Biography

Jessica “Jesca” Ada Hoop (born April 21, 1975) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, who writes and performs in diverse musical styles. She has released five studio albums of her own, as well as live, acoustic and dual albums with others.

Hoop was born in Santa Rosa, California, to traditional Mormon parents Janette and Jack Dennis Hoop. She grew up singing hymns and folk tunes with her family in four-part harmony. At age 14, her parents separated, and two years later she broke away from her Mormon religion. Hoop described losing her faith as, “Now I feel free of it: I have faith in people.”

Hoop moved off the grid into the rural and wilderness areas of Northern California and Wyoming where she, “lived under a tree for a summer, in yurts, in cob dwellings, and in a chicken shack that I converted.” At the age of 20 she was employed as a wilderness survival guide in a rehabilitation program for wayward teens in Arizona. This course involved, “no camp, we would just walk, for two months. They would learn how to make fire by friction, and the experience was life changing. The environment was transforming.”

While she had been creating music since she was a teenager, being a survival guide provided Hoop with the “mental space to write as I worked.” By 2000, Hoop had moved to Los Angeles where she became a nanny to Tom Waits’ children. He and his wife Kathleen Brennan became instrumental in developing her career and brought her in contact with his music publisher Lionel Conway. His company gave her a publishing contract and “an advance, something to live off, and helped to develop.” Conway sent a demo of the song ‘Seed of Wonder’ to the DJ Nic Harcourt who began to play the song on Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW. It became one of the most requested songs on the show and created a considerable amount interest in the acoustic live shows Hoop had begun to play around Los Angeles. She then signed to Columbia Records’ subsidiary 3 Records and developed her first record with Tony Berg, producer and head of 3 Records. Her debut album KISMET was released in September 2007 in the US. Following a reshuffle at Columbia, Hoop was dropped 3 months into the release.

As a result of meeting Tom Piper, the touring manager of the band Elbow, Hoop moved to Manchester, England in 2008. Initially she found it difficult to adjust “as a California girl, I find it hard to stay under that canopy of cloud.” After settling in the Chorlton area of the city, Hoop spent 18 months recording new material for the album HUNTING MY DRESS which was released in 2010. She had parked “a lorry trailer in my back garden that we use as an extension (…) where I go to write.” In the same year she signed with the US-based label Vanguard Records. It was followed by the SNOWGLOBE EP in 2011, which consisted of a handful of tracks recorded prior to her move to the UK. Hoop described them as “folk songs” and the EP received a degree of critical acclaim. She worked as a backing singer on Peter Gabriel’s New Blood Tour in 2011. The following year she released THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT. In 2013 and 2014 she released COMPLETE KISMET ACOUSTIC and UNDRESS, re-interpretations of songs from KISMET and HUNTING MY DRESS respectively. In 2016, Hoop released LOVE LETTERS FOR FIRE, an album of duets with American singer-songwriter Sam Beam (Iron & Wine). Jesca Hoop signed with the label Sub Pop and announced that she would release the album MEMORIES ARE NOW on February 2017.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0fqE57gXXTTqxXlFYVNG2u?si=0ZubTSr0TIWujuS6hnoq_Q&nd=1
https://www.facebook.com/JescaHoopMusic
https://www.jescahoop.com/

ORDER OF ROMANCE

Jesca Hoop returns with her sixth album, ORDER OF ROMANCE, a record that fortifies her position as one of the most striking and original voices in contemporary music. ORDER OF ROMANCE is Hoop’s most intricate and finely balanced album to date, one that draws on classic song writing, recalling anything from Gershwin to Paul Simon, but creating something that is unmistakably, indelibly Jesca Hoop. It is a deep dive into craft. As Jesca says “I set out to mature as a writer, to further clarity my voice and stance, through melodies and phrases only I can construct. Order of Romance feels like every person, character, or artist, I ever was over the many seasons of my life was handed an instrument to play across the songs.” In the summer of 2021, Hoop once again ventured south from her adopted home of Manchester to Bristol to team up with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding), her collaborator for 2019’s TOPNECHILD. This time additional assistance came from in Jess Vernon (This is the Kit) to arrange for a four-piece horn and woodwind quintet. Legendary drummer Seb Rochford lent his skills, John Thorne plays the bass and Chloe Foy and Rachel Rimmer were enlisted to deliver Hoop’s signature vocal arrangements.

The result is a fruitful marriage of song craft and arrangement, brimming with a cinematic charm and lyrical with that signify a new chapter full of new life for an artist who knows her mind, her heart and voice well enough to trust them in uncharted territory. ORDER OF ROMANCE then is a complete work that demands close attention, an active listen, a filagree that’s apparent lightness of touch belies a serious intent. Themes of empathy and friendship, intertwine with a clear eyed and moralistic poetry on subjects such as gun control, religious and political cults, and climate change. Order of Romance is perhaps ultimately an exploration of the endless balance act of being a ‘Human Being’, an approach and examination of some of the biggest theme and issues of our time through the doorway of the personal, a way finding meaning and some kind of faith in a world where so much is disconnected and discordant. As she states “I seek out reflection and resolve in my songs. I find out who I am in a sense. For a few minutes, I can exist in nature at my full potential, saying just what I mean, in balance, in awe, in wonder and in full force. As a moral agent, a mode I can’t seem to avoid, my writing is time taken to observe and ask questions. I find humour in our predicament. I find danger in the reckoning. I find faith despite our sorry state and I feel connection when I draw it through my voice. I stand my ground and through the music and point inevitably towards compassion.”