Sofie Royer

0:13Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. For today's show, I speak with Austrian singer Sophie Royer about her new album Young Girl Forever. The electropop album paints the contradictions of being a female artist today. Here is Sophie with more.

0:40Sophie Royer, first of all, welcome to Monaco Radio. It's a pleasure to have you here. I love your music. Thank you. I don't know if you've seen, but I've added, we did a special Austrian pop. And I've added you as well on the list. But of course, your parents are from both Austria and Iran, but you grew up in California. I actually didn't know that before reading up more about you. Yeah, my mother's Austrian, my father's Iranian, and they were both engineers. And that's why I was born in Palo Alto, California, because they were working for Apple at the time. Yeah, it's fun. And, well, let's talk about your new album, which I think is fantastic.

1:18So it was inspired by a book called Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young Girl. So tell us what made you connect to that piece of work, so much so that you even titled your album with it. So I had finished the record earlier this year between the period of, I want to say, January and March, before we got to the mixing of the record. Parallel to that, I was on tour as the opening act for my friend Louis Offman. So we were touring France and Spain, a little bit of Germany. And I had been recommended the book for the Xth time. And so I decided to read it. I decided to finally give it a read.

2:01There's another really great zine by Tikkun, the collective, called Instruction Manual for a Civil War. I'd read that. I loved it. I thought it was very funny. And so I was like, OK, I'm going to give this text a try. And it, I think, was especially refreshing for me to read, just having kind of come off being in the last semester of my own studies in philosophy and psychology and English. So I was forced to kind of read a lot of theory. I didn't have too much time to spend reading Bellatristic or generally kind of more left field books. I do love Verso books and their sale. And there's like a staple of like, I don't know, a few books that I'd been meaning to read and never got around to.

2:50And so when it came to me being on tour, I kind of had the book on my phone. I had like a PDF of the book on my phone. And the way it's written, I don't know if any of the listeners have seen it, but there's almost kind of these very quick phrases written in different fonts as kind of these pop statements on, let's say, the young girl is a commodity or the young girl is a good in consumer society. And I thought that was very interesting and very funny. and yeah obviously ended up finding parallels to our own reality my own existence as well as just generally the society and structure that we live in it's it's the same if you read like an Irving Joffman or a Pierre Bourdieu you're like oh this is so universally applicable and still very relevant for today's day and age and I was very curious about the album the idea of the young girl as well is there something about living permanently in this state of youth as well well so the interesting thing about the the young girl it's not if you read the book it's not so much actually about like a female girl and it's not so much about her necessarily being young it's kind of just like this is a placeholder figure and i i do get asked a lot in interviews kind of to like relate it back to something very temporal but i don't i don't necessarily think that's what the book stands for or is supposed to stand for.

4:25But that's also my interpretation of it. Of course. Let's talk about some of the music as well. As I said, I'm a big fan. We play some of the songs here on Monaco Radio. For example, one of my favorites, and it is a single as well, I forget, I'm So Young. I forget, I forget so easily. I forget so easily. It's so beautiful. And of course, not even the lyrics, the beats. There's something quite nostalgic about it as well. What do you have to say about this song? I wonder what was the process for that song in particular. Well, this song was kind of a song in between other songs on the record. I had my bassist in the studio that day, Marcus Windisch, who I don't know if anybody's listening, but he's amazingly talented.

5:08He was playing this little riff and I was like, oh, that needs to be its own song. And that's kind of how that song happened. I think I wrote to it in like five to ten minutes. It's really one of those songs that happened very fast. We maybe spent the most time on it, my sound engineer and I, on making that drop with the church bells. That was maybe the most stressful thing. But the keys I played super fast, the bass line was recorded super quickly, the little guitar licks very fast. So there's really not a lot of overthinking going on with that song, which is maybe what makes it so catchy. It is very catchy.

5:48And it's funny, and the whole album, I would say, has a very kind of danceable mood to it. Would you agree more, perhaps, than your first two albums, which I'm not saying they were not danceable. Oh, absolutely. No, you're totally right. This is party, party album in a way. It's totally right. I got tired of playing songs on stage that were morbid. And I wanted to do something a little more dauntless and lighthearted and for me to have more fun when I'm playing live. And so I hope it transposes to the audience. Oh, it definitely does. And the videos for the song, they're a delight. Oh, thank you.

6:22They're very cinematic, if I can say. Are you inspired by film in general, by specific directors? I mean, if you see some of the shots and the videos and then you watch the movies that they're inspired by, they're like one to one recreations of some of these film references. I worked very closely with a good friend of mine called Grégoire Lion-Dufour. And he was the director on both Young Girl Illusion as well as Baby Doll, as well as Indoor Sport. it i really can say that like in gregoire i found somebody that can really help my weird little like dreams come alive of what i want to do i i did film in in high school for for my ib and it was like i don't know i had like these dreams of being a cinematographer that i very obviously did not pursue and um i'm a big i'm a big film nerd like i love watching movies um i watch a lot of them and it's nice to be able to kind of like have that tie in in these music videos so yes there's like one-to-one shot recreations if you look at a video like indoor sport you have direct references to like jim jarmusch um and bernardo bertolucci and you know this kind of stuff but i guess that's the good thing about well being an artist the singers whether you can play around you know you're not a cinematographer but you're definitely playing around with this uh you're not But you are a violinist as well.

