A Quote by Sophie B. Hawkins
My songs are always four years ahead of me. They're like my teachers.
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I've always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn't interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.
When you play all that as a body of work there are four great songs, four mediocre songs and four bad songs. I didn't know it at the time; I was just doing my best.
Often I visualize a quicker, like almost a ghost runner, ahead of me with a quicker stride. It's really crazy. In races, this always happens to me. I see the vision of a runner ahead of me, maybe just 15, 20 meters ahead of me, and the cadence of that runner, which is actually me in the future, is a little quicker, so if I'm going (his rhythm/breathing), then my ghost runner, the vision of me, ahead of me, like opening up and just going for it, is quicker .
I've been writing songs all along, and since moving to Nashville in the late-'80s, I'd begun writing something like 15-20 songs a year, instead of the typical three or four in previous years.
I don't like albums; I like projects. I want to tell a story - I don't want to limit myself to 10 songs or four songs or whatever. I just tell a story and I want you to feel something. If it took me one song or if it took me four, call it however you want. So I call them projects.
I can't be bought with money. If someone calls me and asks me to work for them for three or four years, and they'll pay me well to build their vacation home, I ask myself why I should work three or four years on something like that.
My grandfather was a teacher, my grandmother on my mom's side, four of my aunts, my sister-in-law, my best friend. So I've always, my entire life, been surrounded by teachers, and because of that I've had a tremendous respect for what teachers can do, the power that they can have.
I write these songs and I like the idea of letting the band interpret it as they will. This band is like any band; it's not just me. This isn't just a way for me to play my songs. There are four distinct artistic voices, and they deserve to be expressed.
I remember when I was a kid and I used to go and see Queen play live. It was like there was Queen the album band, and then Queen the four dudes on stage playing the songs on stage, and it never lacked anything to me when it was just the four dudes playing the big songs.
My voice has always been kind of distinct - even when I was four years old, my mom told me that people would be like, 'Why does your daughter always sound like a chain smoker?' I've always had this deep, raspy voice.
When you first sit down to write the first song, until you've maybe got three or four under your belt, it's always, to me, like a mountain to climb. You look at that one blank piece of paper and you think, `God, how many songs do I have to write here?' It always feels like pressure.
My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the same group.
We've always been a band who's taken forever to do things. After writing 'Persona' I think we wrote about four songs in three years!
In my lyrics, I used to always state two years ahead. I did that to make it seem like we were ahead of our time - a time capsule almost. It had never been done before.
Puffy produced four of the tracks on the album. Those are the four songs that are collaborations between Puffy and me. And he gives me my space to work even when we work together, like with my producer and my vocal coach.
I've been sort of writing sketches for songs on my own forever and putting them down on cassette tapes. Yet for years and years and years, my main songwriting outlet was as a member of Sonic Youth, and for most of our time together, our best songs were written in a group setting, where the four of us were getting together in a room.
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