DAYTROTTER

http://www.daytrotter.com/article/1247/pepi-ginsberg

“Ginsberg, in her soulful and breezy style, alludes to the secret folds of people and all that they stand for as they try to navigate all of the difficulties that line up each morning at the stoop, handing you the newspaper as they come in and tuck themselves into the briefcase or carry out bag that you leave the house with. Her explorations in the elasticity of free will and the need to leave everything up to the almighty chance and arbitrary encounter are wonderfully rich and voluminous in their font and thoughtfulness. She doesn’t make snap judgments or phrases, but ones that have adult teeth and some age lines cracking out of the corners of their eyes, showing their maturation.”

The Fader

http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/5/8/video-pepi-ginsberg-the-waterline

“We can pretty safely file this one in the Things We Should Have Paid More Attention To folder”

Foxy Digitalis

http://www.digitalisindustries.com/foxyd/reviews.php?which=1799

This cumbersome and rather confusingly-titled debut from transplanted Philadelphia singer/songwriter Ginsberg (who apparently now calls Brooklyn her home) is an intimate collection of tales that delivers an eclectic combination of straightforward folk (“China Sea”) with occasionally forays into Southern spirituals (“Inchworm”) and whacked-out, Tom Waits-styled avant jazz/blues (“You, Your Brother, And Me”) often set to enigmatic and surreal, Patti Smith-inspired poetic lyrics (such as the title track, which appears in two parts)! Ginsberg wrote a novella (“No Name, Colorado”) at 19, so she has a gift for creating striking images with her poetry/lyrics, and she delivers them in a sing-speak bluesy style that suggests she’s bearing the weight of the universe on her delicate shoulders.

Her myriad styles and personas makes for a disconcerting listening experience which Ginsberg, herself, calls “psychedelic deer piss.” It’s bluesy, folky, and spiritual (sometimes all at once) and can come across like Miriam Makeba or Pearl Bailey making their way through the Suzanne Vega songbook. Perhaps the strangest track of all is “Zelda’s Song (As Sung By A Young Spanish Woman),” wherein Ginsberg adopts a faux Spanish accent that probably accurately reflects some of the local in her neighborhood, but struck me like an audition for Rita Moreno’s role in “West Side Story.” So while I commend her attempts to be varied in presenting the many voices and styles of Pepi Ginsberg, I prefer the straightforward folky tunes like “Maroon Coats” and “Cool Green Castle.”

Ginsberg invites a band to sit in on the album’s rockingest (and best) songs, “Kettle Song” and “Needlenumb” and I’d like to hear her career and future songs develop in this direction. But as it is, we have a nice, strong beginning to what could be an exciting new voice in the folk/rock world. 7/10 — Jeff Penczak (18 September, 2006)

Jambase

http://www.jambase.com/Articles/14206/Pepi-Ginsberg-Red

“Red (Park The Van) is uncompromisingly alive and captures both the sounds and essence of this labor of love. Ginsberg is a voice we can believe and her observations ring with the weight of the Everywoman. She takes delight in language and melody, and her vocal performance is passionate and sincere.”

By Forrest Reda
Published: June 20th, 2008

Jewish Exponent

http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/10101

Pepi Ginsberg’s on a remarkable journey. She’s come a long way in a short time, and she’s nearly bursting with excitement about the future. A few weeks before the release of her breezy, folky debut, “Orange Juice: Stephanie/ Stephanie,” the 23-year-old singer-songwriter sat in Rittenhouse Square and retraced her steps.
Her affair with music began soon after she moved to Philadelphia five years ago to take a major in visual studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The summer before sophomore year, she returned to her hometown of Greenwich, Conn., determined to spend her time creatively. And so she decided to write a song each day.

She had been writing poetry for as long as she could remember, and she’d sung in school. Her family made music, though not professionally. One grandfather concocted little songs on the accordion and several other instruments, while her father played guitar and banjo.

The only catch: She didn’t really play. At first, she came up with things in her head or by returning to the piano after a long hiatus that had begun soon after her father’s death, in a gliding accident, when she was 7. But to bring the songs into the world, she needed to learn guitar. She started playing in January 2005, and the results were apparent immediately.

