It’s hard to believe, let alone accept, that a year has passed since we got word that SOPHIE — our beloved architect of unruly beats and life-affirming singalongs — had left this world.
As far as I know, there aren’t many casual SOPHIE fans. You’ve either never heard of the Scottish artist, or you’re like me. Which is to say that hearing the news felt like one of SOPHIE’s towering metallic synths had leapt to life and bulldozed the shit out of you. It was an awful morning. An awful week. An awful month. An awful time that has, as anyone who’s grieved knows, not relented so much as transformed.
I don’t listen to SOPHIE like I used to. I’m not sure I’ll ever ride the train to “LEMONADE” again, or cheekily throw on “Is It Cold In The Water?” before sliding into a scalding bath — my chosen cauldron of gender ecstacy. The joy still feels too close to the pain. I have made a few exceptions, like listening to SOPHIE all night at an online tribute, where fans across the globe expressed their love by dancing through the tears. Or months later, when I played “Immaterial” during my “Gender Rereveal Party,” because no night honoring the plasticity of self would be complete without SOPHIE.
Dealing with death is hard for many reasons — one of which being that it is so brutally simple, even as the emotions it causes can be infinitely complex. It’s been a year, and I’m still finding new levels to this loss, new contexts made unsteady by her absence. One place I have found comfort, though, is among those who shared my love, who knew SOPHIE in ways I did and in ways I did not. This is why on the anniversary of SOPHIE’s passing, we at them. want to help create this feeling of communal listening for you, our readers.
Below, we asked writers and musicians to share something of what one of SOPHIE’s songs meant to them. Our hope is that, in these words, you might find some measure of comfort knowing that your love is shared, and that, in your sadness, you will never be alone.
— Wren Sanders
“VYZEE”
I first heard "VYZEE" in 2014. I want to lie to you and say I was cool enough at the time to know it was by SOPHIE, but anything I heard in 2014 was normally through a filter of party favors, Red Bull vodka, or a hangover. Researching who made a song was simply not in my skill set.
Yet in 2018, after falling in love with SOPHIE and going through her catalog, I remember hearing that lyric, “shake it up and make it fierce,” followed by the instantly playful, “do do do,” and my brain telling me: You know you’ve heard this before. Then a grin stretched across my body.
Like so much of SOPHIE’s music, “VYZEE” provides the moment your night out goes from standard-good to weirdly-wild. It shows you the room you are in right now is the room you want to stay in, that anyone lip-syncing the playful “If that's what you wanna do” (voice sample by Raffy) is someone you want to get closer to; that anyone not smiling ear-to-ear as the “we can go” reverbs is someone you can’t really trust.
I adore “VYZEE” because it sums up what I love about SOPHIE’s music production as a whole: always addictive, always distinct – and always in on the joke.
“It’s Okay to Cry”
(CW: suggestion of self-harm)
“It’s Okay to Cry,” the first single from SOPHIE’s 2018 album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, starts as a whisper. The gentle affirmation soon becomes a howl, carried by a sonic wall of bubbling synths, until her soft vocal tenses like a tightrope. Through her tears — our shared tears — “It’s Okay to Cry” asserts that supportive community can lift us out of our despair, as we come to know and love our truest selves.
When I started hormone replacement therapy about six months ago, the first thing I felt when I put one of those little green estrogen pills behind my tongue was sweet relief. Then came waves of heartbreak. In those six months, I also lost friends, employment, and other support structures. I had moments where I didn’t want to be here.
But what have I gained? Well, besides new tits and some attitude, the rest is still unwritten, but I love where I’m at right now. It is taking a fucking village. After all, no matter who you are, life gets life-y, and we’re allowed to be imperfect. As SOPHIE sings, “We've all got a dark place / Maybe if, if we shine some light there / It won't be so hard.”
“Faceshopping”
On “Faceshopping,” the third of the singles on OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, SOPHIE’s pitched up voice slyly sings, “My shop is the face I front / I’m real when I shop my face.” The vocal alteration and the lyric play challenge our perception of what is “real,” reminding us that the image we cultivate for the world is a performance. From there, the artist’s writhing production enacts this revelation even further; the instrumental, an ever unfurling array of raucous, steely synths, is as much a “face” as the one the lyrics invent. When the track reaches its glittery bridge, SOPHIE has switched on us, allowing a new, softer, crooning self to sing: “Do you feel what I feel? / Do you see what I see?”
Yes.
As a queer person who has shopped for faces in search of one that feels organically “me,” it’s liberating to be assured that what we fabricate — what we perform — is just as real as the parts of ourselves we’ve tucked away underneath.
“Immaterial”
Puberty is not only violent because it signifies a death to one's childhood, but also because of the changes it inflicts on the young body. I recall those early preteen years, horrified at each new discovery that made my anatomy foreign to me, like the hair that randomly sprouted up in regions I never investigated much, or the fatty lumps that apparently needed to be held in some sort of fabric receptacle. Suddenly, I realized I was being trapped into a form that would be more gendered and sexualized than before.
On “Immaterial,” SOPHIE doesn’t just merely propose that we break free of gender, but rather go back to a time before we were locked in its cage. On the sugar high of a dance track, which served as the centerpiece of OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES, the late producer and artist boldly asserts we can forge an identity untied to physical form. This gleeful feeling that comes with knowing that every day can be a blank slate is exhibited by featured vocalist Cecil Believe, who sings with the souped-up helium quality of a little kid’s voice: “I was just a lonely girl in the eyes of my inner child/But I could be anything I want.”
For me, “Immaterial” is a reminder to reclaim this childlike sense of freedom and possibility — to think of every moment as an opportunity to take the shape of my own desire and undo the prison that puberty made for me.
“Ponyboy”
A little bit before we were together, my boyfriend and I heard “Ponyboy” on the radio while driving in the mountains. The second single from OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, the song has the quality of being unignorable, the kick drum bound so tight to the bass it's as if the bass were cutting into the skin. I turned it up, as it demands. I'd seen SOPHIE perform it live about a month earlier, in Los Angeles, where it engulfed me. Some rhythmic phrases take root at the bone. I am thankful that the first time I heard the song I heard it as environment, on a quaking, enveloping sound system, so that it could change me.
Some experiences can split your seams and stitch you back different. Sex is one, and music is another. For maybe a year after that drive, my boyfriend and I would catch each other tapping out the drumbeat to "Ponyboy," often without thinking, on the nearest surface. And often the nearest surface was each other.
When SOPHIE died last year, we got back in the car and played the album, letting the same beat blare from the windows — letting it rewire us all over again.
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