Farewell For Now: Inside Mipso’s "Indefinite Break"

For Mipso guitarist and singer Joseph Terrell, the first sign that something was wrong was when he kept forgetting the words to “Louise,” one of the folk-pop quartet’s biggest songs.

“There was something that would happen onstage where I couldn't put the verses together in my head anymore,” he recalls. “And I was just, like, 'I think I am overloaded on this.' I think the part of me that wants to be honest about my own musical desires and grow as a musician and feel and believe and pay attention to what I'm making is not being fed by this.”

The other members of the band shared the sentiment, though it showed up in different ways for each of them. But it all led to one big decision that they reached together: an “indefinite break” that the band announced on May 7.

The reasons were both practical and personal: age, time, creativity, proximity, and a changing music industry all factored into the decision. To flip a line from “Louise,” there just wasn’t any more gas in the tank after 13 years as a band.

Deciding Together

Mipso was a band forged in friendship, a foundation that remains strong today. Terrell, mandolin player Jacob Sharp, and bassist Wood Robinson met and started playing music together as Mipso Trio while undergraduates at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Fiddle player Libby Rodenbough frequently sat in, and she became a full-fledged member of the band once she graduated in 2014, one year after the others.

They built an audience the old-fashioned way, slowly but steadily in an era just before going viral was a thing. They piled into a van and played regionally, then ventured farther from home until they were touring nationally and overseas. At their busiest, in the last half of the 2010s, they played 200 dates a year. Along the way, they released six full-length albums and dodged every genre description anyone ever tried to put on them. 

From the start, Mipso was a band that made every decision together. The camaraderie and teamwork the members became known for onstage was directly linked to how they operated behind the scenes.

“We're a true four-person, full-collaboration project,” says Rodenbough. “There's no frontperson and there never has been. We all write and arrange. Every decision that we've ever made in this band has been by consensus. Every member has veto power on every decision. And that's been true from day one.

“And, man,” she adds with a wry laugh, “is that time-consuming.”

The decision to bring Mipso to a close for now, Terrell observes, was “true to form.”

“We talked about this for-fucking-ever and discussed it, and we made a decision together,” he says. “And even though it's a decision to stop playing music, it was one last bit of collaboration for now. I'm proud of that.”

There wasn’t a fight, and there wasn’t a falling-out. The decision to put Mipso on hold, its members say, was more like a fade. Doubts started sneaking in amid the difficult making of their fourth album, 2018’s Edges Run, and COVID allowed those doubts to kick the door wide open.

Mipso chose to self-title their fifth album, released in 2021. It was meant as a reset after the turmoil of Edges Run, but without the support of a tour it quickly fell off the radar. Amid the lockdowns, the band members, on the cusp of their 30s and reeling from the brakes being applied to a career that had been going full steam, had time and space to take stock. It was clear that something had shifted.

“The first real conversation that we had about this was when we had the ‘tour from hell’ in Europe,” explains Robinson. The 2022 itinerary was intended as an ease back into touring, but there was nothing easy about it. The band encountered multiple illnesses, instruments and merch lost by an airline, a robbery, a truly disgusting greenroom, and more. “We were like, this seems insane to still be trying to do this in the way that we have been doing it,” Robinson recalls. “And we've had many conversations since then. We've had a lot of circumstances change since then. A lot of moves, a lot of qualifying moments in our life to try to make us reckon with why we do everything that we do.”

That reckoning also prompted each of the band’s members to move, sooner or later. Sharp relocated to Los Angeles, Rodenbough to Western North Carolina, Robinson to Salt Lake City, and Terrell to New York City.

They made time and travel arrangements to work up songs for their most recent album, 2023’s Book of Fools (ND story), and to prepare for tours. “We made it work for a long time,” says Terrell. “But there also was a growing sense of when we're not together to just rehearse and be around and do stuff together in the same space, what we're doing before tour is more like playing catch-up. … So it was more like we were playing a Mipso show as opposed to getting together to do what feels like the most creatively up-to-date thing from all four of our lives.”

