Mipso at The Iron Horse

Name: Mipso at The Iron Horse
Start: 2025-09-26T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 18 Center St., Northampton, MA, United States, Massachusetts 01060

Schedule

Fri, 26 Sep, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

18 Center St., Northampton, MA, United States, Massachusetts 01060 | Northampton, MA

Mipso
at The Iron Horse
Friday, September 26th
Doors: 6:00pm
Show: 7:00pm
TICKETS STARTING AT: $30
includes all fees
Mipso formed in 2012 as an excuse to play together between classes in Chapel Hill. Joseph Terrell came from a family of banjo-playing uncles and a guitarist grandma, and he’d gotten curious again about the string band music he’d heard as a kid. Jacob Sharp was raised on equal parts Doc Watson and Avett Brothers in the mountains of North Carolina and he was hunting for a chance to sing some harmonies. Wood Robinson added a Charlie Haden-esque interest in bridging jazz and grass sensibilities on the double bass, and Libby Rodenbough soon joined on fiddle, unsatisfied by her classical violin training but drawn like a moth toward the glow of old, weird Americana.
Their first album, “Dark Holler Pop,” produced by Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse), included Terrell-penned fan favorites “Louise” and “Couple Acres Greener” and turned recent-grads Mipso (“let’s try this for a year,” etc.) into a full-blown touring band. Although it hung out on the Billboard Bluegrass top 10, its sonic mission statement was in the name: “Dark Holler Pop” was groovier and catchier than its string band contemporaries; its unabashed poppiness belied the songs’ durability and depth.
2015’s “Old Time Reverie” earned them an invitation to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade wherein they rolled down 5th Avenue on a 12 foot bucket of fried chicken. They got to have breakfast on the green room bus with Pat Benatar and Questlove, but in hindsight the whole experience was a little beside the point. They doubled down on touring, playing upwards of 175 shows a year, honing a telepathic, sibling-esque connection onstage.
2017’s “Coming Down The Mountain,” produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee) added drums and pedal steel and put the band on bigger stages with an expanded Americana sound, including the Rodenbough-fronted title track, another streaming hit and live staple.
Mipso considered hanging up their hats in 2018 while recording “Edges Run” with Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Anais Mitchell). After five years of near-constant touring, they had started to wake up in hotel rooms wondering what state they were in; they’d never had pets. The album took off. Sharp’s intimate vocal on “People Change” floated into dorm rooms and coffee shops across America, cementing Mipso as a bona fide streaming success across four albums and placing them in that rarefied strata of bands with three distinct lead singers: The Band, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, Sonic Youth, The Wailers, The B-52’s, Phish, Mipso. 2020’s self-titled start-fresh album on Rounder Records brought experimental Canadian producer Sandro Perri into the mix and minted a collection with moodier landscapes and unexpected textures such as “Hey, Coyote” and “Big Star”.
Post-pandemic Mipso is starting fresh again with “Book of Fools”. The songs might be their best yet: “Carolina Rolling By” shows Terrell at his most relaxed and confident while the band turns a story of a pill-popping truck driver into a meditative cosmic country-tinged head bopper. “The Numbers” flirts with 60s surf rock while Rodenbough winks and wags a finger at our market-obsessed culture, and “Broken Heart/Open Heart” features Sharp at his most heart-wrenching and earnest. Other standouts “East” and “Radio Hell” will infect you with earworms made of guitar riffs, Robinson’s pretzel-twisted upright bass lines, and saturated “ooohs” drifting in as if on AM radio waves.
Rock, country, indie-Americana: genre descriptors try but miss the point, which is that these four people and only these four people could’ve made this album. Only a decade in the van could’ve made this album. Only four personalities held in sustained, frictional balance could’ve made this album with its sizzling energy and unlikely cohesion. Mipso did it again. These are searching, driving songs from a band that’s still trying to say something different, still going somewhere new.