Pepi Ginsberg

Pepi Ginsberg was born in CT in the early summer. She lived in a clapboard house on Clapboard Ridge Road with her mother and father and dog. When she was seven her father died in a plan accident and later her mother remarried a kind, gentle man. Pepi was named after her grandmother, a resistance fighter in WWII, who, with the help of her grandfather, whom she would later be introduced to at the Copacabana in NY, organized the refugee ship the Exodus to usher holocaust victims to safe harbor in Palestine. This Pepi attened local high school, picking up the post of editor in cheif of the school's literary magazine, a post TRuman Capote once filled. When it came to leave, Pepi packed her bags and headed to West Philadelphia to attend college where she continued to work on both visual art and creative writing, the latter of which manifested itself in the form of a novella, written at age 19 called No Name, Colorado. Luckily, finding great like minds within the city, Pepi spent the last years of school haunting the wharehouses, drawing and playing songs with friends. A spot on a local Philly music compilation soon followed and with the support and help of friends she recorded her first album Orange Juice:Stephanie/Stephanie by the spring of the following year. That next fall in 2006, Pepi moved to Brooklyn and recorded a second record, Sometime Momma/Sometime Babe, in the tub of her apt bathroom. When the record was finished Pepi hit the road and headed west, driving the coast of California with friends to play shows. Upon returning home, Pepi found a bottle with a note in it at the foot of her apt door. The return address was from Philadelphia musician Scott McMicken(Dr.Dog) who had written to Pepi asking if she woud like to come down to Philly and record a song. As Pepi tells it . . . "I went down and it was just good vibes from day one. We recorded The Waterline and it came out just great. I went back a few days later and we did In My Bones and then I just never left. I had all these other songs and the general feeling was- damn, we have three and a half weeks, I have the songs, so lets just do it. We created a schedule and the Brown Chair, White Room Manifesto which was a collection of our ideas on what we thought was a good way to approach an analogue record – stick to basics, no reverb, no plug-ins, just music and spirit. We stayed up all hours, smoked too many cigarettes, washed up in the sink, and slept on the couches so we never had to commute. On top of that, hanging out was just so fun that I don’t think either one of us was too interested in doing anything that wasn’t recording or talking, including sleeping and eating. There were late nights that we went a little silly, we called these times our non-tage moments, laying on the floor with Scott’s amazing dog Zimba starring at us as if to say ‘Oh man . . .’ Then we’d get stranded at the studio and the nearest place to get a real sandwich is a twenty minute walk which meant dinner one night was salt and pepper on packing-peanuts from a box of recently delivered records. We snuck into the building’s staff fridge and brought ice cream sandwich’s into the fort we built in the studio, but I’m probably not supposed to tell that! We took a trip to Toby's grandparent's house in York, PA to record Nothing More outside at night with the crickets as our backing soundtrack, The whole time was magic, better than a dream.” Red was joyfully recorded in three and a half weeks – "We never looked back," Pepi said. "There wasn't time." It was a blessing and now the record is here to share.