Sophie Strauss is unapologetic and honest. A musician based in LA, Sophie creates ethereal tracks that are the theme songs for girls around the world—capturing a universal experience of girlhood. Her voice is simultaneously light and rich, creating a beautiful sound we wish we had heard sooner. In the following interview, we get to know Sophie as not only a talented artist but an activist and thinker.
Keke Magazine: How did you get started as a musician?
Sophie Strauss: I’ve always loved attention, so I think it was a natural progression from there. I sang with my dad in the car a lot growing up and he’d play guitar and we’d sing together. Then I started writing when I was a teenager—mostly poetry—but then the two things (music and writing) organically came together. I started writing music when I was 16 and put my first little demo EP out when I was 19 and haven’t stopped since.
K: Can you describe your style of music?
S: I’d describe my music as lyrically-driven, intimate, and plush. I like to think it doesn’t take itself too seriously while still trying to address serious themes.
K: What do you like to write about in your songs?
S: I like to think nothing is off limits, I like to write about moments or experiences that aren’t usually deemed poetic enough to be written about or turned into music because I think those kinds of moments are the most universal and do the best job of communicating a feeling. I like to write about conversations, cooking, making plans with someone, getting stuck in traffic….really anything at all.
K: Tell us about your new album Hard Study. What inspired this album?
S: This album was inspired by women in my family—by women who never got to be the complicated, emotional, smart humans that they were capable of being because the world was so unkind to them. I wanted to take all the mundane, beautiful, frustrating experiences of being a girl, of being a woman, and make an album that said “it’s okay to feel this way, it’s okay to talk about these things.”
K: Your music video for “I Was” came out recently—can you tell us what this song means to you?
S: That song is about the intimacy of girlhood. Of being simultaneously grateful that no one ever forced me to define my childhood experiences as queer but also feeling regretful that, perhaps, I missed the opportunity to deeply explore my own emotions. It’s about sitting in the gray area that remembering creates.
K: How do you use visuals to enhance the meaning of your music?
S: I’m a very visual person so I almost always have a strong sense of what I want a song to look like, what I want my space to look like, what I want my clothes to look like, etc. I typically don’t like the visuals for a song to be too on-the-nose or literal in terms of its interpretation of the song because then it feels like a wasted opportunity to add even more depth to what a song is saying. I like if the song is doing the work of communicating one idea and the visuals are doing the work of communicating another and then those two ideas are either helping each other or creating interesting tension.
K: As a woman in a music industry dominated by male executives, do you think that you have faced any inequities due to your gender?
S: Well I’m currently an independent artist so I haven’t really been at any big companies where men are holding the keys to the kingdom, necessarily, but I’ve still definitely dealt with having to combat male assumptions about me as a musician and as a professional. I’ve had producers assume I don’t have a clear vision for what I want a song to be in a way that often feels infantilizing. I’ve had so many men—even random men—officer unsolicited advice or ideas about what I should do with a song or performance or instrumentation. I think when women and girls are making music it’s often assumed that we are just the public face for a team of men working behind us to make us look good or sound good. But in reality, as an independent artist, I’m doing fucking everything. I’m writing, I’m scheduling, I’m doing all the visuals for my shows and track art, I’m tirelessly searching for and reaching out to possible co-collaborators and venues and putting bands together and finding mixers and studio time and paying for it all out of pocket. I am so lucky to have worked with so many incredibly talented co-collaborators and artists, but this shit doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a fuck ton of work. And I think people often assume we girls just stumble into this—that we just show up and look nice and sing.
K: How do you use your music to embody feminism and empower other women?
S: I don’t think I actively try to be empowering or anything so much as I just try to be really honest. Even if the content of my lyrics is fictional, I always try to have the sentiment be really true to the things I’ve felt and experienced. I think that honesty can be really empowering. I know I’ve felt so heard by other artists who have used their art as a way to be honest about topics we don’t hear a lot about, when they don’t shy away from taboos it is a way of giving permission to other people to talk about the things they thought they’d have to keep secret.
K: What is do you want your listeners to take away from your music?
S: I want them to feel heard. I don’t really care so much about spilling my guts so that people know everything about me, but I want to be saying things that make people feel like there’s people out there who might understand and feel the way they do.
K: What does inclusion mean to you? How can the music industry become more inclusive?
S: Inclusion is super important on a really deep level. I think the push right now to be more inclusive of artists who aren’t just white or cis or men is really important. But I also think it runs the risk of being superficial fixes for brownie points instead of profound shifts in the way the industry functions. I imagine a lot of white dude execs sitting in a room being like “EVERYONE SAYS WE GOTTA BE DIVERSE SO LET’S DO IT BECAUSE DIVERSITY IS HOT RIGHT NOW!”As opposed to like….an actual meaningful restructuring of how decisions are made and who gets to make those decisions and who gets to benefit from those decisions.
K: Where you do you see yourself and your music in the future?
S: I really have no idea. I know I’ll never stop making music but I cannot imagine where it might take me. Lately I’ve noticed that the things I used to be so sure I wanted aren’t necessarily appealing anymore. I’m still figuring out what I want from this world and how to be gentle with myself as I figure that out. How to let the things I want change without framing that change as failure. I’m trying to allow myself to re-define how I think of what it means to be successful. I just don’t know right now, and I’m trying to learn to be okay with that.
K: If you could work with any other female artist, who would she be?
S: Fiona Apple!!!
K: What is a fun fact about yourself?
S: I am a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and I can wiggle my nose like Bewitched.
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