Sophie B. Hawkins became a global star with the release of her iconic hit ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’ in 1992.
Since her breakthrough success, Hawkins has established herself as an artist not afraid to speak her mind and stand up for what she believes in. 11 years have passed since she last released a record, and recently Hawkins unveiled her latest record ‘Free Myself’ (read our review), her most personal to date.
I caught up with Sophie to find out about the journey to releasing her new album, discuss her incredible success in the 90s and to talk about the importance of standing up for yourself as an artist…
‘Free Myself’ is your first album in 11 years. What’s the journey to this record been like for you?
Well, Pip, let’s see. The reason why it was 11 years was at the end of ‘The Crossing’, which was a really perilous crossing, I just had to move back to my home in the east coast from California. A relationship that was 17 years in the making broke up in a horrible explosion, and that was also my manager, and I had a son, a four-and-a-half-year old. I moved back to my hometown of Manhattan, New York, New York and I started to rebuild. It wasn’t just rebuilding my career without my manager, it was rebuilding my whole life and being a single parent, and so forth. I did keep writing and I had so many attempts to release a record at that time. There’s been so many renditions of this album, which is now called ‘Free Myself’, with many different songs on it. I kept almost releasing it and in a ways I was building steam on some levels. I also wrote a musical during that time, which I’m still working on getting into production and I wrote a novel during that time. It wasn’t like I wasn’t working, it was just hard for me to get out into the world because I had been out in the world in one way for so long, with the same manager, who was also my partner.
(I had to start) totally from scratch and I think when you start from scratch, it’s exciting but there are, not missteps… let me think of a better word, something that will come towards you and you’ll think, ‘oh, this could be it’. It ultimately isn’t but it does get you to a certain place. It wasn’t till after COVID, somebody in the business heard the record and said, ‘do you know, this is a really great album?’ It was 16 songs at that point and then it was even longer until I got it down to the record that you’re hearing, with the title that you’re hearing, totally curated in a way as to be a product and to have the DNA of the brand of Sophie B. Hawkins from the early days. That took a lot of editing because like I said there were so many songs and so many versions of Sophie B. Hawkins, so who am I going to present now? It did take 10 years and it is a long time, however, I feel what people are getting now is the best thing that I could give them and it’s actually great. It is exactly who I am and where I am. Every song and the tour, all of it is so good right now.
It’s so important to take your time as an artist and only put out the material you feel represents you the best. There are artists putting out 36 track albums, where half the songs don’t need to be on the record, so it’s fantastic to see there are artists out there like yourself, still taking the time and care…
Yes. Pip, the thing is, I think you’re right. So much of what I hear, when I listen to a new artist and I’m really excited, really there’ll only be one song on the whole album I really like. I always find that incredibly disheartening. It’s like reading a book and the first 20 pages suck you in, and then you go, ‘what, this is terrible!’ and you feel like you’ve devoted yourself to a novel that you just can’t finish or remember or whatever. We are living in a throwaway economy and culture where you get a first impression, it’s so exciting and so new, but then you really don’t like it as you live with it. I don’t ever want to do that. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with any of my albums, I think I’ve been really conscious of making these works of art as best as I could at the time and that each song holds up. You’re right, it is important to take the time because the music lasts, and we don’t. In 10 years when my kids say, ‘oh, wow, that’s a really great album, Mom’ that is much better than them saying, ‘you did a bunch of shit albums Mom’. That would be terrible (laughs).
There would be nothing worse than having your kids look at your work and say, ‘gosh, Mum churned out loads of albums she really shouldn’t have’…
Yeah. My mother was an author and I have just grown up with a different point of view where you don’t want to put out something that you think is half-assed. You don’t want to convince yourself that it is good, if it isn’t good so I do take a little time. I’m known to be slow Pip. I’m known to be a slow boat; in relationships, in work, in everything. I can write a song in two weeks, I can record it, I can do all that in my bedroom but then the whole process of really getting it out, it’s always taken me a bit of time.
That’s good, because it means that you are putting that thought and effort into it. I can definitely see, and feel, the intention with this record. I love the fact that ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘You Are My Balloon’ bookend the album with optimism and then you get all kinds of emotions in-between. The sequencing is so perfect. How did you go about sequencing this record?
