How SOPHIE’s Collaborators Assembled Her Final Project
When -remembering his late sister SOPHIE, music producer and engineer Benny Long constantly comes back to one idea. “I think her brain was just ahead of the technology,” he tells Billboard, a tender smile crossing his face.
It’s a recurring theme in conversations about SOPHIE, the visionary pop producer who died Jan. 30, 2021, at age 34, after falling from a balcony in Athens, Greece. During her life, SOPHIE persistently forged her own path, crafting industrial electronic soundscapes on early breakthroughs like 2015’s “BIPP” and “HARD” that laid the foundation for today’s growing hyperpop scene. After her death, artists, fans and industry professionals of all stripes celebrated her impact on both pop and avant-garde music.
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“[Some of] the most influential pop stars in the world are using SOPHIE as a muse today,” explains Bibi Bourelly, who worked with her on the producer’s 2019 remix album. “They were asking SOPHIE, ‘What’s the sound? What’s the next thing?’ You can’t be a fire producer in the pop world today and not know all of SOPHIE’s sh-t.”
Fans are getting a final glimpse into SOPHIE’s musical world — and producers and artists are receiving one final set of reference points from the pioneering performer — with SOPHIE, the producer’s self-titled final album, released in late September. Comprising 16 expansive new songs that oscillate between techno, pop, R&B, ambient and experimental sounds, the posthumous -album aims to encompass all that -SOPHIE managed to accomplish throughout her influential career — and continue to push the boundaries of pop music even further forward.
Long and SOPHIE started working on the project shortly after the release of her Grammy Award-winning debut album, 2018’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un--Insides. Inspired by audience reactions to unreleased tracks from her live shows, SOPHIE wanted to create something that “moved, almost like it was a voyage,” Long explains.
That meant winnowing down dozens of unreleased songs, which each had numerous remixes and rearrangements, making for what Long estimates were “900-plus versions” of tracks to choose from. It took the pair years to determine what the artist’s ideal version of her next project would look like — but after spending the COVID-19 pandemic honing the album, SOPHIE and Long locked in a tracklist at the end of 2020 that spanned the producer’s storied career, including “stuff from 2014 right up to the end of 2020,” he says.
When SOPHIE died, she left her brother with 16 tracks in various stages of completion, some nearly finished, others in need of major reworkings. But SOPHIE had spoken at length with Long about what work remained. “It wasn’t like we’d explicitly discussed in numbers that ‘this one is 73% done,’ ” he says. “But there was rarely a situation where I suggested something and she would say, ‘No, that wouldn’t work,’ or the other way around. We were always pretty aligned, and that gave me confidence to finish this album.”
It helped that both SOPHIE’s label, Future Classic, and her estate were eager for the album to be released. With their sister Emily, a music lawyer, helping creatively and from a business angle, all that stood in the way of the album’s release was Long finishing SOPHIE’s work. “I just had confidence from everyone — family, labels, collaborators, friends — which made the whole process that much easier,” he says.
Los Angeles-based electronic R&B duo BC Kingdom — made up of the mononymous performers Logan and Chris — features on three of SOPHIE’s most prominent tracks: lead single “Reason Why” with Kim Petras and electro-R&B tracks “Live in My Truth” and “Why Lies,” both featuring pop singer LIZ. While they finished both “Reason Why” and “Why Lies” in sessions with SOPHIE in 2018 and 2019, “Live in Your Truth” still had missing lyrics when the producer died. “For a while I had writer’s block because I felt like I didn’t know what she wanted me to convey,” Logan explains. “I started asking myself questions like, ‘When’s the last time I saw her? When was the last time we had fun together?’ Those questions became the second verse.”
Bourelly remembers the late-night session at London’s RAK Studios in 2017 that produced her SOPHIE collaboration “Exhilarate,” the new album’s final single. “We were probably in that studio until 8 or 9 a.m.,” she recalls with a laugh. “We would just sit and shoot the sh-t together. We made so many songs that night because we were just trying everything out.”
The producer’s sessions were famous for their nonconformity. BC Kingdom’s Chris recalls that it didn’t matter if she was in a proper session or at a house party (as the duo was when it first recorded “Live in Your Truth”); if SOPHIE felt the urge to create a song, she would. “Once she was behind that board, you knew what was about to happen,” he says. “It never felt like work, because she would just tell you, ‘Hop on the mic, have some fun,’ and then she would turn it into a hit.”
That spirit of unbridled fun and rampant experimentation encapsulates SOPHIE’s impact on the music industry at large. Along with influencing the sound of pop music today with her outlandish production and co-writes for artists like Madonna and Charli XCX — who paid tribute to her late collaborator on the brat song “So I” — Long says his sister’s legacy lives on in every pop artist dedicated to making the music fun again. “She never thought that pop and experimental music needed to be different things,” he says. “She thought you could do something wild in pop — to see that happening now is amazing, because that is what SOPHIE was all about.”
This article appears in the Oct. 5 issue of Billboard.
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