Jesca Hoop

Jesca Hoop has been revisiting her previous albums through a deconstructed lens for several years now. Even as she's continued to ignore convention with one compelling album after another, the Manchester-based songwriter has also taken the time to return to those imaginative albums—filled with "unusual" songs, as she describes them—to give them the stripped-back treatment that mirrors the live show.

Jesca's latest unplugged effort, Selective Memory, revisits 2017's Memories Are Now, the fourth entry in her ongoing acoustic series. The literal bedroom recordings brought her back to songs she'd not played since tracking them the first time around, but as she told us in this interview, the songs are as resonant as ever—both personally and politically.

Analogue: You’ve got a couple of new projects making their way through now. I’d love to go back and hear about the inspiration to say yes to these projects in the first place. Why this particular direction for you with Selective Memory?

Jesca Hoop: Well, if I take you back to where the acoustic records came from, Selective Memory is the fourth of its kind. So if I have six studio albums, I've now recorded four of these unplugged versions, these home-style recordings where the whole thing is performed in a group together from top to tail. There's no real overdubbing, and there's no post process. It’s just record and mix and release.

I'm not sure exactly where it fell. Maybe it was between Kismet or my second and third records, but it was like, ‘Okay, I need to offer something while I'm trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces from being signed and now being independent.’ I needed to put something out and that was perfect.

I also wanted people to have something that they were able to take home from a show that sounded like the show. The album has all the bells and whistles, and my shows were—and still are—quite stripped back. So I wanted people to have something that is reminiscent of the show to take home. So that's where the genesis of these, the tradition started.

Then, after Order of Romance, my sixth studio album, I decided I wanted to take a longer time in between it and my next record. So it was a good time to continue for the people who collect these acoustic records, to add another one to the line.

It's a nice little collection because all the artwork is done by the same person. It’s not just the same kind of audio aesthetic, but they have a similar visual aesthetic. The plan is to continue doing these for every single record, giving them this little acoustic imprint.

Analogue: You mentioned wanting more time after Order of Romance.

Jesca: Well, I wrote Order of Romance during the pandemic, so I had every single day to concentrate on it. And with my schedule as it was, in the follow-up, I just needed more time to write the material to get it recorded.

Also, I'm completely independent, and I don't necessarily have any plans to change that. So with the DIY approach to record-making and releasing, you're pulled in a lot of different directions. So it's important to preserve. It's important to schedule things in a way that you can achieve that. So I just wanted to be absent for a while.

I think probably that's the most important part of how I chose the timing for Selective Memory, was that I wanted to be absent for a while in terms of new material, in terms of asking people to pay attention. You know what I'm saying? The attention economy, I wanted to dip out of the attention economy for a while, and then choose carefully when I re-entered it. And Selective Memory is like an appetizer for a new season of material that's coming from me.

Analogue: I love the way you said that, to get out of that attention economy. Is that a reactive thing, where you were desperately needing a break? Or was it proactive?

Jesca: It wasn’t a need to take a break. It was like, ‘I think now would be a good time to be absent.’ I'm not the kind of person who wants to be present in social media all of the time. And so I might offer little things, but I won't always participate to the level that you're about to see, that I may be generating right now. Like I said, I'm opening up a new chapter of activity of both these re-performed songs and then new material.

Analogue: Have you learned some hard lessons along the way about your engagement with this attention economy and what it takes from you in some personal way?

Jesca: Absolutely. I don't know exactly what I want to say about it, but with the making of records comes… I’m going to say attention grab, whether it be the team or the artist or whoever is grabbing for it. So it could be radio or it could be press. It could be paper. It could be online. It could be social, it could be Instagram or Facebook. There's only so much real estate in all of those territories.

So when you make a record, the recording process, that whole relationship is compromised by that element of the process. It comes part and parcel with any industry, I suppose, that requires consumption. So it's about negotiating how you're going to interact with the people that support you, to find a way to do it that feels good to you.

You have to adjust to the fact that when you started to make records for a living, you were actually expected to become your own PR person, filmmaker, promoter, all of those things. The industry has very much changed. So when you're doing all those things yourself, you have to manage your time really carefully.

Analogue: Is it surprising to you the way that some of your relationships with the songs have changed as you revisit and re-record them?

Jesca: Some of them I perform all the time. Some of them I haven't played since I recorded them.

The thing that is most enjoyable about the process is that the recordings are really fluid because they're just single takes. A lot of times, when you make a record, you have the editing power to remove all of the flaws. You know, you can take out anything that irritates you. In this particular process, the song, that one performance is the thing, and they're going to have flaws.

It’s really just about the relationship between the voices and these really pared-down arrangements. So it really highlights how the songs stand up in their own way. They’re very unusual. They're very unusual songs. Even if one of them sounds familiar, I don't know if I have the ability to write on the nose in a genre. So I'm influenced by genre that comes from wherever it comes from. I don't even necessarily want genres influencing a song when I'm writing it. But the songs are unusual.

So when you strip them even further back, you can hear how unusual they are. But you have to listen because they sound familiar at the same time.

Analogue: What’s that like to come back to these songs that you haven’t really touched since you recorded them the first time?

Jesca: Yeah. It's great because they felt really topical. It was in 2014 that I recorded them, and I've been through maybe one or two cycles of life since that time. But I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I could have written this about now!’ All of them feel relevant to my life now and also to the political climate.

VISIT: Jesca Hoop