“I just started writing and writing and writing. Sixty songs, 70 songs, just a zillion songs,” Ginsberg says. “Half of them I could play, half of them I couldn’t. Most of them no good, but I needed to get so much stuff out of my system.”

Last summer, she gave herself an ultimatum.

“I had all these songs. I have them recorded on my computer,” she says. “And I was like, ‘You know what? If I don’t start singing in public now, I won’t. So just make up your mind. Are you going to do it or not?’ ”

She decided to go for it. An open-mike led to solo shows and a spot on “Up the Stairs and Through the Hall,” a compilation of songs by local musicians. Through West Philly’s supportive scene, she linked up with guitarist Eric Carbonara, who helped her turn her compositions into a cohesive album. They recorded “Orange Juice: Stephanie/Stephanie” over the course of six months.

Just 17 months after she committed herself to guitar, she celebrated the CD’s release with a show at the North Star Bar here.

The shift from visual arts to words and music bled into her schoolwork, and she switched her major to creative writing. She still draws — she designed her own album cover — but she can say things in song that she can’t on canvas.

Painting With Song
“I wish that I could begin to describe with a physical mark with a pen the way that I see the world,” she says. “But I became increasingly frustrated ’cause I realized that maybe that wasn’t the best way that I could communicate the things that I was seeing. I feel like I’m painting a picture with language, and so in that way it informs it. Whereas if I could translate it with a paintbrush, I would, but I can’t.”

Her visual literacy lends a fresh perspective to her lyrics. Take the gentle two-part title track, for example, which marries Ginsberg’s ruminations on color and religion.

“It’s like if you hear a word that you’ve never heard before and all of a sudden you seem to start to see it everywhere,” she says. “That’s just how I felt about the color orange on a particular day.”

The narrator’s belief system is more complex. “She says, ‘I’m praying to orange, I’m praying to the mundane, I’m praying to a color, I’m praying to something that doesn’t matter, I’m gonna pray to things of this world that everyone can have,’ ” Ginsberg says of the titular Stephanie.

“Any kind of religion is for everybody, but it’s not something everybody can experience. You can’t convince anybody to have it. You can’t tell somebody to pray.”

For a different take on her background in art, consider “Needlenumb,” a shimmery rocker that’s informed by artwork that merges sewing and drawing. Many songs have explored the idea of sundering a relationship that seemed solid, but Ginsberg’s metaphor puts a new spin on it.

“You look at two swatches of fabric that look like they should go together,” she says. “You try to sew things, and the process of going in and out is like breathing, so it should be a valuable process. But it’s not necessarily valuable to try to put things together all the time.”

Most of the CD’s songs pivot on Ginsberg’s confident, languid vocals and guitar, but “Needlenumb” is one of a handful of tracks that she and Carbonara recorded with Michael Heinzer on bass and Matt Ricchini on drums during an after-hours session at Penn’s Kelly Writers House, where Ginsberg worked. Those tracks, particularly “You, Your Brother, and Me,” benefit from the full-band treatment.

Ginsberg says she wants to move more in that direction for her next effort.

“I’ve gotta get it down so that I can do my thing by myself and say what I have to say and, hopefully, communicate it,” she says. “But once that happens, kick into gear and then team up with a good set of drums and a nice lead guitar and some good bass parts.”

Whether her Philly friends stay in the picture remains to be seen. A year after graduation, Ginsberg’s embarking on the next leg of her journey. With “Orange Juice: Stephanie/Stephanie” behind her and a head full of ideas for the follow-up, she’s saying goodbye to Philly.

She’s planning to work as an assistant to an artist friend in Brooklyn, but what she really wants to do is live on the road for a while, taking her songs from town to town.

NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90449506

May 14, 2008 – Pepi Ginsberg has a distinctively mournful voice with a remarkable range. On her latest CD, Red she croons with a weathered and passionate warble about her inner demons (real or imagined), sleeping with strangers, getting high, and starting anew. She’s a kind of troubadour for the 21st century, gracefully channeling ’60s psychedelic pop and folk and retooling it to fit her own imaginative stylings.

Red is full of off-kilter rhythms and unexpected instrumentation. Spare violins dance woozily with bleating trumpet lines and shuffling rhythms. Fuzzy guitars take a walk with reedy organs. The mood is melancholy one moment, joyous and celebratory the next. The mix is sonically ambitious without overwhelming the heart of the songs, due in no small part to producer Scott McMicken, frontman for the Philadelphia-based psych-rock group Dr. Dog.

