Miranda Hope had her first public performance at the age of three, when she sang "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" with her grandfather Bob Hope and Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops.
She grew up in Washington, D.C., singing along to records -- the "Annie" soundtrack evolved into Billie Joel's "Glass Houses" which became Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and finished up as Pink Floyd's "The Wall." One heck of a weird, long song.
Fast forward a dozen years to a 25 year-old Miranda, who needed to sink more deeply into the music that moved her. It was the beauty of Mary Chapin Carpenter's "I Am a Town," that sent her to a flea market north of Paris, France, to buy a $50, no-name guitar. Cracked body, rusted strings, out of tune – she took it home and promptly broke the first string she tried to tighten. Still, from the moment that she played her first notes on that 5-string, she was hooked.
She begged chords from friends, learned songs, and studied guitar with Val Mackend in New York while pursuing a master’s degree in Theatre at Columbia University. She moved to rural Virginia, wrote songs in a log cabin, and played open mic nights and gigs, while working as an English/Drama/Music/Science/
Yoga teacher, an actor, a director, a writer, a film editor, a bartender, a waitress, a llama trainer, and a sushi roller. Since 2005, she has run a non-profit counseling company for low-income rural teenagers, called "Next Step" -- a job she has felt honored to do. Through it all, there has been that guitar.
"Leaving Eden" was recorded in East Nashville in the summer of 2008 with local artists Mack Starks, Neilson Hubbard, and Kirk Yoquelet. (See the links page for more about them.) In her first major recording effort, Miranda draws on a lifetime influnce of Americana Folk/rock and female singer-songwriters, but she tempers it with her own lyrical storytelling and perspective. Through her efforts to distill her own life experiences into melody and words, she delivers something universal.