying to catch with that?

- We found that during tours, the shows that feel most special happen without your awareness of it, sometimes to catch your off guard.

And it has to do with the crowd being in the right head space, the right people really listening and being present and us being in the right kind of state of mind to let something happen.

And so, we had a lot of shows that were big and important and were playing New York City for the most people we've played or whatever it may be.

And it feels like we were like excited when we walked off stage.

But we recorded all these shows, and then when we went back and listened, sometimes those shows were like, they were fine.

We didn't hit any wrong notes, but they didn't feel like something was sparkling.

Nothing was like happening.

Nothing was like emerging from the stage.

And so I felt like it was the goal, was to pick the performances.

And it's funny you said the dead 'cause like we are, I would say closet deadhead, but I'm not ashamed of it, have been for a long time.

"Europe 72" is kind of an inspiration being like, it's a live album that reflects them on stage, but it's called from many different shows over the course of a tour and they pick the best performances And they actually rerecorded a lot of stuff.

We didn't do that.

So we were picking performances that, like there was one show on a Sunday night in Sacramento, California, where it wasn't even that big, but there was something about that California air, I dunno what it was.

- Man, in fact, the show was so, it was in this like- - It was loosey goosey.

- Yeah, it was in this country, almost like dive bar type of venue.

- Yeah, saloon.

- Saloon.

- In a horrible decision for the quality of the music that you're hearing, there were open windows in the wall between the venue side and the bar side, so you could hear a lot of clatter from the other room, but it created this atmosphere that was just kind of perfect.

And the venue had even that night we learned that they had sold a lot of tickets with the wrong date on it.

- Oh no!

- It was a lot of people who bought tickets weren't there because they thought it was happening the next night, which we learned the next morning when we got lots of angry emails as people were seeing our Instagram stories and they're like, wait.

- [James] What?

- But there was just something about the show and we were super gassed.

This was the final week of the final leg of a long tour and we kind of walked in and we were like this pretty unremarkable room.

I think we all on a Sunday night, we were like, "This will be fine.

And in the context of a band that's played 1300 shows, sometimes playing a show is a huge accomplishment.

And so it wasn't a bad thing.

We're just like, we were kinda settling in, feeling super casual, and I definitely did not think one of those songs would make it to the record, but it's one of my favorite ones.

Actually, that's the one that's coming out on Friday.

- Yeah, it's the second second single, yeah.

And so it's one of our first songs we recorded from our first record that's sort of like a beautiful piano ballad Jacob sings.

It's called "Do You Want Me?"

And we turned it into kinda like a honky tonk country rocker.

- Yeah, and let your hair down a little bit?

- [Joseph] Let our hair down a little bit.

- There was a new band member that night that I got to meet, and I'll never forget him.

His name's Sacramento Joe.

And you'll hear him prominently on that song.

- All right.

- Yeah.

- Sacramento Joe, guys, oof, sounds straight outta a honky tonk.

- It makes you wanna take a little trip to Sacramento.

- Yeah, let my hair down too.

[all laughing] What brings you joy playing together live?

- I always feel like it's the sense that we're making something that none of us could make on our own, that there's something mysteriously additive happening, and when we all play together, it's this kind of three dimensional being that we create that isn't something we could even imagine by ourselves.

- That's awesome.

What about you, Jacob?

- I've been thinking a lot lately about, as our lives are changing, what a gift it is to be able to make music at all, to be able to make art in a world that often doesn't encourage you to do it.

And that we've been given that gift so consistently for so many years and with each other.

I feel like it's a gift we've given to each other also.

I can't help but now be very present of that whenever we're making music together and especially on stage.

And you think of it, or I think of it almost like a family reunion every time.

And you see things in your family that no one else can see, the good and the bad, and you have a level of comfort with yourself, with your family that you don't have anywhere else, and that's what this band has become, and that's an incredibly joyful thing.

- Just from somebody on the outside, and seeing you all release these dates here in North Carolina, it does felt like a homecoming sort of, that we get to be a part of, which is really cool.

