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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, and we wanted to let you know that the Upper West Side's own Sophie B. Hawkins is back on the road again with a new release called Free Myself, her first full album in more than a decade. When we heard that she'll be playing in our area at City Winery this coming Wednesday evening, we wanted to revisit this conversation I had with her last time she performed in town back in November when she was on the road to celebrate the 30th anniversary of her debut album, Tongues and Tails.

In that conversation, we explored the legacy of her hits like Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover and As I Lay Me Down. We also talked about the roots of music in her life, starting with the first instrument she decided to pick up, percussion, and particularly African percussion. I asked musical artist Sophie B. Hawkins what made her want to pick up the drums at age 14.

Sophie B. Hawkins: I grew up thinking I want to be an African drummer, and I don't know where that came from. I mean, I don't have any African drumming in my family as far as I know. In fact, there aren't any musicians in my family. My grandmother was a concert pianist, but she didn't pursue it professionally. That's the only musician in my family. I was the only one.

There was two things I wanted to be. I wanted to be a Bob Dylan song, and I wanted to be an African drummer. It took me a long time in terms of the way we push our kids now to hurry up and start playing instruments when they're two. It took me till I was 14 years old to actually find my African drum teacher, and maybe it was growing up in Manhattan and hearing the drums in the park around the census fountain.

Maybe it's because I just found out from my genetic chart that I have a lot of genetic history in Spain like Iberia and India, by the way, Bengali. Maybe it's that, and maybe it's just that I have the Sophie intelligence. We all have our own super intelligence, and my Sophie intelligence said drums is the way I'm going to tell my story. That could be.

Alison Stewart: How do you think those years as a percussionist and currently as a percussionist influenced your songwriting?

Sophie B. Hawkins: Oh my goodness. Well, the first album, it's amazing. It's not so much in Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover because that was just a straight up, I wrote it on the piano song, but there's songs where Did We Not Choose Each Other and Don’t Stop Swaying, which I do on stage and We Are One Body where I really recorded the drums first and I decided, I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how I was going to say it. I recorded all my drum parts first, and then I did the lyrics and the harmonies after that.

By the way, when I was becoming a drummer, I wanted to be the best drummer in the world in Manhattan. I played for 10 classes at NYU, and I played for the Alexander class. They had rhythms like 13/7 and 14/5. I did all those rhythms and I wrote songs around all those time signatures. I was really intense about using the drums to open my subconscious, but I think anyone could also hear that harmonically. I really love developing harmonies, and I'm not just relying on clues at all. My songs are very developed harmonically.

Alison Stewart: I was looking at your tour schedule, Sophie, and you've been playing all across the country. What's something that you've observed about the United States in 2022? I know it's a self-selected audience because they're your people, but I'm curious if you've gotten any sort of vibe from the audience, if you've observed anything from visiting all these different cities.

Sophie B. Hawkins: Well, what I've observed is, and it's interesting you said they're my people because oftentimes, parents will bring their kids. I'm getting new people and it's really nice, I have to tell you. Well, what I've observed is that people are really loving and they're funny. They appreciate my complete candidness and my complete, for lack of a better word, my naked approach to just delivering things and opening up subject matters and introducing songs in new ways.

They're incredibly open to my humor. I think that this is all because of COVID and because of just hardship and also sadness about the world, sadness about just how humanity has become so complex. We all want more compassion, and we all want more love and understanding. People get to the show and then we cannot only express the humorous side of venting but also the real yearning to connect. It makes me cry, actually, that's the only thing I would say about being on stage too with my band, is that we come from very different places.

We came from different states and we got together and we decided that no matter how hard each show was, whether they had our back line or not, no matter what was going on, we just come up to the plate with 1,000% because we want to connect and we want to connect with people and with music and with ourselves. It's almost as if this is our last chance. We do it now, or we just don't, and we decide we want to do it. I see the same spirit in the audience.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Lori, who's calling in from Westchester, and Lori has an interesting story. Hi, Lori. Thanks for calling All Of It. Hi. You're on the air with Sophie.

Lori: I am so happy-

Sophie B. Hawkins: Hi, Lori.

Lori: -to be talking to you, Sophie. It's so strange, 30 years ago, I was working at Messina Music while you were recording Tongues and Tails. I just remember all of the energy, the creative energy that was in the studio while you were all there. I just can't believe it's been 30 years, but I'm so happy to hear that you are in New York and playing. Congratulations on this amazing milestone.

Sophie B. Hawkins: Thank you, Lori. I remember every moment of those Messina days. One, you're right. There was people coming in and out, but the core of us, me and Rick and Ralph. Ralph is not even here anymore. He died. We were so intent about making something new, but also with its seat in the history of all the music we loved. They were so respectful of me, Alison and Lori. They didn't push me around. I wouldn't have let them, but they didn't even try. They were just so respectful.

