Wood Robinson: Camp Creators & Alumni Artisans Series

2010 was Wood Robinson’s first summer working Falling Creek, and it was also the year that he and his UNC-Chapel Hill friends started a band. Eventually, Wood graduated college and finished two more summers at camp, but that band, “Mipso,” is still going strong.

Fast forward to today, and Mipso has been touring for about a decade, across 48 states in the U.S., in Europe, and in Japan. The string quartet stays true to their North Carolina roots through their folk and bluegrass sound, with Wood on bass, Jacob Sharp on mandolin, Libby Rodenbough on fiddle, Joseph Terrell on guitar, and all four harmonizing captivating vocals. Their albums “Old Time Reverie” and “Edges Run” both topped Billboard’s Bluegrass charts, and their single “People Change” has been streamed over 100 million times on Spotify to date. They’re releasing their 6th album in July of 2023.

When Mipso was getting started, Wood never dreamed that it would be a career. “I minored in music but my degree and my ambition was actually in environmental science. I was planning on pursuing higher education and was going to get a Masters and PhD in global hydro climatology. I was playing a lot of jazz and orchestra stuff, and a friend of mine - Joseph, the guitar player in the band - approached me about starting to play some more folk music and some bluegrass with him and his friend Jacob, who played mandolin. I was just wanting to play a different style of music that, as of yet I was fairly unfamiliar with, except for having listened to it when growing up in North Carolina. It just very slowly snowballed from there.”

If you were at Falling Creek in 2010, ‘11, or ‘12, you might recall the large upright bass that Wood brought with him each summer. The bass was a fun addition to the Morning Assembly band every time he brought it out to play on the front porch. “The first year at camp I was a backpacking trip leader, the second year I taught whitewater paddling, and then the third year, about a week and a half into my working there, I broke my foot, and so I was the music teacher,” remembers Wood.

Wood explained how his time teaching music at summer camp influenced him. “There’s a strong human connection between a teacher and a student because playing music is inherently vulnerable. As a teacher you have to have a real sense of patience, tempered by a real sense of expectation, because the only thing that will make a person better at playing music is their own will to get better and will to put in the hours doing it. When you perform music, even if it’s just to your teacher or to a family member, you’re really vulnerable at that moment. Especially if you haven’t done it a lot. So as the teacher, you have to have a lot of love, compassion, and empathy for the person that you’re asking to essentially perform for you. So it was really a very nice experience teaching music at camp.”

After his time at boys camp, Wood and his bandmates devoted a lot of patience and hard work to get Mipso off the ground and start getting booked. “It’s a young man’s game,” Wood said. “We were swinging at just getting 5% of our emails returned, because at the time no one knew how many tickets we could sell.” Wood remembers being able to sell tickets in hometown venues around Chapel Hill and Asheville, North Carolina, but having trouble convincing venues in larger cities like New York City, Boston, or Chicago. “It was just a whole series of leaps of faith. Unfortunately, the music industry is not for those who pale in the face of financial risk. Another way of putting that, is that it’s not for smart business people - yours truly very much included,” Wood joked. But the hard work eventually started paying off.

Wood has been able to build a career out of his passion for music, but he’s careful not to promote band life as the only path. “I would say that music doesn’t have to be your vocation to be your passion. What pays your bills doesn’t have to be your passion either, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some people are really lucky that their passion can pay the bills too, and I’m very lucky that a whole series of things fell into place. That’s not to discount the fact that I worked hard for it, but had those random occurrences not happened in my lap in the way that they did, I don’t know that I would be pursuing music as my career. But what I do know is that regardless, I would still be playing music, and I would still be hustling to play music in cooler places to more people.”

When asked what advice he would give to a camper wanting to follow a similar career path in music, he was honest. “I would not be able to in good conscience recommend putting all your eggs in one basket and making music your only career option. However, if it were the only thing that would make someone happy, I would tell them to first get a Bachelor’s Degree in music, so that people want to hire you to be in their band and to teach their kids music. Most people that make their careers in music aren’t doing the glamorous thing on stage, and they’re just as happy, or happier. Get a job at camp and start teaching kids ukulele. That was as fulfilling as a lot of things that I’ve done.”

Wood is a believer that you should play music for the love of it above all else. “The only reason to do it is that you love it, and every time you can get on stage it fills you up a little bit more. That’s kind of the same thing as anything else in life. You just have to consider, do the pros of pursuing this outweigh the cons?”

Even now, over a decade since working at Falling Creek, Wood says there are still skills he learned at summer camp that he continues to draw on today. “I think it’s impossible to discount the importance of patience. Learning to work with people for a common objective is one of the great skills in life,” he said. At camp, he said he gained “the ability to maintain perspective of what’s important. Not to get too bogged down on things that might feel incredibly important in the moment, but less so in the scheme of weeks and months and lifetimes.”

Currently, Wood has been keeping busy not only with Mipso, but also with creating personal music and going back to school. “Mipso is releasing a new record this summer in July, and so we’re working on mixing that and getting the artwork and everything ready for that. My personal music is released under the title of ‘That Other Band,’ and I’m putting together some music for that as well. My record ‘In the Middle of Everything’ was released in 2020 as a sextet.”

As if that weren’t plenty, Wood has also been working towards his Master’s Degree in Spacial Data Science. He lives with his wife Katie in Salt Lake City, Utah, and loves playing music as much as ever. “I’ve been fortunate enough that the spark that I get when I’m able to play music is still there, every time I pick up the bass.”