I wanted to talk to you about the single microphone technique.

And y'all use this in your shows, right?

I feel like it's a traditional bluegrass Americana thing to do and it sort of promotes togetherness, harmonies, and solos.

Do you think that is a technique that just really fits what you all do?

It feels like a Mipso thing, beyond just it being as traditional thing, but specifically for y'all.

- Yeah, I'm glad you see it that way.

That's what it feels like.

It forces us to listen to each other in a different way.

And oftentimes on stage you're in your different zones with different monitors, and that's a moment where we get together and it's kinda like stripping things back to the core of what we do, which is listening to each other and listening to our acoustic instruments.

And I also love that speaking of being shaped by sound.

When you play a concert, what you're hearing in the audience is oftentimes as many as like 36 different individual audio inputs being jelled together.

And in that moment, there's literally one thing happening.

And it might be a combination of four voices, and it might be a combination of four voices and four instruments, but it's coming through one single source.

So there's this like real true jelling of a combination of things that's actually being presented.

You're not hearing a summed combination, but the thing itself.

- Right, there's so much less engineering on the other side, but there's engineering from you all, right?

- Yeah.

- It's also initially when we started using it, it was close to how we practiced too.

So there's a part of it where that's how we were most comfortable playing music together was in tight proximity.

And then since then, it's become a part of how, to Joseph's point, how we kinda like regain control both of ourselves and often of crowds within a show, because there's this real tightening that happens when you ask people to do something with you.

And at that moment within a show especially, we're asking them to kind of refocus.

And it's a wonderful part of being at a show that you get to have moments where you're really dialed in and moments where there's lots of other stuff going on too.

And we celebrate that, but there always is something nice about saying, let's be still with each other for a moment here.

- Yeah, there's a particular energy in the audience that you can just feel.

- [Joseph] Totally.

- Yeah.

And kind of going back to this shaped by sound idea, I'd like to ask you all, how do you believe that you are shaped by sound?

- You know, we've been talking about how music is from a place, and I very much feel like I'm from a place.

I couldn't be me without having grown up here.

But the first thing I thought of when you asked that was The Cicadas, and this brood that hatched this past summer that sounded like an alien spacecraft hovering about a football field away, no matter where you were standing.

This electric, but organic, weird buzzing.

It took me back in this wildly visceral way to one summer when I was 11 or 12.

And I remember just being fascinated with finding these shells on all the little trees, and that was a soundtrack to it.

And I don't know, it's like it was a good reminder that sound on a sort of mechanical vibration level is a little like laser beam to the unconscious.

And I don't under I understand why.

I couldn't devote myself to something that wasn't on some level a mystery to me.

And that is wild.

That was like, I'm 33, and it was like, boom, there I was back 2002, Randolph County, North Carolina from sound.

- Yeah, that's incredible.

Jacob, do you have a response?

- Yeah, for me, it's funny now, I've lived out of North Carolina for a number of years in a row now, and yet my identity in all those places is varied as the North Carolinian.

And so, especially post Helene, a lot of people who aren't from North Carolina have been checking in, "How's your community?

How are things?"

And I've been processing what it feels like having grown up in the mountains to see all these places that were from a landscape visual perspective, the back pocket things in my mind fundamentally changed.

And for a generation, they'll look differently to other people than they look to me in my childhood.

But the one thing that I've been reflecting that won't change is the sounds, both of the natural landscape and the type of music and the way people share music.

And that is like a part of my core identity as a Western North Carolinian is that music is something that you share, that you make with people, and that you use to, to share in this revelation that you feel some of the same things, you feel them differently, but you feel them the same way.

And that to me is how I feel shaped is that it encouraged me to really try and understand why I was feeling a certain way and how I could say that.

And the first place I knew how to say those things publicly was through song.

- That's awesome, I'd like to ask you all like, what is your approach to a set list?

Because they're different, right?

- Oh, boy, it's a good thing we got some battery power.