When Ginsburg arrived home from a tour last Summer she found a note in a bottle on her doorstep from McMicken, asking if she’d like to record a song together. What initially started as a one-off recording turned into an entire album. “The Waterline” was the first track they did together.

“It was just a composite of things that were brewing in my head as I walked around the city,” says Ginsberg. “It’s a really city-centric song, feeling an affinity for St. Mark’s church, I’d walk by there and some girl (was) tripping on some kind of acid jaunt outside there with her hands held up. She was on a whole other level and I don’t know what she was doing. It’s a little bit of an adventure story. It’s not necessarily about water but the idea that things could be overwhelming, but you’re going to feel the pull of it whether you’re drowning or staying afloat.”

Red is Ginsberg’s third release. Her debut, in 2005, was the self-produced and recorded Orange Juice:Stephanie/Stephanie. She followed with Sometime Momma/Sometime Babe in 2006, an album she recorded in the bathroom of her Brooklyn, NY apartment.

Ginsberg has been writing feverishly since completing Red and is currently touring in support of the album.

Paper Thin Walls

http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=1481

“Although Cat Power, Karen O and Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley, among other females, all did beautiful jobs reworking Bob Dylan for the I’m Not There soundtrack, it’s a shame singer-songwriter Pepi Ginsberg didn’t get a shot: Much of Red, her gorgeous third album, perfectly evokes the pathos of Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks andDesire. The intensity of her jarring, challenging wail—step off, Joanna Newsom—is met with warm, vintage piano and acoustic guitar arrangements orchestrated by Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken, who has built his own rep for pumping blood back into sounds from bygone eras with his own outfit. Just like the world-weary singing of Karen Dalton’s, which influenced Dylan in the 1960s, Ginsberg revels in the imperfections of her voice.”

Paper Thin Walls Listening Party

http://www.paperthinwalls.com/listeningparty/index?id=70

“I don’t consider myself a singer, there’s just a necessity of communication,” says 24-year-old folk-rock tunesmith Pepi Ginsberg. “These are my words, and this is the only voice I have.”

Paste Magazine | You only get two sets of ears

http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/festivus/view/sxsw_315_you_only_get_two_sets_of_ears

One of the shows I was most excited for coming into SXSW was brash folk singer-songwriter Pepi Ginsberg. Sincerity is hard to come by at a music livestock show, but she joyfully kicked her legs and showed that her voice—the most evocative and unique that I’ve heard since Joanna Newsom—is genuine and even more stunning in a live setting. I will never tire of hearing “In My Bones,” and hopefully she can teach her backing band to sing the delicious harmonies found on Red (featuring plenty of assists from Dr. Dog’s Scott McMicken), out in May.

Pop Matters | Tales from the fest: An Abecedarium

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/56257/an-abecedarium

F is for Find of the Festival

Several bands that I saw and loved were already on my radar prior to attending SXSW, so my one true find of this festival was Pepi Ginsberg. Attending on the advice of a friend, her combination of Patti Smith vocals and Bob Dylan’s lyrical cadence catapulted her to the front of what was a pretty crowded field.

Pop Matters | Music Days 3 & 4: Too Much Fun

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/features/article/56159/music-days-3-41

I wasn’t really sure what I walked into when I entered the Park the Van showcase to find a rotund man wearing a fake moustache and projecting a campaign video for Pepi Ginsberg. In it, people stated that a vote for Pepi was a vote for a variety of things: purity, integrity, and cleanliness among them. Excellence wasn’t mentioned there, but after this set, it definitely should be. While her earlier material seemed to presuppose her as an electronic folk artist, the tunes we hear tonight sound like Patti Smith covering Bob Dylan. With a three-piece backing band providing a blank canvas for Pepi to paint on, she soars and warbles, yodels and cracks. Her voice belies her youthful looks; structured and strong, it also contradicts her nervousness. Removing her sunglasses, she suddenly realizes people are actually watching, says “oh,” and puts them back on. It’s not that she’s afraid, just overawed, perhaps. Introducing each song individually, she’s heartfelt and honest. From the slight surf guitar influence of “Window Degree” to the delicate picking that opens her set, the music doesn’t overpower, acting instead as a backdrop for her impressive vocals. Best of all is “Rumbleweed”, which starts off with “Pale Blue Eyes” picking before proceeding into jauntier territory that finds Pepi dancing around the stage like she’s stepping on hot coals. Remember: a vote for Pepi is a vote for excellence.

