Pepi Ginsberg
The freewheelin’ singer-songwriter reinvents herself through song and a little bit of illusion
By Katy Henriksen
Published: April 30th, 2008 | 12:00am
Pepi Ginsberg was nearly finished with a visual studies major at the University of Pennsylvania when she heard about a newly created creative writing concentration in the UP’s English department and decided to switch over in her sophomore year. “Something just didn’t sit right with me,” Ginsberg explains of the reason behind her switch from visual studies. The creative writing academic culture immediately made sense to her as a lifelong poet, and Ginsberg began participating in it by writing songs. Eventually, Ginsberg made songwriting her final school project. “That was my thesis, to write songs. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
Although Ginsberg had grown up singing in school and had non-professional musicians in her family, she didn’t know how to play the guitar and was, therefore, at a loss when the thesis committee wanted her to perform the five songs she wrote for her defense. Rather than have someone else accompany her, Ginsberg was determined to play the music herself. She took a few lessons and practiced so that she could strum the notes to her self-penned tunes.
“I was like, I have to do it. I was obsessed with certain songwriters, and they never had somebody else do it,” she says.
One such songwriter was Bob Dylan. At the time, Ginsberg was particularly taken with Dylan’s traveling troubadour past. After a successful thesis defense, she followed his path and moved to New York in 2006. “I felt like I wanted to be a songwriter from New York, too. It’s so silly...” Ginsberg gushes. “I thought, ‘It’s going to be so cool, I’ll just fall into this world.’ Then you realize, ‘No, I have to make my own world.’ But it exists, this sort of romantic Bohemia.”
Two years later, and Ginsberg is living out a traveling troubadour fantasy in Brooklyn with her April 22, 2008, release of Red, a collection of songs about moving forward and taking risks in life. Ginsberg wrote the album in 2006 while living in an apartment with fellow musician Rio En Medio, though both were relatively new to recording at the time. “I got obsessed with the idea of this being a record. But I had no idea what was going to happen,” she says of that time.
Like Dylan, who in his early days was known for mimicking favorite artists and bending the truth about various artistic experiences, Ginsberg decided to fake it. She made a fake CD, complete with cover art and a track listing, and carried the fake CD around New York, showing it off as her album. “But there was nothing. It didn’t exist at this point,” she says.
The illusion changed when Scott McMicken (Dr. Dog) asked her to record a song with him back in Philadelphia. Ginsberg brought other songs along just in case and, in an intense three-and-a-half weeks living in his studio — where the duo recorded in analog without effects — Red was born.
Both catchy and intelligent, Red has a driving pulse throughout. This is no more apparent than in “In My Bones,” which Ginsberg cites as one of her favorites. “It was this eerily prophetic template for what my life became — this idea of home and transition,” she said of the song.
Like Dylan, Ginsberg’s voice has a tattered swagger that is deep, throaty, and rounded. However, she replaces Dylan’s gritty vocals with mellow tones that seem sipped right out of a few glasses of a favorite red table wine. Ginsberg describes her voice as “a brown chair in a white room — stripped down to the basics,” though she is still amazed by the complex set of events that led her to becoming the romanticized ideal of a Bohemian New York singer-songwriter musician.
“It was kind of blowing my mind. I was like, my life is coming true because of this song,” Ginsberg says of the now biographical “In My Bones,” which became her symbolic mantra of moving forward and transformation. The process of writing and recording Red has inspired a kind of freewheelin’ spirit in Ginsberg. “Going forward is scary, but going back is even scarier,” she says of her new view on life. “It’s really less safe to go backward. It’s safer to go forward, and there are points of no-return.”
Issue #35
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