Jesca HoopYou never think about it, but some kid in Beverley Hills must have Harrison Ford on their paper round. In fact, Han Solo himself got his first big acting break through building some shelves for George Lucas. As day-jobs go, being Tom Waits’ nanny has got to be pretty cool. You look after the kids for a while, watch a movie, and then get to hang out with one of the most fertile minds in modern music just as he comes back feeling all groovy from a few beers and a nice dinner with the wife. How much would people pay for an hour with Tom Waits in contemplative mood?

Jesca Hoop was the lucky young lady who got paid to do so – and there are places in her music where you can hear TW’s influence, the kind of beautiful musical mess that he stitched together on albums like Rain Dogs and Swordfish Trombones, where strange chord shifts drop out from under the music and odd dissonances suddenly fall in together and turn out to have been harmonies all along.

There are similarities to Feist and Cat Power in her music too, her sometimes sweet, sometimes piercing, sometimes sultry and seductive voice ties together simple acoustic guitar tracks with complicated, swaggering electronic ones, and there are nice little touches of production like whispers turned up to overpower the rest of the track. Definitely worth a listen if you like any of the artists used for comparison, and interesting enough to be worth investigating if you have any kind of indie sensibility. If the big man backs her she can’t be bad…