Dark Holler Pop: A Song By Song Review

In 2014, I was watching a video about some events going on in the Triangle region of North Carolina. At some point in the video, it went to a performance at UNC with a group singing a song at UNC called Carolina Calling and I immediately fell in love. I listened to that song relatively often before deciding to listen to the rest of the album later. It’s been a few years, but I find out new things every time I listen to this album. During the listening of this album that I’ll do, I’ll take a deeper dive into the lyrics of this album and see if I can find even more meaning than I do on a typical listen.

Dark Holler Pop is the first album by Mipso, a folk/bluegrass band from North Carolina. They technically had an album before this under the group name Mipso Trio called Long, Long Gone, but I usually consider this a separate group and actually didn’t know it existed until 2017. Dark Holler Pop is a North Carolina ballad from beginning to end, evoking a feeling of being in the Appalachian Mountains of the western portion of the state. This is quite present in both its lyrics and the instruments used. The banjos and mandolins perfectly complement each well and are consistently soothing and beautiful, further cementing my love of the album.

Mipso is one of my favourite bands, if not my favourite, so this review may be a little biased, but I wanted to go through song by song and see what I thought of each.

A Couple Acres Greener

A Couple Acres Greener starts the album off strong within the first few seconds with a strong show of the string instruments. One thing that I’ve never been able to tell about this song is whether or not the protagonist of the song is a younger person reflecting on what he wants to be remembered for in the future or whether it is an older person reflecting on his younger self and seeing a crossroads where he should have changed. Listening to the lyrics now, it now seems to me that it could be a little bit of both and the protagonist ages throughout the song or it’s like a case where the older and younger versions of the person are somewhat communicating. At the beginning, the protagonist appears to be a youth who hasn’t exactly figured out his life and wants to change to be more holy and a person worth remembering. He’s reminiscing on potential future memories of becoming a farmer and teaching his son to plow the land in his footsteps but the temptations of Friday nights always creeps up on him and lures him away, especially since he’s too young for the past tense. Towards the end, the protagonist thinks about death and says someday they’ll write my name upon a stone…and I won’t be there to see it, highlighting that once he’s dead, whatever he’s done in life will be permanently etched on that stone. He also thinks that the people thinking about him after death will think about what he’s done in life and point out that he could have been all of the things he was thinking about and he could’ve left things a couple acres greener. Overall, the protagonist’s conflict seems to be deciding whether or not to choose a fun life or settle down and when living on either side, the other side always looks a couple acres greener.

Tried Too Hard

Tried Too Hard seems to follow a similar pattern to A Couple Acres Greener of a person refelcting on life and its various struggles. The song starts of with the sombre line I always took the wrong side of the high road, meaning the protagonist has taken a hard path and somehow seems to end up failing in the end, like taking a steephill only to find out there’s no smooth downhill afterwards. THe protagonist has seemingly gone through quite a bit of failure, emphasized by the chorus lyrics maybe I was born to fail. In every path they’ve taken and every time they’ve tried to fight the changing tide, they’ve always managed to fail. The lyrics of the song seem to contrast with the somewhat upbeat instrumentals in a way that I think if every occurance of the line maybe I was born to fail was removed, I could see myself not noticing that the lyrics were quite sad without listening closely.

Louise

Louise is quite possible the Mipso song I’ve listened to the most. It’s the song whose lyrics I probably know the best off of my head from this album. One of the live versions sounds far more beautiful to me and that’s compared to a version I already deeply loved. The story of Louise and her husband seems to pick up on a similar note to Tried Too Hard where the protagonist(s) are quite unlucky, but Louise has the positive note that the couple here has quite a bit of love. Louise tells us the story of a couple that gets unlucky with a plot of land failing to produce any crops. Louise becomes pregnant and they decide to head off to somewhere with more arable land to raise a family using Louise’s family’s old car. The old farm car, to me, represents the couple’s luck. With its rumbling gears and stuck left door, the odds of it failing at any moment, but there’s gas in the tank and that gas is the hope that will carry them throughout their journey. Eventually, Louise has the child somewhere outside El Paso. I really love the way they show how the child was born using the lyric I heard a new voice with the new day. It sounds as though Louise struggled in labour throughout the morning and when the sun started rising, Louise’s husband heard the voice of a new baby, showing them that everythign was alright and that they had new things to look forward to. The little gas they had didn’t take them too far after that and decided to name their baby boy after Louise’s dad, who owned the farm they lived in at the beginning. They eventually found new land and built their home on it.

I love the fiddle of the live rendition of this song, played by Libby Rodenbough, as it adds quite a bit of emotion to the song and story of this couple. I think this song will have a permanent place in my heart. It’s been a song I consistently listen to the last six years and will likely continue so for at least another six.

Rocking Chair Blues

Rocking Chair Blues has always been a song I preferred listening to for calm activities. After listening to it this round, I’m actually not too sure how to interpret most of it. The line I raised lots of cane till my my momma would cry. She prayed my harvest would wither and die at first glance seems to be referring to raising sugar cane, but I kind of see it as cain rather than cane. This makes me think that the protagonist of this song was one to often cause trouble, leading to his mother giving him the rod. His mother was hopeful that this seed of misbehaviour would wither and die rather than a literal agriculture harvest

Red Eye to Raleigh

Red Eye to Raleigh is a song about a former couple where one party is trying to make amends. We’re never told exactly what caused their breakup, but we do know that there was a parting shot in the parking lot that finally tore it apart. From the lyrics of the song, it appears that they have been broken up for quite some time as the protaganist is taking a red eye flight to Raleigh to make amends. The protagonist has very clearly not gotten over their former relationship as he’s been leaving messages for the ex and makes this trip down to Raleigh, knocking on his ex’s door for an entire night. One of my favourite things about this song is the biological comparisons made to the physical and metaphorical hearts. The two lines that stick out to me are my broken heart, every aching atrium… and the line they say to trust in science for what the body needs, so sign me up for experimental laparoscopic cardiology. I never fail to be amused by that second line and will sing it out loud with my other Mipso loving friend every time we listen to this album.

When I’m Gone

When I’m Gone is a song about someone who is very comfortable with the concept of death. The song feels like it would go well with a hymnal and could be sung at a church. The protagonist thinks of death as a calling to journey home rather than as the end of life. The protagonist doesn’t want any loved one to be sad upon dying, but rather to be calm and move on with life and to prevent making the children sad, refer to it as sleeping. A song about dying would normally feel morbid, but in the context of this song, it feels oddly serene and calm and pretty happy for a song about dying. I think it pairs pretty well with the Mipso Trio song Dying Daze, which is also about death but from a different perspective.

Get Out

Get Out to me has always seemed like an escape song but I can’t tell what they’re trying to escape. Looking at it from a literal point, the protagonist of the song wants to escape a lonely town. Looking at it a little bit more, it seems like the two subjects want to escape and the protagonist wants to esacape with the other but the other person for whatever reason can’t join at the moment. There is a chance that I am trying to look too deeply into it and it is as literal as it sounds.

Squirells

Squirells to me has always felt like a young love song. I enjoy the line I could compare your hair to dogwood flowers as it evokes a bit of a North Carolina kick to this alraedy certified Carolina record. If I’m being honest, though, this is probably the song I’ve listened to the least often in the album.

Border Tonight

Lyrically, I mostly see this song as being about a person who wishes to go south into Mexico and not as much else. I really enjoy the instrumentals on this track due. It kind of feels liek what I would expect to find in a bluegrass equivalent of a jazz band

Carolina Calling

This is the song that began it all. The very first Mipso song I ever listened to. I will forever appreciate it for that sole purpose. This song is a home sickness song. A call from the red clay and rolling acres of (North) Carolina. THe protagonist of the song is someone who currently lives in Carolina and is thinking about the future in a place likely up north as directly stated by the line probably living somewhere colder. The protagonist of the song realizes that Carolina is home and the present time will be a fond time to remember but is able to easily tell that at some point all of the great things of about Carolina will be calling for a return home.

Do You Want Me?

This is a great piece to close off the album. It is about someone who has recently lost a romantic partner and is reflecting on whether or not the person is reciprocating those feelings. The consistent bass strumming in the background has a soothing effect as does the mandolin strumming. I think this is the perfect track to close out the album and the fade away at the end closes off the end of a wonderful album.

Summary

I absolutely lvoe this album. I find myself listening to it in all sorts of scenarios. I am not actually sure how many times I have listened to the entirety of the album, but it is definitely in my top 5 most listened to albums (and a one or two more of those may be Mispo albums as well). This is an amazing piece of work for a debut album (depending on whether or not Long, Long Gone counts). The album feels like a cohesive piece and I often find myself listening to it and wondering if the album is about one character going through life, but that is somewhat unlikely due to the different lifestyles lived by the various protagonists in each song, but I can dream.

This album will definitely have a place in my heart for years to come and I am always looking forward to Mipso releases.