I can’t take full credit because the the 16 songs that really did fit in this theme, that we actually recorded in the studio was strings and everything, some of them were hard to let go of but they will be for the next album because they were really strong songs. There was people in my life who said, ‘Sophie, what is the theme of what you’re doing? What is the DNA that connects back to your first two albums because you’re coming out after so long and people want to recognize you and they want to feel safe and trust you’. It was a process. I listened to people. I don’t listen to people when I’m writing Pip, and I don’t listen to people when I’m recording the first demos, but when it got down to sequencing the album, I completely was open-minded. I was also open-minded about taking songs off the album, because I could see that as strong as the song was, as much as I love to play it live, it didn’t fit the theme of ‘Free Myself’ which everything in my life fits right now. This is a challenge but in all of life you’ll have a relationship that you go, ‘oh, I love this person so much but right now, it’s not fitting how I need to be in the world’ and it’s hard. You sometimes have to move away from things and come back in a different way.
One of the things that I found really interesting about this record is that right there in the middle, you’ve got ‘Consume Me In Your Fire’, which is a demo. It’s one of the highlights on the record for me. It caught me off-guard and I think that the rawness of it, the incredible power of your voice and the lyrics of that song are just so special. Why did you decide to put the demo version of it on there?
Well Pip, the reason why is exactly what you said. I have this really elegant recording of ‘Consume Me In Your Fire’ that I did with the band with strings all mixed and mastered and expensive. It was even in a lower key. A lot of people loved it and thought it was a single but then when I would play the demo for people, they’d say ‘oh, you can’t really beat that, can you?’ I kept trying to beat it and then I even tried to take the demo and add things to it, and nothing was better than that first take. Sometimes that happens. I wanted to give the people who are listening to this album the raw passion of that original take. It doesn’t always happen and it’s not always easy to show people that but in this case, what you said, when you got there (it caught you off-guard).
It really did. I grew up on stripped-back female singer-songwriter music so that song, for me, is everything I love listening to. It really connected with me and ticked all the boxes of what I like…
That’s exactly how I felt too and I’m so glad you said it. That was a decision that took a lot of time and going back and forth and I must have done six versions of that song trying to better it, but we couldn’t. That’s an exact example of why the record took a little time, it was things like that. You know, when you see a great movie, usually the scripts take a really long time and even sometimes the editing and stuff is a process. I’m writing a musical right now and it takes a long time to really develop it – the characters, the songs and the story – because there’s so much going on.
I can’t imagine where you start writing an album, let along a musical!
Yeah, it’s really personal. I like what you said about ‘Consume Me In Your Fire’ that it took you off guard. That’s the element again, the DNA,… ‘what is the Sophie B. Hawkins (DNA)?’ There’s always something on the albums that you go, ‘whoa, what is that?’ and it’s good. It’s kind of like you have to reckon with it and you like it or you don’t?
Throughout your career your lyrics have always been very honest and candid. Even going back to ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’, you’ve always said exactly what you wanted to say. Has there ever been a point, and particularly with this record, where you question if you’re sharing too much?
Yeah. I do have misgivings about some things I’ve let out there that were very personal. It’s so funny, they’ve given me kind of street cred. They’ve been wild and some people love them but some people have actually turned their back on me because of them. That’s always hard Pip, I don’t like that. I can be very accessible, I can be that artist who has pop hits and is just so easy to digest but then there’s that other side of me, like you just pointed out, and sometimes I go really far and I have gotten really far. I never can really adjust to it. However, the songs I’ve been writing lately are intense, about things that have been going on, and I feel like, ‘wow, this is going to be interesting’. This is going to be interesting to put this one out. I seem to do a very beautiful positive album and then I go to another layer. It seems to be how my life works.
At the end of the day, you have to be true to yourself. You came up in the 90s and you’ve spoken previously about the challenges of working with a major label and being a woman in the industry. What was your experience like during that time?