We can talk about set list creation for a long time.

- Can you actually grab the live record?

- Yeah, yeah.

- We write a different set list every night, and it was so much fun to make the live record, which is a combination of recordings from every different show we recorded.

But we made it like a set list, and this is what we have.

Every show, we write out with Sharpie, the set list for that night, and we've never done the same one twice.

And it's really funny because you'd think having done something 1200 times, you'd have like a real science to it, and sometimes we think we're gonna nail it and like, "Well, you know, that one didn't really hit tonight.

And I think that the transition between this and this one wasn't quite right."

But it's just like the most fun way to do it, and the only way to keep it feeling like for us, something's happening on stage rather than we're just performing a road thing.

- And we like it to happen after soundcheck, and often, right before we go on set, you want the room, the crowd, our energies to help inform the route we're taking.

So it's always different, but we have some familiar patterns.

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, we thought a lot about the arc of it.

- From an emotional and energy perspective.

- Yeah, like what grabs somebody at the beginning, or what things go well into and out of each other.

And also sometimes, the kind of like really stark juxtapositions that can feel really kinda surprising.

And having the moment in the middle where we gather around a single mic is super fun to play with that too.

The dynamics is cool.

We go real small and intimate, and then we can go big back.

- Do you think there'll ever be a time where you'll go out with no set list and just completely wing it?

- That would be cool.

- Maybe.

[Joseph laughing] - Jacob's like, absolutely not.

- It's interesting, I think we would do it well, but I don't know, there's certain types of things that I like, sometimes it's like what tickles me as a performer, and sometimes it's what tickles me as a concert goer.

And I don't always love to see a band talking on stage to themselves.

And I wonder, I'm thinking about the logistics of would we be able to pull that off?

- We discuss things.

We're like a very like discursive band, and it's not like I can imagine maybe like, I don't wanna be up there and be like, now, now, now this is this, drill seargenting it.

So I think yeah, maybe it wouldn't work as well for us.

Also, it's nice to turn off that part of your brain when you're playing.

I know what's happening next.

I can just play this song.

I'd be starting about halfway through a song and be like, "What's next?

What's that?"

- Yeah, it's true.

- And then you're distracted.

- Then you're worried about it.

- Yeah, I'm gonna put this up real quick.

Yeah, sorry, I asked you just 'cause in the vein of Grateful Dead, they just went up there and just did it some nights, which is, I don't know how they do that, but yeah, I think you can tell when they're just like, "Yeah, I mean we'll do this one."

- Yeah.

- Often bands, I think that the beauty of our band for me is that we don't kind of, to Joe's earlier point, we don't have like one central thing that other people are falling behind.

- I think that it would be easier in a band where there was a clear front, one person who's singing all the songs, and I could imagine that version of not making a set list easier than the multi-headed beast that we are.

- Right.

- Right.

- So maybe we jump back into your set list for the show today, and kind of walk through those.

I've got a list of them here, so I'll kind of just walk through them.

The first one is "Edges Run".

- "Edges Run" is a song that is also an album title.

It's an album we made in Oregon, the album we made furthest from home.

And that album feels very indicative of that place in time.

It was right after the first Trump inauguration.

It was winter on the Oregon coast, and we were interpersonally at a low point, I think as a band.

And a lot of the songs really benefited from that struggle.

And "Edges Run" is one of my favorites from that session.

- Yeah, check out Woods Baseline on this one.

One of my favorite sleeper classic Wood Robinson moments.

This sort of like very odd motif that continues under the chord changes that really makes the whole song for me.

- Cool, what about "Carolina rolling by"?

- It sure does roll by, doesn't it?

- Dang, yeah.

- "Carolina rolling by" is from our most recent record, "Book of Fools".

And that song came from a canoe accident.

I had the misfortune of falling out of a canoe on Jordan Lake, actually on New Hope Creek right off Jordan Lake onto a tree root that I didn't know was there.