7:50I am, yeah. You're classically trained from a very young age, right? Why? I mean, I don't know if most people know this, but I play almost all the instruments on the record, whether that's bass, guitars, violin, viola. What about writing songs? I know you write most of your songs as well. No, I write all of them. All of them? Yeah, of course. But in terms of collaboration, do you like doing everything by yourself? How does it work when you're making music like this? I don't know. I think like just making music for me is such a personal progress that for these three records, I haven't really included anybody else in the writing of the songs.

8:28Are there are there songwriters that I'm very inspired by that I think are interesting, like Dan Negro, for example, who does a lot of like the very contemporary pop music that's out today? Absolutely. Can I afford to work with somebody like Dan Negro? No way. So it really comes down to, I think, like a semblance of self-control and also like pleasure that I have from doing it. I'm very glad you've included in the album a cover of a Leo song. I love their work as well. Tell us why this particular song as well. Were you always a big fan? Was it kind of almost like a coincidence? No, I love Leo.

9:06So when I used to DJ, I think her singles and records were some of my most favorite songs to dance to. Saj Kamini Maj is no different. That's like one of my number one songs that I will put on at like a cocktail party or if I'm getting ready to go to an event or something. and I yeah I decided to just remake it a little bit spontaneously and I didn't it's my first cover that I've ever included anywhere but ironically enough it fits so well with the album title that I was like well it's kind of just got to be on there doesn't it it just matches the whole thing and you're of course performing live you know in many places including here in London how is it the performance I've never seen you live I very much look forward to that.

9:59Do you like it? Because not everyone actually likes sometimes to be on stage, but what's your experience with it? Anything that involves me making or performing music, I enjoy, and that really includes being on stage. I think I'm used to it. I've been playing violin competitively from a very young age. I'm very used to having to perform in front of people. So I don't really think I get nervous in that traditional sense. I'll probably be more nervous if I'm playing like a showcase festival and there's like nobody in the crowd that knows me. It's a very small kind of audience of like maybe five to ten people that don't know who I am.

10:39And it's like uncomfortable for everybody involved. And I'm like, oh, God, being a musician is just so embarrassing. Whereas like if it's your own show and, you know, these people bought tickets to see you and, you know, are familiar with your music, I think it's something really fun and special. and you know going back I mentioned that I've added you to the you know the best artist from the history of Austrian pop in a way but I love that in the album there is actually a song in German sorry my German is terrible by the way but I loved Nichts Neues in Westen Nichts Neues in Westen nothing new in the west how does it feel to sing in German do you like it yeah does it come naturally I mean I speak German fluently so yeah there's also German songs on my last record Kleinmarks that I play in this current set as well.

11:27I like it. It's definitely something I enjoy doing. If I wasn't on an American label, I probably would have done like half German songs, half English songs. But I think for now it's like a good balance to have like two German songs in there per record. No, that's very good. And finally, I'm curious, what are you listening actually at the moment? I know cinema inspires you a lot, but perhaps other music? Well, so, I mean, this is like really cringe, but I've been listening to, okay, so like if I've been flying. Nothing's cringe. Don't worry about it. Okay, so I've been like, I've been traveling a lot because I'm on tour right now and I've been listening to 528 hertz positive energy, spiritual frequencies.

12:10And I have it like downloaded on my phone and I'll just like put in my AirPods, plane takes off and I'm just like asleep, you know? And then I'm just like, I wake up and I feel like very relaxed. and but I guess that's not really like hey what's like your record of the moment it's like I don't I don't even know who makes these I don't know who uploads them on Spotify and then I've been listening to a lot of Elliot Smith and then at the gym I listened to I've been like listening to a lot of cigarettes after sex also also embarrassing also so cringe but uh hey like I it's a good music I like it yeah but it's like just some dude cheating on his girl like every song is about how he can't be faithful to his girlfriend i'm just like just let her go man like it's cool um but yeah i love working out to that because it just like really puts me in like some kind of like taxi driver vibe mood and i can go for a long time taxi driver soundtrack of films they're always a good list so good yeah yeah that's a that's a classic i can see in the future like sophie roy are doing soundtrack for one of your favorite directors that could be an upcoming project i I would really love to do that.

13:12I did some film work recently for a modern remake of the movie Emmanuel. I don't know, the hit 1970s erotic thriller. I'm dying to see that film. Yeah, it's by Audrey D. Wan. It just came out. Naomi Watts is in it. It's a really fun little watch. And they licensed three of my songs for the film. And then during the casting, they were trying to find somebody to perform the songs. The film is set in Hong Kong. and yeah they then i don't know exactly how but i think the music supervisor was like well like here's her profile like maybe she could play herself and so i'm in that movie very very briefly playing some different editions of my song so like um this amazing amazing he and his plays kind of like this very acoustic version of baker miller pink and we're in a hotel lobby and I'm singing, he's playing.

14:06Yeah. Another reason for me to go and watch that film. Listen, Sophie Royer, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for coming here. Thank you. Thank you.

14:28Thank you very much, Sophie Royer. Her album Young Girl Forever is out now. The show was edited by Elliot Greenfield and I am Fernando Augusto Pacheco.