Lean Into This Place

Cris Cohen: What's cool and fascinating about you guys is that you're actually from this area. I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. And there are always bands from LA, San Francisco, and New York. You don't often hear about bands from the Triangle Area (Raleigh – Durham – Chapel Hill, North Carolina). And you even said in a previous interview, "It's great to lean into this place where we're from." How do you do that with your music? 
 
Joseph Terrell of the band Mipso: I think part of it is that we don't try to be too deliberate about that. It feels like the honest way of being a band or a musician from North Carolina is to make the music that you make, that feels honest and, in the sense that you are from the place, it will become a reflection of that place. We don't go to the drawing board and say, "Alright, Doc Watson + Superchunk = Mipso 2022." I hope that we sound like we're from here because we are.
 
And there is a rich, layered history of a music scene around here. And that was a cool thing coming of age here. On the one hand, there are so many studios that you can pop into and play. There are so many great venues, so many great older musicians who, I think, are very welcoming. So we were in a fertile ground to become musicians. 
 
Also, I am invested in the state, the idea of the state, this place, and everything about it. It's been a fun process to learn the history myself. And there's the ones that are on billboards like Libba Cotton, as she should be, and Doc Watson, like I said.
 
But then there are different layers at every era of amazing artists from right around here that there's so much to learn from. So we're lucky.