And they thought that I had a spinal injury 'cause very quickly, I couldn't move and then they thought it was maybe a cracked kidney, but it turns out it was just a torn muscle that touched my spinal cord there at the base of my back.

So I spent about two weeks not being able to walk or move very much.

I learned that back injuries can be very serious.

And I learned that canoes while very peaceful, lovely leisure craft can also be very dangerous.

- Yeah, temperamental, huh?

- Yeah.

- That's how I describe you too.

- Thank you, I'm a dangerous leisure craft.

But I was on some high dosage serious pain meds for a few days there and it got me in the right mindset to write this little story about a guy driving a truck who's addicted to pills, but he's still got the hope that he can turn his life back around.

- And what about "People change"?

- "People change", also from that Oregon session.

- That's a song that I feel we inhabit really well on stage.

And that song, though I love the recording, to me, really came into its own once we figured it out on stage about six months after that album came out.

I think there's a real calmness and confidence in how that song starts so delicately and burns to a simmer.

- Yeah, what's it like for y'all, for that one maybe in particular here to revisit, 'cause I feel like singing it now might mean something.

Does it mean the same thing, or does it mean something different from when you first wrote it?

- I think I've learned that that song means many different things to many different people, and it has had multiple meanings for me for sure.

My perspective on it has shifted, and I think that in the performance vocally, it feels like it's a different song to me now than it was.

- Yeah, the reason I brought that up is 'cause you really do mention the time passing in that one, so yeah.

- And a more accurate rewrite would add a couple years to that first line.

- Yeah, yeah [chuckling].

- Oh, yeah.

- What about "The Numbers"?

- Yeah, I love that "The Numbers" has such a cool attitude and I love playing that one.

It's a little bit of us kind of getting into a slinky, vibey surf rock territory, but it's a really cool satire that Libby wrote, which I think of as being like sort of a take down of the Kai Ryssdal version of like, how are you feeling?

Well, that's probably based on how the economy's doing.

How's the economy doing?

Well, let's just check the stats.

A very like simplistic and reductive version of understanding anything, let alone, like the health of a people.

- A great song for me too to highlight, Mipso is us four, but we've been really shaped by some long term band members who've been with us on the road.

First, John Westerland, who's a Durham bass musician, and now Sean Trischka on drums, core part of how we and our sounds have changed over the years, but also the producers we've brought for each record.

And "Book of Fools" was produced by a long time friend of ours, Shane Leonard and I feel like Shane, both in the box and then in post too really, that song became something totally different than I thought it was gonna be based on those early sessions in the mountains writing it, or hearing it from Libby.

- Totally.

- What'd you think it was going to be at first?

- I thought it was gonna be a kind of stripped back, simmering Libby song, like a classic version of Libby vocally and performance.

And it went way more into a finger wagging swag than I was expecting.

- Cool.

- Very different, a similar strength of attitude, but a really different personification of it.

- Yeah, what about "Called Out Loaded"?

- Speaking of letting your hair down, I feel like "Called Out Loaded" is a real Jacob Sharp letting his hair down moment.

- Joseph Terrell on guitar too.

One of my favorite electric guitar moments of you on record.

- Yeah, I do play guitar on that one.

- Yeah, "Called Out Loaded", I think that's a song that at this point, it's more important to me for what it represents within a set than what it's about as a song.

And within a set, it really is us kind of letting one fly.

- You do kind of just really change up the vibe there with that.

It comes out as a rocker.

- Yeah, I get to have a fuzz pedal on a pedal board for just one song.

I also wanna be like, "Ladies and gentlemen, the same man that sings 'People change', 'Called out Loaded', here we go."

[all laughing] - And "Big Star".

- "Big Star" is one of my favorite Libby tunes for sure.

It's a really simple song about going to the beach with a friend and finding love by looking at them, But also as a band, it was a really cool moment for me.

It's one of my favorite recordings from our 2020 record just called "Mipso", where we let ourselves really strip back the traditional thing that we've done of each playing a role we expect, to me on rhythm guitar, and one on bass, and Jacob on mandolin, and building the sound of a song in that way.

