Pippa Hoover and Honey Magpie Make You Dance and Think
By Jason Wares
Pippa Hoover is a cellist who creates music that will move you. The music she performs will bring you laughter and deep contemplation, often over the smaller take-for-granted beauties that nature provides us.
Pippa is performing at the Carrboro Music Festival with her band, Honey Magpie, which she co-leads with Rachel Hurwitz, and as a solo performer joined by Franklin Bellflower on guitar and David Criswell on bass. She spoke to The Carrborean about those upcoming performances. You can see Pippa Hoover solo at 1:15 at the My Muses Card shop and Honey Magpie at 8:15 in the Century Center.
Pippa’s music ranges from playful to deeply resonant and bluesy. The songs that she writes both as a solo artist and in collaboration with Honey Magpie often have a subtly of meaning that makes you want to listen to it multiple times. We asked Pippa how her music has evolved since she first started writing songs at the young age of 14.
She started writing music as an almost confessional and emotional outlet, and some of those older songs remain in her performance. Her more recent music is nature inspired or “inspired by the little things that I see that are interesting to me for whatever reason, or an image that I want to write about in some way, and then I figure out what idea goes with that.”
The songs that she performs demonstrate that connection between nature and bigger ideas.
Pippa mentioned that audiences love Honey Magpie’s song “Lost in the Woods.” The song’s confident rhythm guitar and pizzicato cello immediately set your heart marching. The lyrics turn the tale "Little Red Riding Hood" on its head, brushing off fear of strangers and the safety of the known path in favor of having self-confidence and the excitement of creating your own unique journey.
We asked Pippa which Honey Magpie songs crowds love but are less obvious hits. She pointed to the song “Sweet Tooth.” Sweet Tooth is fast paced, almost Irish sounding song about, “this woman who's in a pretty bad marriage, and it's basically like, don't get married ever because your life will be drudgery.” Pippa said when they first wrote it, she wondered if people would like it but it’s become one of Honey Magpie’s most popular live songs.
Pippa’s solo performances demonstrate her often playful and always inspiring work on the cello, along with lyrics that set your mind in motion. One of your correspondent’s favorite Pippa Hoover songs is “The Garden Spider,” which is at once a contemplation of an actual garden spider that lived at her parent’s house and a moving parable with beautiful ideas about life’s struggles.
She also performs a new song that she called Still Lake on a Sunny Day. She hasn’t released it as a recording yet but has noticed that it gets a big response when performed live. “It's about the experience of people projecting ideas of who you are onto you and not really understanding who you are at your core,” Pippa says. It’s a song that she conceived of during a beautiful and somewhat grueling 23-day hike on the John Muir trail in California. She says, “The imagery from that [song] comes from the John Muir Trail. It’s got those really clear Alpine Lakes, where it's just so cold that you can see right down to the bottom of them. There's nothing in the water, but then when it's really sunny, it's just like a mirror.”
Pippa Hoover and Honey Magpie will make you want to get up and dance and then later, after you’re done dancing and walking home from the venue, contemplate your place in the universe and the meaning of your existence. Seek them out at the Carrboro Music Festival!
You can find Pippa’s and Honey Magpie’s music on any streaming service. In addition to the Carrboro Music Festival, Pippa is performing on October 25th at Pluck Farm, as an opening act in support of her bandmate Rachel Hurwitz, who is releasing her first solo album.
