Jesca Hoop ‘Summertime’ Performance & Interview
Yahoo! Music’s Who’s Next? features Jesca Hoop, where the American singer songwriter talked about religion’s role in her music, breaking free of a mountain living lifestyle and getting a career break with the help of Tom Waits.
“Music was absolutely central in the religion I was raised in, also just everyday life,” Hoop said about her family’s Mormonism. “My favorite of what they exposed me to, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, the early Beatles, because my mom didn’t like the later Beatles. I think one thing that’s good about religion is most religions celebrate music and the expression of it. I think it was part of how we become so musical.”
“I think I knew I wanted to do this when I was a little kid and then I lost track of it for quite a while,” Hoop observed about pursuing a music profession. “I lost all ambition really. I was like screw it, I’m just gonna live out here. Way out here and forget about all y’all. I was living in the mountains. Living in the woods. Growing food and keeping it simple. I was always making music, but I wasn’t performing it in a listen to me kind of fashion, always singing around the fire. Not for money. Not for attention, I was just doing it in an informal way. I had to quit eventually because I was like what am I doing up here? I’m being stabbed by cactuses, smoking cow pie to get flies away from me. This is great and this is what needs to happen, but I’m a singer and I’ve been singing since I was a kid and I’m writing songs and it needs to go further than this campfire. I want to do something more, so I came back. I had to decide what of this world I wanted and what I didn’t. I had to decide on my own terms and that was very difficult for my mother in particular. She had a hard time with that. I was listening to the White Album, what are you gonna do?”
She then became a nanny for Tom Waits, who got her career in gear. “Eventually when I was serious about making changes in my live, they were ready to offer me whatever they could.”
Video of her performance of ‘Summertime’ and an interview has since been removed at Yahoo.com.