And we stripped it all back and built it back with piece by piece very minimally.

And it has this really spacious soundscape that really suits the song in a cool way.

- One that's seen a lot of lives on stage too.

That one, we kind of took it to school several different times and found different resonance within it each time.

- Are there certain songs, where you find yourself doing that like this one, where you're revisiting it constantly?

- Totally, like on the live album, we played recordings, we played versions of the songs totally different from the recordings, which I love.

And that song, "Big Star" is a great example too because most recently, we've been playing it on stage around a single microphone fully acoustically.

Whereas on the record, it's kind of our most out there spacious, exploratory, sonic thing.

And it kind of made it fresh and brand new for us again.

- That must be energizing to approach songs like that.

- Definitely, I think it's a test of a song.

I think if a song can't withstand that kind of focus or that kind of deliberate intimacy, then it may be doesn't have enough meat on the bones.

- And "Louise".

- I know it well.

- Yeah, I bet [chuckling].

- I remember very specifically when Joseph brought "Louise" to the band and it was maybe like the most fully formed and you sounding thing yet at that point.

And remarkably, I still feel like it's very you.

You've changed so much in the year since, but you still inhabit that song and that type of storytelling I think equally to that first moment.

- In what ways do you think it's him, or did you think it was him?

- Joseph has a unique ability to zoom out, but to still show the most microscopic detail and that song both in its the detail of its writing and the scope of its storytelling does those things.

- Yeah.

- Thanks, Jacob.

- And "Green Jesus".

- "Green Jesus".

You know, over the pandemic, I got into gardening.

And I grew some marijuana.

- [laughing] That's tough, isn't it?

I heard it's hard.

- You know, I found it a lot easier than tomatoes.

- Ah, okay.

- But as a part of my experience, kind of reconnecting with things that grow, we'd spent 10 years traveling so much that I didn't anymore have a sense of the seasons.

And it was a really profound experience to be like, "Oh, this is spring starting.

Oh, there's strawberries.

Oh ,there's honeysuckle, that's that smell."

And really, the song is about finding so much little beautiful love and meaning in things that require patience and attention to grow.

And there's a bit of winking and nod to it, but I think it's about something more than that too.

- Yeah, about the environment around us, and how we should care for it.

- Absolutely.

- "My burden with me".

- "My burden with me", and what record is that on?

- "Coming down the mountain".

- Filmed in Durham or recorded in Durham.

"My burden with me", now we have enough perspective on our music to look back with different ideas from how we understand it, not how we want it to be understood.

And I think one of the things that we've been talking about lately is that there's songs that are meant to be shared, not necessarily like campfire songs, but they feel within some of the folk cannon that we learned about song craft from, and I think "My burden with me" is one of the best examples of that.

- Oh, wow.

- That's a song that I think you can imagine.

Well, it's hard for me not to hear it with Libby's voice, but I can imagine anyone singing that song, and it being their song too.

- Wow, that must be a really powerful thing to go out and do that song all the time, but also hopefully see other people do it, right?

To put that out into the world and see that come back in a way.

- I think that's one of the most special, it's hard not to get into like Hallmark language.

It's the one of those rewarding versions of whatever, when we see like YouTube versions of our own songs played by somebody in Germany, it's so cool.

And then the Carolina UNC has a Bluegrass Program now, and they played a couple of different Mipso songs at their final yearly recital.

- Oh my gosh.

- And the director told me that we're one of the bands that the people tell him that turned them on to roots from acoustic music the most.

That's the coolest thing.

- Yeah, that must be a real full circle moment for you.

- For sure.

- Yeah.

- And I think it's a good reminder of the point of what we're doing, is not to put your ego out there and stand on stage and be in the spotlight, but to carry something forward and then share it with people.

- Yeah, and you're part of something larger than yourself, right?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah, what about "Couple Acres Greener"" - Sort of just what we mentioned, "A Couple Acres Greener", it's sort of, it's funny now to think about that, a song written by a 21-year-old me that's so sort of like full of like angst and a sense that like, I'm a little bit embarrassed at some of the angstiness of it.

