In late January 2025, Jacob Sharp returned to Altadena, California, for the first time since the Eaton Fire, making a stop at the National Guard checkpoint to prove that he was not a looter or a gawker. The air was thick with fumes. He wore an N95 mask in his car.
Through his speakers, he listened to gentle piano over birdsong—the latter of which he’d recorded the year prior in his beloved Altadena backyard.
He’d received the masters of Middle Kid, his debut solo record, on January 7, the first day of the fires in LA County and the day he evacuated Altadena, where he’d lived since 2023. He finally had a chance to listen as he passed the checkpoint near his house. “Find your breath and let it slow, like a friend who don’t let go,” he heard himself sing on “Shadows.” “There’s always a way, you know, to live a little easier.”
“I received this gift. I wrote this for a different version of myself, and now I am that person who needs this song,” Sharp told the INDY. “I hoped that it would be a balm for people. I didn’t know that it would be my balm.”
Jump forward to August 2026, with Sharp on his screened porch in Durham, his faithful dog Lula by his side. Though he is newly back in North Carolina, his history in the local music scene runs deep. In 2011, as a fresh-faced student at UNC-Chapel Hill, he cofounded Mipso, a string band at the time. Over the course of six LPs and 13 years, the four-person band evolved from bluegrassy pop to restlessly inventive folk fusion, rarely covering the same ground twice. Last October, the band played its final show and split amicably.
“I want to know if it’s possible to release a record where the goal is not growth from a career or financial perspective [but] growth from a community and a joy perspective.”
jacob sharp, musician
Sharp is the last of his former bandmates to release music outside of Mipso. Libby Rodenbough crafted a couple of solo records. Wood Robinson cut a songwriter record and a jazz album. Joseph Terrell also made a solo LP and, more recently, has casually gone viral with a series of protest songs. During that time, Sharp was falling for a new West Coast hometown, only to see it burn.
Now Sharp has come home to a state he hadn’t planned to return to, where he’ll release Middle Kid outside of the LA songwriter community that first nurtured the record. His life was abruptly rebooted, yet he’s at peace.
“I’m sharing [Middle Kid] for the joy it brings me, not for how it will give me something new in a music career. In a way, I’m trying to find myself in music again,” Sharp said. “I want to know if it’s possible to release a record where the goal is not growth from a career or financial perspective [but] growth from a community and a joy perspective.”
Middle Kid is out October 9, with a release show at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room on November 13.
There’s a handful of other live dates, including an appearance at Raleigh Wide Open on October 2 and a daytime date in rural Nebo on October 3, but Sharp’s show schedule looks more like that of a local act than a seasoned professional. That’s by design. The album’s sound, too, is more direct than the technical prog-folk that had become Mipso’s sandbox by the end. Middle Kid is a tastefully produced album with a lyrical, melodic nucleus, written in 2022 and 2023 while Sharp was living on the West Coast and finding his footing as a songwriter.
Things had been good in Altadena. Sharp relished its mountains and wildlife. It reminded him of his native Morganton, only with LA’s many facets immediately next door. He was surprised at how deeply he and his then-fiancée Cate Parker loved it.
“It was a joy to see Jacob spread his wings,” said Sharp’s former bandmate, Joseph Terrell, who spoke by phone in the minutes before boarding a plane to join songwriter Samia Finnerty as a touring guitarist.
Sharp flourished in a community of West Coast musicians who got to know each other through cowriting. After all his years in Mipso, Sharp knew his former bandmates’ voices like he knew his childhood bedroom. In LA, though, he learned to relate to new collaborators, such as Benjamin Lazar Davis of Okkervil River and Bridget Kearney of Lake Street Dive.
Terrell, who Sharp describes as a brother-level friend, was the only other former member of Mipso to play on Middle Kid, so named because its songs are often about (or written within) the ways people relate to themselves and others.
Terrell heard elements of Sharp’s personality emerge in the Middle Kid sessions that hadn’t been there for Mipso. He points to Sharp’s irreverence on “Hotter Than Shit,” a peppy pop number about relating to a seemingly cooler person, only to realize relative hipness is illusory anyway. Sharp’s vulnerability and pop refinement were always present in Mipso. On Middle Kid, those elements move to the front.
“Things were too good in LA to leave unless we were pushed,” Sharp said.
The night before the fire, Sharp said, felt like a dry hurricane. Trees fell to howling Santa Ana winds. Then January 7 dawned eerily. Lula was on edge all day.
“You could see Eaton Canyon from our house, basically. I heard from Cate that a fire had started nearby,” Sharp said. “I was putting away some dishes. I looked out the window and could see a huge ball of flame hundreds of feet in the air. It was clear that it was gonna be bad.”
Sharp gathered some clothes, the dog, his instruments, and a few necessities. He and Parker raced away from the apocalyptic scene of smoke and blowing ashes. They escaped to what amounted to a climate refugee hotel—the first of 16 places Sharp and Parker and Lula bounced between after Altadena burned.
“My home was on the edge of the fire destruction. The fire came within a block of our house. In the moment, [the house surviving] felt like a big gift,” Sharp said. “Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we learned it was much worse. Everything was ruined from toxic smoke damage.”
One by one, Sharp threw out early lyric notebooks and family heirlooms. He held the last letters from his mother, who died when he was a teenager, in the gloves of a full hazmat suit. And then he let them go.
“What’s beautiful is that I got to see all those things again,” he said. “You get to process slowly that these are just items that we carry.”
Though transient, Sharp and Parker kept their wedding date of February 22, 2025. They celebrated the people who kept them afloat. And they started looking for a place to make a soft landing. In September, Sharp and Parker left California for Durham, settling in an older, wooded neighborhood. And in January 2026, a year after they were driven from Altadena, they welcomed baby Marina. Having lived through disaster and started a family, Sharp’s priorities became clear and uncluttered.
“Jacob has been distilled or refined,” Terrell said.
On his Durham porch, Sharp said he feels like he’s living in the Triangle for the first time. Mipso toured hard, sometimes hitting the road for 250 to 300 days a year. Back then, Sharp felt like a tourist in his own town. He knew bits and pieces of the Carrboro scene, but that was it.
Now, though, he’s solidly in Durham, his calendar wide open and free of tours. Even with Middle Kid releasing soon, he’s not trying to game algorithms or chase Spotify streams. He’s on the far side of a successful music career, and a life he tried to build on the West Coast, and somehow the familiar things feel new again.
“I want to text my friends [that] I’ve got a record out. I want to see them at the coffee shop and let them know that we have a Cat’s Cradle show coming up that I’d love it if they were at,” Sharp said, his voice warming with enthusiasm. “I’ve never played a solo show. That’s wild to me.”
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