When you look back on things, they’re different than when you’re in them, but I was really stressed out a lot. On the one hand, I loved that I was supported by Sony and I loved a lot of the people that were supporting me, especially by the way in Europe and the UK. Sony UK was phenomenal. If it weren’t for Sony UK, I don’t think I’d still have a career because after the first record, Sony America said move to Europe (because) Americans don’t get you. They were wrong about that because Americans do get me however, I was happy to move to London (laughs). I lived in Hampstead and I made my second record there with Steve Lipson and Heff Moraes, and I hung out with George Michael and it was great. While I had the annoying thing of a record company where they aren’t really supporting you unless you do this or that, and there’s always these negotiations, and you’re giving up so much and they’re putting you down for being who you are, then there’s also the fact that you are getting support, which is different than now where there’s really very little support. It’s difficult to get any support. I have to say Lightyear and Virgin are supporting this record, and I’m really grateful.
Basically, my hindsight perspective is, it was like being a teenager and your parents are very, very dictatorial. That’s how it is being on a label. If you can make it through to adulthood, fantastic. Unfortunately, for me, I took a stand. Or fortunately, maybe. I took a stand on the third album, and I left Sony. I sued them and got my masters back. I don’t want to dwell on it because the truth is, it was good for me, and I didn’t suffer so much from it. That’s what it is. I think the analogy of being a teenager (is right because) you’re doing something new, and you’re always trying to do something new so of course, you’re gonna get pushback.
It must have been a crazy time because ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’ launched you around the world very suddenly. I remember listening to that song as a kid. How does it feel to have songs like that, that have endured?
It’s cute that you said it was suddenly because that talk was a process of years and years. From the time that I wrote it and recorded it ,again in my bedroom, and put it on a reel-to-reel 8-track to the time it got into the world was years. First of all, people didn’t hear it at first. They didn’t like it. Second of all, once people did hear it and start to like it, and all the labels were after me because of it, they wanted to change it. It was a lot of standing my ground and fighting for what I knew was right. The demo is very similar to the album version but believe me, they didn’t want that in the beginning. It was an incredible fight. I had to be a real visionary and imagine the world liking my song because I knew it was a classic hit. I knew it but not everybody knew that. Maybe one other person knew that, Rick Chertoff. He’s only one who heard it the way I heard it.
Thank goodness you did fight for your vision and what you felt was right, because that song did incredible things for you. I can’t imagine it being any different…
Yeah, I agree with you. I can’t imagine it being any different and I love it so much. It’s supported my whole career. I’ve been able to do all these other songs and twists and turns on my journey because of ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’ and ‘As I Lay Me Down’, and a little bit ‘Right Beside You’, but more those first two songs. While fans love other songs, they love so many different songs off the albums, they love when I play them in the shows because I still of course play all the old favourites in my shows. Those two songs have held up my whole life. I mean, I’m supporting my children, as a songwriter on really those two songs and they’ve supported me going forward. You wouldn’t be listening to ‘Free Myself’ if it wasn’t for ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’. It’s kind of amazing.
I can’t believe it came out in 1992 to be honest. It still sounds so fresh all these years on…
Me too! When I sing it on stage, it’s still a challenge. It’s not an easy song to sing. The lyrics are so intense. I love it so much and the ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’ Sophie is the person that I’m always sticking up for and protecting. We all have these parts of ourselves that are so unique and so real. You just got to really, really fight for yourself, your essential self because it’s different from everything out there and everyone out there.
You mentioned your love of London earlier. When can we see you playing this album live over here?
The record sounds so good live. Oh my god! It really depends on how well the record does. I don’t know what it takes anymore but whatever it takes, I’m praying that the support continues because they are supporting me. If the support continues, there’s no reason I won’t be over there. I have a phenomenal band. Simply amazing. It’s just three of us and we all switch around on instruments. Everyone says it’s just a huge sound and it’s so full of energy and light. You’ll see me there for this record. I’m intending to be there.
What does the rest of your year look like?
The touring is big and it’s draining. These tours are very real. I will keep writing songs and recording them. I will keep working on the musical. What I honestly think is that perhaps a next album will come out, because musicals take so long, and it’s the easiest thing to do next; to combine the overflow from ‘Free Myself’ with the new material and see if there’s some kind of synergy in those songs, some kind of theme and then put a new album out. That would be probably the smartest, fastest thing to do within the next two years.
‘Free Myself’ is out now via Lightyear Entertainment. Watch the video for ‘Better Off Without You’ below:
