2003 The November 2003 sophiamusic.net interview (by Wouter Berteloot, 28/11/2003, Brussels) While preparing for the interview we talked about glossy magazines like Esquire who want to do a Sophia feature (Sophia hits the mainstream?), about the guitar he destroyed two days earlier during the VPRO radio session, about the brilliant new album and about the new single ‘Oh my love’. Robin: I’m glad you like the new single. It’s quite a different song for people to take in. I was afraid people weren’t gonna like ‘Oh my love’. Sophiamusic.tk: It’s more up-tempo and it has electronic influences but it still sounds like Sophia. It kind of made me think about the OBX collaboration ‘Reminds me of the sun’. That was completely made of electronics but it still sounded like a Sophia song. Robin: Do you wanna hear a song that I didn’t use on the album? It’s called ‘Airports’. This is a true electronic song. It was supposed to be a hidden track but in the end I didn’t think that the album needed it. At first I thought that I was gonna have to push the album in as many directions as possible in a way to challenge people. But at the end of the day I thought that the album said exactly what it was supposed to say, without the song. Sophiamusic.tk: This is not your first adventure into the electronic world. You teamed up before with OBX and the Slack Dog Ensemble. How did that happen? Robin: I’m trying to think how I met John Tye (from OBX & Slack Dog Ensemble, ed.). To be honest I don’t really know. I had the studio and I was doing the Flower Shop Recordings. Because of the label I came across a lot of people that had heard about the way I worked, there was a lot op spontaneity involved in what I was doing and it was a very punk rock set-up with Old Betsy Satan (the Flower Shop 8-track, ed.) and a lot of people liked the simplicity of that. I had worked with John on some electronic things even before that and he called me up and said: “Look, Luke Vibert and Kingsuk Biswas are here, and we all want to get together and have a bit of a session together”. So we got together and we all kind of improvised, I think on Luke’s version of Ruff Dog you can hear me in the background, talking and stuff like that. The thing that really amazed me is how they approach music after it’s been recorded and what they do with it. I approach music as a moment in time. The way that I write music is I sit down and I literally write it all together: the words and the music. I try to express the way I’m feeling at that certain moment. But with them, they kind of take things how they come and they don’t know what they’re gonna come out with in the end. They add things and subtract things and in the end they have a piece of music. The way they construct it is totally different from the way I work. I was stunned when I first heard the really distorted version of ‘New Yawk Dog’ that’s on the A-side of the Slack Dog Ensemble 7 inch. It sounded like an electronic band played through a Marshall stack. I loved that. I thought it was fantastic. We’ve just been friends for a really long time and in that type of environment you basically say: “let’s do something and we’ll see if it works”. Do you know the French band M83? They’re also on Labels and they have a couple of great albums out. They’re looking for a singer to collaborate with and they sent me a copy of a song they want some vocals for. I don’t know if it’ll eventually become anything, but these kind of things are good because this way I can approach music differently than I would normally, where the music and the lyrics have to be very intertwined or else it doesn’t have any emotional dept for me, which then makes it impossible for me to play. Which was the problem with The May Queens. The idea behind the May Queens was that we would just get into a room and make this kind of punk rock record. But the problem was that I couldn’t approach the lyrics the same way that I approach the music. I ended up taking lyrics I had written for Sophia songs and apply them to music that they weren’t related to. So that took the music out of context. People asked: will you do any live shows? And I really didn’t see that happening. Especially now, now that I’ve kind of pushed Sophia even further in that direction. Sophiamusic.tk: You’ve even made The May Queens obsolete with this new Sophia album. ‘If a change is gonna come’ could easily have been on the May Queens album. Robin: The funny thing is that James Elkington - who played drums on The May Queens - said the first time he heard the song: oh, this is how the May Queens should have sounded. The only thing I can say why that’s happened, is because I’m finally creating music with everything in mind: the lyrics influence the music and the music influences the lyrics. That’s Sophia. And that’s Robin Proper-Sheppard. That’s what I’m so happy about with this record. I went into it with no expectations. I thought: I’m gonna release this album the same way I’ve done all of the other Flower Shop records and the only thing I had in mind was challenging myself and challenging people’s impressions of Sophia. And there were no commercial concerns like if people don’t like it, it’s not gonna sell this many…I didn’t worry about that, I wanted to make a record that encompassed everything that I have done. Sophiamusic.tk: That was the only plan you had when you started working on the album? Robin: In the beginning I really did have an idea of what I wanted. I wanted to create an album with the dynamics that I’ve always tried to achieve. I’m so used to doing albums where during the first week or two I think “this is gonna be the record I’ve always wanted to make” and gradually it doesn’t become that. You find other things in it that you really like about it and it becomes something else. But with this album, you know, you’re working on the songs, out of sequence, you’re focusing on songs at individual times but then the day that I left the mastering studio, I was listening to the album on the way home in the car, and I pulled up in front of my house and I was only half way through it and I waited till I got to the end of it. And that’s when I realised I wasn’t gonna use ‘Airports’. Because ‘Another trauma’ faded out and I realised I had finally made the album that I had always wanted to create since the very beginning of my career. It feels right, the dynamic and what it’s saying. In a way, all the previous Sophia records have been about me and about the things that are happening to me, whereas with this record it’s about the way that I’m relating to people and the impact that I’m having on these people. It’s a totally different record. And I didn’t really recognise that while I was working on it. For instance ‘Swept back’, which is about the way that I feel when I’m in relationships and how much I hate the fact that I seem to hurt the people that I care about. So, when I’m focusing on one song at a time, I’m just looking at that aspect of it. But when I heard the whole album I realised that it has this thread: that the whole way that I see life and my partner has totally changed over time. It was really a surprising record for me to make. Sophiamusic.tk: Lyrically speaking, there a lot of accusations flying around: “look I told you so” but also a lot of apologies and “I’m sorry”s. Are you aware of that? Robin: That’s the pattern that I have in my life, and in my relationships. With ‘People are like seasons’ I’ve finally been able to turn the accusations back on me. That the pain that I’m experiencing in relationships is often the pain that I’ve caused. But it isn’t always about what’s happening to me and about the sadness that I’m feeling. A lot of that has to do with my relationship with Hope (his daughter, ed.) and watching Hope grow up, and about how the way that I feel and think influences her. And about how to protect her from my cynical or less positive attitude towards life. I have to let her look at the bigger picture. Like when she’s talking to me about the children in her class or how she got into an argument with someone or how people change from being best friends with one person to being best friends with another person. I’ve got to try and explain to her the reasons behind that. You know like in ‘Fool’, which is about how people change. How I’ve got to try and make her understand that life isn’t always as dark as she’s making it out to be. I’m trying to explain to her: look, everything is gonna change. What’s happening today will be different tomorrow. And to just try to be happy about everything. That has really influenced my attitude towards life and it has influenced my writing. The writing of the first few Sophia albums was a way for me to deal with something and to be able to kind of let it go. And by keep singing those songs, I was letting go. And I thought I was doing that with this album. I’ve been playing acoustically a lot recently and when I play those old songs I keep thinking about where they came from. But with the new songs, where they came from wasn’t a really good place but the fact is that I haven’t been able to let that go as it’s still a part of my life today. It’s a part of the way I’ve continually lived my life and dealt with my relationships and the people around me. And it’s actually really hard to play them. It’s very confrontational. I find it very emotional. It’s a new way of dealing with music for me. I thought I was gonna be able to let these things go but unfortunately I’m still dealing with them on a day-to-day level. It’s probably the darkest record I’ve ever made. Although I tried to produce it in a way that the focus isn’t so much on me and this kind of aura around me. I tried to lift it up outside of that. Even with a song like ‘Holidays are nice’ where I really tried to make a positive song. It’s all about the only way for me to ever find happiness in a relationship is to leave all the stuff that causes all the pain and problems behind us and go somewhere else. But that’s not the way life is. That’s not the way it works and that’s very sad. Sophiamusic.tk: Has Hope heard the part of the De Nachten album where the crowd sings happy birthday for her? Robin: Absolutely. The first thing she said was: “But how did they all know my name?” (laughs) I remember playing it for everybody when I was back home. Julie (Hope’s mother, ed) started to cry. Look, it was a promise I had made to myself that I would try so hard to never miss her birthdays. I was there at her birth. I held her like 30 seconds after she was born. All that stuff. Luckily the thing is that she does understand that this is the way that I make my living. That I do have to go away sometimes. I tried to explain to her that even if I don’t see her for a little while, she’s always there with me. Sophiamusic.tk: I tried to figure out the lyrics to ‘If a change is gonna come’. Am I right that you’re having a go at yourself in that song? Robin: That song is absolutely about that. It goes “Sometimes I hate all day, but isn’t that OK?” It’s about accepting yourself and accepting the way you are as a person. We kinda joked around when the album was finished and we were saying: this is gonna be a song for the kids. But to be honest it seems to be the people that are my age, in their thirties, that seem to relate to it the most. When you’re a kid and you say “Life’s a bitch and then you die” you say it like, oh well, c’est la vie. But it has a different meaning when you’re an adult and you say it. You’ve just accepted that life is fucked up. There’s a lot of stuff in life you have to deal with you’d wish you didn’t have to deal with. But the fact is, you’re an adult and you have to deal with it. But the “Life’s a bitch and then you die” line is a very simple thing to say. When we were recording I was saying: there’s no way I can sing this song. It’s such a cliché. But one day I was walking down the road and I thought: how can I not sing it? Everything about my music is about how I feel. And if I was to chance that song because I was afraid to say something, I might as well change all of my songs. It’s about honesty, it doesn’t matter how simple it is and it is very simple. Sophiamusic.tk: First time I heard the song I was also thinking “’Life’s a bitch and then you die’? What a cliché.” But then I paid more attention to the other words in the song and they put everything into perspective. Robin: That’s right. You know, we refer to it as ‘the bumper sticker song’, because it’s like a bumper sticker. But at the end of the day, like you say, it depends on to context in which you listen to the words. And then you realise that it is in a way about making fun of your situation and about accepting it. There comes a point in your life where you have to accept that you’re an adult and when you accept that fact, you also accept that life’s a bitch and then you die. It’s funny and you can laugh about it and that’s what I’m doing. It is quite an angry song, the opening line (“been walking down this road every day of my fucking life”), there’s a lot of anger in that. It’s me realising I live the same things over and over again. But I’m glad you got that out of that song, though. Because the songs are so simple, people almost don’t get it because it’s too simple. A lot of the times I’m quite worried that people try to find something deeper in it, and there isn’t. I’ve been asked by City Slang to write a track-by-track explanation of the songs, but it’s so simple. You just have to look at it to understand where it came from. I remember talking about it with Christof (Ellinghaus, the City Slang label manager, ed.) and I said: how do I explain something that’s so simple? He goes: well, just say that. Don’t explain the songs, but explain to people that it’s not as complicated as they might think. Sophiamusic.tk: I was very surprised when I heard that you had signed to City Slang/Labels. At the end of The God Machine you vented your disgust with the record industry. You even wrote songs about it like ‘Fucking Hypocrite’. Why did you change your mind? Robin: I never really anticipated doing this again. The situation within the music industry has changed a lot. And I remember kind of looking at the people within the record industry that had helped Sophia. For instance I had lots of distributors all through Europe, and the reason why Sophia was able to develop as much as it has is because certain people within these companies loved Sophia. I don’t think I ever sent out a CD to any distributor, they all came to me. They said: “look we really like the record, let us distribute it”. After I’d finished this album I called up Christof to just talk to him about my options. And he honestly believes that I called him because I wanted to sign to City Slang and I can say with my hand on my heart that I didn’t. I called him for his advice. He had set up City Slang the same way that I had set up the Flower Shop Recordings. I wanted to talk to him because he’s been through the things that I’ve been through. At the end of the day he said: “Look, why don’t you send me a copy of it and I’ll listen to it and we’ll have a talk”. And I said “Yeah yeah, I’ll send you one” but I didn’t. About a week later I get an e-mail from him and he’s like “Where’s my copy of the album, I thought we were gonna have a chat about it.” I said, “Yeah sure, I’ll send you a copy”. I still didn’t send it to him. Then probably about a month later I get this phone call and he went: “Where the fuck is my album! I want to hear it and I want to hear it now!” (laughs). So I finally sent him a copy. And he called me back and said “This record should come out on City Slang. I know what you’re trying to do. You know what I’ve been doing with Calexico and Lambchop and the way we deal with music.” What is also a big difference for me is that I now own everything I do. I learned a lot through The God Machine, I learned a lot through my relationship with Polygram. The fact is that the God Machine records now belong to a record company that we didn’t sign to. The fact is I don’t own those records. If I wanted them to come out, they wouldn’t come out. Sophiamusic.tk: Have you ever considered re-releasing the God Machine records? There would be a lot of interest. Robin: Well, there would be a little bit of interest. But there would never be enough interest for a major label to re-release them. These companies buy things to own the copyright. That’s what has value for them. Not the fact that they’re selling 1,000 or 2,000 copies of the album. It’s like buying rare stamps and gradually they’ll have millions of rare stamps and therefore the millions of stamps will have a bigger value than all the stamps individually. I learned a lot from that and I never want that to ever happen again. The deal that I have with City Slang is the kind of deal that they have with all their artists like Lambchop and Calexico. All those bands say: look, this is what we do, this is the music that we make and this is the way that we would like to be seen. For instance I told City Slang that I wouldn’t take photographs with anybody else than Philip Lethen. I can tell them: these are the people I want to use and this is the way I want to work. And Christof said: “Robin, you tell us what you want to do and we’re here to help.” Obviously it’s a business and they want their business to be successful as well, but within the confines of everybody being as happy as they can. I’m just so happy about that. They even understand my relationship with Bang Distribution in Belgium. I don’t even have a contract with Bang. It’s literally based on friendship and it goes way beyond just selling records. There’s been times where anything that I’ve needed, all I had to do was call them up. Whether I needed a car booked for me, whether I needed money to pay my rent, whether I needed them to ship some records to me while I’m on tour. I told Christof that I would rather just put my records out through Bang in Belgium and not have them come out anywhere else in the world, just so when I come to Belgium we can sit down and have a beer. The respect we have together is more important than anything else. Sophiamusic.tk: Now that you’re talking about territories. Are you thinking about releasing the album in the States? Robin: We’re definitely talking about it. But it’s a long process, there’s a lot of politics involved. With the whole Virgin/EMI thing, it’s a totally different way of dealing with things over there. All of the people I’ve been dealing with here in Europe are huge music fans. For instance, I show up in Berlin and the radio promotion girl picks me up and she knows all the words to all the Sophia records. I’m supposed to do interviews but she and I are talking about our lives and our experiences so that I’m late for everything. Everything is related on a personal level.  Which is the way that I’ve been doing Sophia from the very beginning, it’s all been about the personal relationships. Sophiamusic.tk: You once said that Sophia was a three-album project. Do you still think that way about Sophia? Robin: I think the creation of De Nachten proved to me that Sophia could become much more to me then I ever thought. In the beginning I didn’t think that Sophia would do anything, I thought we were gonna do one show in London (laughs). And now it turns out that it has become much more than that.  Sophiamusic.tk: In 2000 you even planned to release a double CD with covers and remixes. What happened to that idea? Did you record anything for that? Are there still songs left I the vault? Robin: There are some songs in the vault. But you know, life changes and some things in life change, like: plans! (laughs) Personalities don’t change but plans do. But we’ll see what happens. I’ve already started working on some news songs that are directions for a new album and there’s other songs that I’ll use as B-sides. Sophiamusic.tk: Another plan was to release a free tour single. That turned out to be a bit of a mess. Did you ever think during the past 2 years: “Why on earth have I decided to give away a free tour single. What was I thinking?” Robin: No, not at all. That was an idea from the tour I did after ‘De Nachten’ and I always wanted to stick to it. Because that ‘Intimistic night with Sophia’ tour saved me. It really gave me a purpose: this is what I do. Because they were acoustic songs, because people were so close to me and because everything was so personal. I realised: this is what I want do with my life. Some talk afterwards with Sophia (Carsten Wohlfeld, Oxymoron Berlin, 19/11/2003 for www.gaesteliste.de, translation by maRz for SophiaMusic.tk) Before colleague Ullrich Maurer will thoroughly look into the publication of the album "People Are Like Seasons" middle of January, in a detailed feature with Sophia, we already asked Robin some questions,  the day after the Berlin showcase.  GL. de: Yesterday only Will Foster, on keyboards, stood next to you on stage. Considering the line-up of the band changed a lot of times in the past: who belongs to Sophia now, live and in the studio?  Robin: Will Foster, Jeff Townsin and I were the core of the line-up that recorded the new album. And, altogether, they've both been in the band for quite some time already.  Laurence O' Keefe of Levitation and Dark Star played bass. And Calina de la Mare, who already wrote the string-arrangements for "De Nachten", collaborated very closely in the arrangements.  Therefore a substantially narrower circle of people was involved. The collective will always get larger, but somehow it also simultaneously shrinks. On the tour, starting in February, together with Jeff and Will, Laurence will probably join too, but that's not yet confirmed, because bass-players are always hard to find. Adam Franklin of Toshack Highway and Swervedriver will be joining us as a guitarist [like on earlier Sophia-tours] . GL. de: Speaking of other musicians: are there any recent albums that you found very stimulating? Robin: I won't say they're the best band, but I must confess that I found the last Coldplay-album unusually inspiring.  Not even musically, but the album radiates so much honesty.  It is very epic, but nevertheless simple. I like that. And, naturally, the last Johnny Cash album is also incredible.  GL. de: Yesterday you said jokingly: "And now let's all us City Slangs drink beer, because that's why we are here".  How did you come to the decision, not to release the new album like the previous ones on your own Flowershop-label, but through City Slang?  Robin: I had a long talk with Christof [Ellinghaus, the founder of City Slang] and after that I questioned myself again and again: Do I want to sign such a contract at this point in my life?  Christof understood my dilemma very well, but also said: "If you ever want to do it, it should be now! Let's see, whether we can manage that together!"  I said: "But what if I only sell 30,000 albums, like I did through Flowershop? Then you would hold me for a failure!"  On that, Christof said: "How do you think I will be? You are this cool indie-type that never spent a penny on marketing and yet has sold so many records. I'm under pressure too. We're both on the same ship!" A telephone call was the deciding factor then. I was at home, thinking about whether I should accept the offer. Next morning Christof called, from the airport in Nashville -just on the way to Lambchop - and asked me: "What's the situation on our deal?" At that moment I thought: this is fate, this is karma, let's it do it! Moreover Wyndham [Wallace, who leads City Slang UK] has been a good friend of mine for quite some time. He's always joking and saying he's been wanting to sign me for eight years now. And Sophia is only seven years old!