SOKO She’s an acclaimed musician and singer, an actress who has twice been nominated for the Césars, and a true magician who can turn a rainy day into an emotional rainbow. Her third album, is true to form, pulsing with her “happy sad” energy that transf

Feel Feelings,

the tormented I Thought I Was an Alien (2012), established her as an unclassifiable, out-of-the-ordinary artist to a background of sad folk, and the second, My Dreams Dictate My Reality (2015), showed the importance of following your dreams when you’re an angry young punk, the new disc is a manifesto exhorting us to live our emotions whatever they are, from la vie en rose to the darkest hallucinations. And when she’s not working, this LGBT icon, perched high on her Gucci platforms, spends her time fighting for the causes she most believes in: veganism, ecology and greater visibility for queer love. Live from her adopted hometown, Los Angeles, where she has lived for the past 13 years, Soko shared with Numéro the secrets of her manifold and overflowing creativity.

NUMÉRO: What were the inspirations behind your new disc? SOKO: Just before recording the album, I spent an intense week at a retreat in the Hoffman Institute in California. It’s an institution which helps you deprogramme bad habits acquired during childhood – the patterns of behaviour we were brought up with – so as to replace them with more healthy alternatives. During the entire week, all access to the outside world is cut off and nobody talks about what they do for a living. You don’t call each other by your real names, but by childhood nicknames, in order to get rid of the social status we all hang on to. All you see is whether the person is good or not. In just a few days, the exercise makes you feel like you’ve done ten years of therapy. Since usually I travel so much, I’d never been able to do one of these properly, even though the idea fascinates me. I believe that if people spent as much time taking care of their mental health as of their appearance we would probably live in a much more peaceful and compassionate world. I entirely subscribe to Hoffmann’s thinking when he said, “World peace begins with interior peace.”

In a text to accompany the album, you say: “The inspiration for the lyrics was all the sex I didn’t have.” How did this period of privation influence your creativity? At the institute we were forbidden from doing all the things you’d normally do – jogging, yoga, reading, looking at your phone, drinking, smoking, listening to music, making love –, the idea being to avoid anaesthetizing ourselves through activities that disconnect us from our thoughts. And I realized that I was able to think so clearly without all these distractions to the point where I wanted to carry on for a further month to see what result it would have on my music. In the end it turned into a year and a half of celibacy and voluntary abstinence. When I started on the album, I was far more present, concentrated on the music, strengthened. My energy was multiplied tenfold... The

“If people spent as much time taking care of their mental health as their appearance, we would live in a

much more compassionate

world.”

experience also made me understand that my value didn’t depend on somebody else’s vision of me or on a relationship. The spirit of the disc is: “I’m enough.”

How do you go about writing your songs? What is it that inspires you? Books, films and music? Exhibitions and performances? I’m inspired by whatever is happening in my life when I start writing. It’s always personal, like an intimate diary. I don’t sleep much, so ideas often come in the night. I don’t read books – I’m very dyslexic and have an attention-span problem. But I listen to a huge amount of music and watch a ton of films. I’m a real nerd in that respect! It’s there that I find poetry. Musically, I wanted the guitars on my disc to sound like those of the English group The Durutti Column, the bass like Gainsbourg and Air and for the drums to be very sharp. I wanted it to sound like a giant hug underwater or in cotton wool. My intention was to make difficult subjects like toxic relationships more approachable by wrapping them in warm, sunny, sexy, comforting music. On a track like Blasphemy, the French side of me comes out – it’s an erotic poem and the first piece I’ve written in my mother tongue.

The album’s title, Feel feelings, seems to welcome every sort of feeling in all their complexity. Is it a rebellion against the fake smiles of social media?

One track is called Don’t Tell Me to Smile, and there’s another that’s titled Being Sad is Not a Crime. I find it very trying, during photo shoots, to be pressurized into smiling. I’m very, very careful not to do that to my child, Indigo Blue. If I take a photo of him, it’ll be of him as he is at that instant – I’m not going to manipulate the result by telling him how to behave for the camera. I’m a very sensitive and emotional person. On several occasions people have said things like, “That’s too heavy a subject, let’s talk about something else.” On this disc I didn’t want to have to excuse myself anymore. If we talked about sad things more often, we’d be able to accept them all the more easily in the future.

You’ve written a lot of queer tracks, such as the single Oh, To Be A Rainbow! which came out during Pride Month in June. Was it important for you to provide an alternative to heteronormative love songs?

Writing queer love songs is natural for me. I live with a girl, Stella, and we’re bringing up a little boy together. So I felt it was essential to be heard where that was concerned and to contribute to visibility. I’m lucky enough to live in California, a very progressist state in this respect, but when we go back to France we get a lot more comments. People say, “Is she your sister,” and I reply, “No, she’s my woman!”

On Instagram you explained that you postponed the release of your album so as to be a better ally to the black community. Do you believe that the artist’s role is to use their fame to inform others about causes they hold dear? Yes, even if everyone has free will and can do what they like. But we’re going through a global crisis, and people are starting to wake up with respect to major problems. In a context where a powerful movement for equality is emerging around Black Lives Matter, I didn’t really see myself talking about myself and my album. Black people had finally managed to get media attention, and I didn’t want to come in and disturb that. At my modest level, I’m lucky to be very privileged in that people follow me and keep up with what I’m doing, which allows me to talk about issues that are important to me. And I hope it might make people think, even those who don’t see things the way I do. One of my followers on Instagram used the handle KKK Karen. I wrote to her saying this reference to the Ku Klux Klan seemed uncalled for. She changed her handle in the end, saying she hadn’t meant it. It’s maybe not such a big deal, but still it’s something.

How do you see your professional future in a time of COVID19 when tours and movie productions are difficult to organize?

I don’t think about it; I live in the present and take things day by day. I can’t stream a concert from home with my baby who runs around everywhere and requires a lot of attention. Where the movies are concerned, since the little one was born I’ve shot three films including A Good Man with Noémie Merlant, which was selected for Cannes, even if there was no festival this year. I’m also in the American films Little Fish and Mayday, with Mia Goth and Juliette Lewis, but I don’t know when they’ll be released.

What advice would you give someone who wanted to liberate their creative side?

To tell their own story, in the most personal way possible, and not to tell other people’s stories.

And if you had the power to change things, what message would you want to get across to people?

In Los Angeles, although not everyone is vegan, they try to eat less meat, not only for animal welfare but also for their own health and for the environment. So my message would be: “Go vegan to save the planet!”