Pepi Ginsberg and her friend sat at the East Broadway train station. "The artist Louise Bourgeois said 'nostalgia is a form of mourning,’'' her friend remarked, referring to a movie she had just seen. “But life is always passing,'” said Pepi, as a train whizzed by, “and we're constantly pushed forward and forced to let go.”
Pepi Ginsberg's music is as much a study on the past and the present as it is a leap into the ever-stretching future. Pepi, who has already garnered much critical praise for her unique voice, dynamic live performances and striking lyrics, is an artist who pays homage to the history of songwriting while consistently moving the agenda forward, both in her own particular brand of song and within the canon of songwriting at large.
Pepi was born in the early summer. She lived in a clapboard house on Clapboard Ridge Road. When she was seven her father died in a plane crash and later her mother remarried a very kind man. Pepi was named after her grandmother, Pepi Beck, a resistance fighter in WWII, who, with the help of her grandfather, organized the refugee ship, the Exodus, to usher holocaust victims to safe harbor in Palestine.
Pepi attended public high school and was chief editor of the school's literary magazine, a role Truman Capote once filled. When it came time to leave, Pepi packed her bags and headed to West Philadelphia to attend college where she continued to work on both visual art and creative writing, and wrote a novella at age 19 called “No Name, Colorado.”
There, Pepi found great like minds and spent the last years of school haunting the warehouses, drawing and playing songs with friends. With their help she recorded her first album Orange Juice:Stephanie/Stephanie(2006).
The next fall, Pepi moved to Brooklyn and recorded a second record, Sometime Momma/Sometime Babe (2007), in the tub of her apt bathroom. When the record was finished Pepi hit the road and headed west, driving the coast of California with friends to play shows.
Upon returning home, Pepi found a bottle with a note in it at the foot of her apt door. The return address was from Philadelphia musician Scott McMicken (Dr.Dog), who had written to Pepi asking if she would like to come down to Philly and record a song.
As Pepi tells it . . . "I went down and it was just good vibes from day one. I went back a few days later and then I just never left. I had all these new songs and Scott had three and a half weeks- we new what we had to do! It was serious work and serious fun and not much of anything else like eating or sleeping. There were nights we went a little silly, we'd get stranded at the studio and eat whatever we could find, packing peanuts with salt and pepper one night! We took a trip to a friend’s house in York, PA to record outside at night with the crickets as our backing soundtrack. The whole time was magic, better than a dream."
Red (Park the Van, 2008) was joyfully recorded in a whirlwind late summer. "We never looked back," Pepi said. "There wasn't time." It was a blessing and now the record is here to share.
As a writer, Pepi is one of the few lyricists today who is able to capture raw sentiment by creating her own language to describe the pulsing world around her. Ginsberg writes with a grace and insight on par with the iconic songwriters she walks alongside. Timeless and classic and ever-evolving, with her current band she has found a way to reinvent the “folk” song and make her sound entirely new. Hear her and the message is clear - this is music that's just damn exciting. Ginsberg howls.
|
