Jesca Hoop has shared Caravan, the latest single from her forthcoming album Long Wave Home, due 1st May via Last Laugh / Republic Of Music. The track is accompanied by an atmospheric video filmed in and around Manchester, where the California-born songwriter has long made her home.
Following Designer Citizen — which we featured here recently — Caravan turns from the political to the deeply personal. Where its predecessor took a sardonic lens to questions of nationality and belonging, Caravan articulates the risks of investing wholly in another person, mapping the geography between romantic surrender and quiet devastation. “I’d loved a few boys before / But I had never loved a man,” Hoop sings early on, before the song slowly strips away its certainties. By its close, the troubadour has vanished and the caravan with him, leaving only a coastline and the hard knowledge that “you can never go home again.”
The chorus turns the knife with precision: “Like a believer / Needs a messiah / Begs to surrender / For love I give my life / To my deceiver.” That rhyme — believer, deceiver — is the song’s fulcrum, and Hoop lets it bear the full weight of the narrative – she understands that devotion and delusion are closer than we’d like to admit, and here she maps the narrow space between them.
Long Wave Home is Hoop’s seventh solo album and her first self-produced record, shaped during a period of significant personal upheaval. She has cited Joni Mitchell’s artistic independence as a guiding force, and recorded across studios in London, the Isle of Wight, and Bristol with engineers Tim Thomas and Leo Abrahams. “I really had to commit and do what my hero would do,” she says.
Long Wave Home is out 1st May via Last Laugh / Republic Of Music.
Pre-Order: https://republicofmusic.lnk.to/LongWaveHomeAlbum