- Oh, really?

- But I appreciate the sort of sentiment of... - But that era of angst is timeless.

- It was honest.

- We all have it.

And it's actually funny, on the release tour that "Gas In the Tank" came from, we started to see kind of a new generation of fans at our shows.

And often afterwards, if we saw them at the merch table, we'd engage like, "How are you here?"

And it was 'cause they were finding that first record, which was not the thing that was being promoted.

It's not like what our label partners were telling us to do on Instagram reels to get attention.

It's like, it was just what they were finding and it's what we found meaningful in that time in our life, they were finding meaningful in that time of theirs.

And so that's what a song's for.

- It's really cool to hear y'all say that because we had a very similar conversation with Superchunk who has put out this music, and they're seeing a much younger group of folks come and listen and sing the songs back to them.

And it's one of those things where it's like the time, for people, some songs just fit where you are in life.

- Totally.

- And that can go for generations.

- Oh yeah, but to Joe's point, it is kind of trippy when you're outta that time of life.

- Yeah, I bet.

- It makes you reevaluate who you are now and who you were then.

- And also, sometimes we see those people in the crowd and we're like, "How did you get here?"

- "Did your mom drop you off?"

- Yeah, "Who brought you here?"

- Which is pretty cool.

If your mom dropping you off, to go to the Mipso show, you're doing good.

- Thank you, mom.

- Yeah.

And "When I'm gone"?

- "When I'm gone", from the same era, that song, it makes me think so much about the studio where we recorded it in, The Rubber Room in Chapel Hill and another big mentor of ours, especially you, Joe, Jerry Brown.

- Jerry Brown, yeah.

- Great steward of the acoustic music community, and an amazing encourager and mentor to many, many bands, and songwriters over the years.

I don't think we would have a as rich musical community here without people like Jerry in spaces like The Rubber Room.

And I think about that song very visually from what the studio looks like and how the light and everything informed, I think where that recording went.

- Yeah, very sense of place there as well with that, right?

- Definitely.

- That's the end of the set list.

But for this portion of our chat, I kinda wanna just open it up to the both of you, and if there's anything that you would like to say, or talk to that we may have not talked about yet.

- Well, I think one other thing that I've been thinking about yesterday and today being here and with all of you helping to make this possible, is that a part of what makes like being shaped by sound, it's not just the music, it's the infrastructure of the community.

And one thing I feel really lucky about being a North Carolinian and someone who makes music strongly associated with North Carolina is that I think part of the reason we have such a great scene is because of the myriad of things that surround it, the independent record label, like this record was pressed out a vinyl press in Raleigh.

There's so many great labels, and managers, and there's so many venues.

We're playing at The Cat's Cradle this weekend two times.

And I think it's the ninth and 10th time we're playing in the main room.

And we've played countless other things there too.

And I remember so distinctly sending Frank Heath an email as little head students being like, "Can you make our dream come true?

Can we come play?"

And he said yes, and gave us a Friday night, and we couldn't believe it.

We promptly freaked out 'cause we didn't know how we were gonna it off three months later.

But it takes a real village to lift music up and increasingly in the connected, but to me, emotionally disconnected world that we all live in via our phone, I think that's gonna become even more important.

So I just feel when we got the call about being Heroes, I was so thankful that it was being made and so proud to be a part of the community.

- Well, thank you all for being here.

It's truly an honor to have you all in here, and chat with us and, and play these songs.

We were equally as excited when we heard you all were coming in, so thank you so much, and we really appreciate it.

- Yeah, thank you.

- And thanks to the whole crew that made this thing possible.

- Yes, absolutely.

Thanks for joining us on "The Shape by Sound" podcast.

If you'd like to hear some of the songs we discussed today, you can find them on our website at pbsnc.org/ShapedbySound, or find us on the PBS North Carolina YouTube page.

Thanks for listening.