When singer/songwriter Jesca Hoop moved downtown nine months ago, she couldn’t stop thinking about the “great wealth juxtaposed with drastic poverty.” Or, as she writes in her song “City Bird:” “After the tower turned to a tomb, the underworld refugees all were refused by the banker. With nowhere to go, they wash up on Skid Row… “
“When I first moved to L.A., I only used downtown as a facility—to go to court and sit in on sessions,” she relates while stabbing absent-mindedly at a poached egg with a piece of ciabatta. “Now, it’s a small neighborhood with recognizable faces seeded with great talent.”
Tom Waits, for whom she once worked as a nanny, says, “Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night.” Her golden pen and nightingale voice earned her the opening spot on the Polyphonic Spree’s upcoming national tour. With a conspirator’s grin, she says she hears the band is a bit mad. But she’s a little worried about the tour: “They’re a sunshiny band. I’m not so…sunshiny.”
Nowadays, Hoop writes songs in the stairwell of her building in the Historic Core, but in 2004 she was living in her van up North. Her then-publisher submitted the song “Seed of Wonder” to KCRW, and it soon became the most requested title on Morning Becomes Eclectic. That prompted her moved to L.A. Hoop landed softly in the canopies of Topanga Canyon before the move to downtown.
She quickly fell in with the Ditty Bops. and reconnected with Sasha Smith, a piano prodigy she knew from her days up North, and found Kaveh Rastigar, her bass player who happened to live around the corner.
With eight days until she hits the road and “Kismet,” her first album, coming out in September, Jesca Hoop seems to have arrived. But, she doesn’t believe in “arriving.” She mentions her yoga practice, without a hint of evangelism, and discusses the idea that there is only now. Why waste it waiting? Like the downtown she captured in “City Bird” and downtown today: same lush city, different time.
Jesca Hoop opens for the Polyphonic Spree at the El Rey on Wednesday, July 18th (www.theElRey.com). “Kismet” will be released by Columbia Records on September 18th. Check her out at www.jescahoop.com or www.myspace.com/jescahoop
Saskia Vogel has contributed to Swindle magazine. She has completed a nonfiction book on relationships and sexuality in the BDSM scene called Lessons From the House of Sin.