Steve Churchyard doing the engineering, the musicians who came in, Eric Bazilian, Rob Hyman, Omar Hakim, are you kidding me? God, Mark Egan. Honestly, it was the most amazing time, and I would just, I'd walk up from the village every day. I'd get there early and I would have my outfits on. I was just so excited.

It was in the way I was excited but it was also such hard work because we had to deal with all these things that everyone has to deal with. The tape machines always breaking, the electricity going down, so many threatening to cut off the funding if I didn't stop saying damn. All those things that were always happening. We felt we were in a bunker.

Sophie B. Hawkins: You released a new single called Love Yourself. Before I play this, I'm going to say to the audience, this is a sorry not sorry song. It is such an earworm, so I'm sorry because you're going to be singing this all day, but I'm really not sorry because it's a very good song. Let's listen to Love Yourself from Sophie B. Hawkins.

On the way home I thought about time,

When it's your home, when it's fine

And I cannot believe that this the deal

I can only trust the things I feel

Oh, baby, love yourself

Alison Stewart: That's Love Yourself from Sophie B. Hawkins. I was looking at the video of it and somebody wrote this really beautiful YouTube comment that said, "I don't even think I can make sense of the emotion this video and song bring up for me." I'm curious what you think about the idea of loving oneself that can be fraught for some people.

Sophie B. Hawkins: Well, I think it's fraught for all humans. That's why the song is important to me. It didn't just come out when I was 20. It took me all this time to get there and to realize that this Fingal Oscar Wilde said it much better. He said, "Falling in love with yourself is the beginning of the greatest love affair." I had even heard that, but it didn't really get to me until the song came out. The story is true.

I did go to a party, the folks were fine, and they could have come home and thought I did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, drank too much, ate too much, but instead, this voice in my head and after all the work I've done, and I mean spiritual work, really working on myself as a human as we all do really trying to transcend and leave my ego behind and be a great mother, be a great friend, partner, all that.

Then, finally, this voice in my head said love yourself. It made me cry and it made the song come out. The song is happy and it's comfortable and it's not hard to sing, which is amazing for me. I get a song on stage that's easy to sing, and I love that. On the other hand, it's also, it didn't come from this walk in the park. It came from what we all go through as humans. We have to get there.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sophie B. Hawkins. Recently, some of your songs have been featured on Stranger Things and Euphoria. It's interesting, the '90s music is really having a renaissance. I'm curious if you have any thoughts to why that is. We've had Kate Bush going back up the charts. It's been really great to hear. I love having that new audiences, younger kids are getting to find this music. Do you have any thoughts on why it's resonating with people?

Sophie B. Hawkins: Yes. I have a sense that because in the '90s-- I'll speak for us songwriters, we felt that we were breaking away from the '80s, all that controlled way of writing, and thinking, the material world, and all that stuff. In the '90s, we wanted to go to what was best about the '70s and '60s and then further. We wanted to bust the whole material mechanical world away. We wanted to do stuff that was real, and from our guts, and from our soul. We wanted to get into our darknesses and our lights. We really wanted to paint with music again.

I think that's what us songwriters did from Nirvana to Tori Amos to Sophie B. Hawkins. We all came from Kate Bush. We grew up listening to her. By the way, she's not in that '80s awful period. I mean, like the late 80s, the Regan era. We grew up listening to Joan Armatrading and Kate Bush. Before that, all those great '60s and '70s songwriters.

In the '90s here, we were young and we wanted to make statements of our writing. It wasn't about being even mechanical, like when the musicians were even in the studio, they were really playing. We weren't over-dubbing and we weren't even playing to click tracks all the time. I think that people love that now. They're saying, "I'm tired of people writing to loops. I'm tired of people writing in tribes."

We were real singer-songwriters, we still are, but we wrote alone. It's not to say that you have to write alone to be great, but on the other hand, when you do write alone, you get something that's more unique. I think that's why people are yearning for the realness and the intensity, and trusting the artist again.

Alison Stewart: That was part of my conversation with musician Sophie B. Hawkins, who dropped her latest album Free Myself this past Friday. She'll be playing at City Winery on a Wednesday. On tomorrow's show, the next installment of our album anniversary series, Silver Liner Notes, revisiting two major music releases from 1998, the debut albums from Destiny's Child and NSYNC. We'll play some music and talk about the impact of the music and how it launched the solo careers of Beyonce and Justin Timberlake. Get Lit is tomorrow evening at 6:00 PM at the New York Public Library. Go to wnyc.org/getlit to reserve your tickets. We'll see you there, and I'll see you back here on the radio tomorrow.

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