“I've had multiple pretty intense tension points over the 13 years that we've been playing where I felt like I needed something different in my life, because the pace that we were doing it at was monopolizing,” Rodenbough says. “I didn't feel like there was much time in my life for other creative things or even for friendships and relationships. And then also it was monopolizing to spend so much time with these three people, even though we have a very cool and unique thing. I struggle to even describe it, but somewhere between siblings and platonic partners and business partners, some hybrid of that.”

At various points, each member of Mipso has released solo music, exploring their own sounds and the experience of making music alone, or with a different set of people. It became increasingly clear that a return to Mipso’s previous form was neither possible nor what anyone in the band desired. And it was equally clear that the best time to wind things down was while the band still loved their songs, and each other.

“What it comes down to,” Robinson says, “is that it was a mutual decision that we all really confidently came to at different times.” 

A return to Mipso’s pre-pandemic pace didn’t appeal to anyone, and the band members were increasingly feeling the pull of other creative outlets and personal pursuits.

One Last Tour

True to their college band roots, Mipso isn’t going out without a party. Even as they broke the news of their “indefinite break,” they announced a “Farewell for Now” tour starting in August that revisits some of their favorite towns and venues to play. It’s aimed at offering fans, as well as the band, a bit of closure, one last chance to sing the songs at full volume, in community, experiencing laughter and tears and everything in between together. The last shows on the tour take them back where it all started: Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, North Carolina, right next door to the UNC campus.

“What we built was beautiful because of who was involved,” says Sharp, “and it's going to be really amazing to celebrate that.”

For now, though, the members of Mipso are moving through music separately. Terrell is continuing the solo exploration he started with 2023’s Good for Nothing Howl. “I want to see what I can do with just a vocal and guitar,” he says, “and then we’ll see what’s next.”

Sharp, who has already released a few solo singles, has more of his own music on the way. Rodenbough is savoring a slower pace at her day job at Rare Bird Cultural Arts Farm, though she has plans to make music with other bands and sees solo projects in some form on the horizon. Robinson has placed music on the back burner for now while analyzing ecosystems for a land trust in Salt Lake City, putting to use the conservation science he studied at UNC. But that may change, he says, when he reconnects with old music friends after he moves back to North Carolina soon.

In fact, everyone in the band, for reasons unrelated to music, is moving back to North Carolina soon. It’s a bittersweet reversal of their proximity problem, a plot twist in the band’s latest chapter. But the book seems firmly closed, at least for now.

“We are each other's siblings in a way, and also each other's first listens,” says Sharp. “We inform so much of how we understand music that it's hard to imagine never playing music [with each other] again. And it's also hard to imagine, right now, doing it publicly in the same way anytime soon.”

Rather than trying to predict the future, the band, for now, is appreciating its past. They hope they’re leaving something behind for younger musicians to learn from, just as they looked up to bands that blazed the trail before them, like fellow North Carolinians Chatham County Line and Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange).

“I think that we're part of the river of tradition — the tradition that is people kind of extrapolating from tradition. We are proud representatives of that type of thing, which I think is really strong in North Carolina and is very strong in the Triangle and was very strong in Chapel Hill when we were in college,” says Rodenbough. “So I hope that we'll help uphold that and that younger bands will continue in that mold because they see that we did it as a long-term project.”

Mipso also provides a model of a band based on friendship and mutual trust, propelled not by the constant chase of “making it big,” but by the desire to do it right.

“I think we have to leave the legacy to other people, whether there is one and what it would be,” Terrell muses. “But I'm just really proud that we've made decisions together that felt honest and true to us, and music together that felt honest and true to us.”

When Mipso first came to the decision to put the band aside, there was an urge to define what that meant. They sweated the details, they worked out the wording, and they weighed their options. But then there came a peace, as Sharp describes it, with not knowing what the future would look like. 

“Most people look at something ending and see it as a failure,” he says. “But I see this as a success, that we have remarkably pulled off what feels like a magic trick of four people deciding to orient their creative and personal lives in the same direction for as long as we have. That, to me, is the most successful thing I've ever done. And now I get to hear other people's perspective on that too. And that's been a real gift.”