SONG PREMIERE: Mipso’s Libby Rodenbough Seamlessly Blends Indie Folk and Pop on Shimmering “Make Light”

Photo credit: Chris Frisina

Libby Rodenbough is from Greensboro, North Carolina, and has played with the four-piece folk band Mipso for more than a decade. The cover of Between the Blades, her second full-length album due out May 12th via Sleepy Cat Records (PRE-ORDER), depicts two dogs’ jaws flaring up against a bubblegum pink carpet. It’s a contrast in more ways than one: teeth and comfort, sure, but also—as anyone who has had an animal knows—there’s usually more than meets the eye and it’s possible to hold more than one thing in your heart. (Incidentally, cover stars Bucket and Sufi, who belong to album producers Alex Bingham and Saman Khoujinian, respectively, are best friends).

Lyrical sleights of hand and thoughtful, twinging references tunnel beneath the surface of Between the Blades, which Rodenbough recorded at Bedtown Lakehouse in Virginia with a close group of friends and collaborators in early 2022. It was an uneasy time for all the obvious reasons and some less obvious reasons, too, though this made the experience all the more precious. Outside, the cold was taut and bracing, as salmon-colored winter sunsets swelled above the lake; inside, there were warm meals, friends, and an understanding that this was a project that asked for communal responsiveness, playfulness, and creative risk.

She describes the album in her own words:

“Like always, I find myself looking backward at the paths these songs traveled to find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder as “an album.” I wrote most of them in the period where my mom was very sick and immediately after she passed away, but I wouldn’t say they’re grief songs. Mostly they’re about trying to keep the faith—believing life can be new and even better. In this effort I find myself up against: Elon Musk, climate change, dying mothers, dying children, a question mark where I thought I’d have ambition by now, our civilization which has no regard for the bravery of imagination, the awkward sag of younger passions, and the perpetual ooze of bullshit. Lately my best source of hope is this truce I’ve made with memory; we get along because we don’t try to force each other to be anything we’re not. Holes start to appear here and there in the sweater that is your life—that’s inevitable—but I’m realizing you can really fix those in a great variety of ways. Sometimes it’s stitches and sometimes it’s patches and sometimes you come to like the empty place.”

Besides Bingham and Khoujinian’s work as co-producers and accompanists (Koujinian on electric guitar, keys, and synthesizers; Bingham on bass, cello, keys, and synthesizers), Rodenbough also enlisted a sterling cohort of other North Carolina musicians: Jay Hammond (guitars), Kate Rhudy (backing vocals), Matt Douglas (horns), Anna Jacobson (French horn), and Will Van Horn (pedal steel). Alli Rogers mastered the album.

Today Glide is excited to premiere “Make Light,” one of the standout tracks on the new album. Musically, it captures Rodenbough’s talent for seamlessly bridging indie folk, progressive bluegrass and pop to create a sound that is entirely her own. In this case, we get her light and enchanting vocals dancing around an eclectic array of percussion, strings, and synthesizers. The harmonies make this feel like a communal effort, which it certainly is, and the chorus where they are featured makes this song insanely infectious. The band recorded “Make Light” live, with Rodenbough singing and playing keys underneath a heavy quilt in order to isolate her vocals.

Rodenbough describes the inspiration and process behind the song:

“I was flying home from a European tour, watching the sun bounce off a metal boat hull on the ocean below us. Planes always get my little noggin crackling. I was remembering stories about sailors and shipwrecks and odysseys. I was thinking about the mostly drudgery of van-riding across a foreign continent and the mythology we turn it into afterward. Being as we were only hours outside the actuality of tour, I was feeling a lot less shiny than that speck of gleam down on the water. When you’re wishing you were shinier, is that about the eyes on you, or is it about inner power? Maybe they’re inseparable. We’re living in a time that’s big on visibility, but I bet people liked being looked at 1,000 years ago too. And back then, as now, they probably didn’t know how to feel in the moment after everybody looked away.”

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