Rumbles

http://www.terrascope.co.uk/Reviews/Rumbles_October06.htm

With a voice that is halfway between blues and folk, although the songs are delicate acoustic affairs, Pepi Ginsberg can mesmerise you with ease as she sings her personal stories. Featuring sparse accompaniment, percussion and some wonderful guitar playing that has a West Coast feel in its delicate runs, the songs are dominated by the voice, rich and evocative, bringing the tales to life in a delightful way. The title track of the album “Orange Juice: Stephanie Stephanie”, is possibly the strongest track part two being particularly gorgeous.

Sadie Magazine

http://sadiemagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=117&Itemid=96

“…Red is a delight in influence and design. It’s layered, but not bogged down with sound.”

Stereo Gum

http://stereogum.com/archives/video/new-pepi-ginsberg-video-the-waterline_009626.html

“..The real star of the whole thing is her gorgeous voice. It hits with some sorta Edie Brickell warmth, but in a much jazzier Jolie Holland or, better yet, Spector realm.”

Wears the Trousers Magazine

http://wearsthetrousers.com

Philadelphia has long been an underrated hub of creativity where bohemians can feel completely at home, thriving in a town where the rent is so cheap that you can pay all your bills by working part-time. Pepi Ginsberg — yes, that is her real name — appears to be one of those artistic souls doing just that. Her destiny — to become extraordinary to be exact — was laid out early when she was named after her German grandmother who started a school in Palestine and married one of the organisers behind the Jewish refugee ship Exodus, best known through the seven-hour marathon movie of the same title starring Paul Newman. Fittingly, Ginsberg is one of those rare people who seem wise beyond their years, but in an entirely touching way. With a voice that’s filled with
an ancient pain, so blue and lazy that it’s sometimes on the verge of being out of tune, she really is a poet in disguise, painting tender, sadly beautiful pictures with words worth framing, all enhanced by her unusual speak-sing style.

However ambiguous the title, much of Orange Juice: Stephanie/Stephanie burns with spontaneity and truth. A number of songs take a fairly straightforward approach to folk music; the opener China Sea, for example, takes a delicately played guitar and adds prosaic lyrics to give a stripped down performance that’s emotionally sound and ushers Ginsberg in, closer to her audience. Similarly, Maroon Coats and Cool Green Castle take the same folk influences and skilfully evoke a feeling of melancholy and nostalgia that’s entirely believable.

On songs where Ginsberg recruits a band, such as Needlenumb and Kettle Song, the structured and fairly ordinary arrangements may make for a fuller sound but occasionally trip up her free-spirited voice, making it seem a little bit clumsy. The starkly emotional Orange Juice: Stephanie/Stephanie Parts 1 and 2 provide a much better framework for her unrestricted singing.
That’s not to say that Ginsberg is shy of experimentation. The self-explanatorily titled Zelda’s Song (As Sung By A Young Spanish Woman) finds her singing in a Spanish accent all the way through, while You, Your Brother & Me has a theatrical tinge that’s reminiscent of Tom Waits.

Most of the time, Ginsberg’s songs feel comfortable but not predictable; her voice pushes over lazy guitar rhythms with the appealing nouce of a well-adventured soul. At one point she sings, “if your song wants to be a colour, drink it,” and judging by this debut, that’s exactly what she’s been doing. And there’s plenty of colour to spare; these dozen songs are but a very slim margin of what is floating around this songwriter’s head — apparently she chose them out of 185 songs written in just over a year.

Venus Zine

http://www.venuszine.com/articles/music/3008/Pepi_Ginsberg

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.”

Wears the Trousers Magazine

http://wearsthetrousers.com/2008/07/07/pepi-ginsberg-red-2008/

“An arty pop gem, Red is a definite transition from Ginsberg’s invigorating but sparse debut. But she never sounds anything less than entirely authentic. Rather, her clever feel for arrangements and delicate approach to emotional transparency marks her out even more as something truly special indeed.”