Sophie B. Hawkins: the lion of pop music - hear her roar, listen to her hush - Interview

Interview, Feb, 1994 by Martina Navratilova

INTERVIEW MANAGING EDITOR: O.K., you guys, you're on the line together. I'll come back in a while and see how you're doing.

MARTINA NAVRATILOVA: Hi, Sophie. It's funny we know a lot of people in common, but I don't even know what you look like.

SOPHIE B. HAWKINS: That's what's great about doing this on the telephone. You know why it is? You just have to respond to what you get.

MN: My number one question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

SBH: Lord have mercy.

MN: O.K. Do you want to grow up?

SBH: I think I came out of the womb grown-up. I'd love to have the chance to tend to natures more basic than human nature. You know, one day I guess I'd like to be an incredible gardener.

MN: Wow. I would also love to be able to have a garden and just go out and pick what I want. My mother does that. When she's ready to cook she just goes into the garden. I am so envious. I always have to call and have people send it, or steal fruit.

SBH: Really?

MN: Yeah. I'm very good at climbing fences.

SBH: That's funny. In Czechoslovakia?

MN: Once I stole a whole bunch of cherries, and I put them under my shirt; then when I was climbing over the fence I fell, and when I landed, the cherries splattered all on my stomach.

SBH: Oh, my God.

MN: So were you a tomboy when you were growing up?

SBH: My mother definitely raised me to be a boy--although when I got into adolescence I questioned it. I was a total slut. I now see how that was my way of becoming a woman, my kind of rite of passage.

MN: So what's your most comfortable outfit? And if you go out, what do you like to wear? What do you think looks great?

SBH: Well, I'll tell you. In fact when I'm comfortable is when I feel beautiful. I think I look most beautiful when I feel most beautiful. If I'm really going out with somebody I love and I want to be very sexy, I like this long black dress that a friend of mine in Paris gave me, with a beautiful black coat, and my black high heels.

MN: How tall are you?

SBH: Without heels I'm five feet nine.

MN: That's pretty tall.

SBH: How tall are you?

MN: I'm five feet eight. You got me there.

SBH: [laughs]

MN: I listened to the tape of your record that's coming out in the spring, and it struck me that every song is different. It's not like you can say, Oh, this one thing is Sophie. Tell me a little bit about how you made the record.

SBH: For this record I shipped my whole studio over to London to a house I'd rented.

MN: How'd you like London?

SBH: Well, I loved it. I'd always wanted to live in Europe, and then it was right there. I got to be there and work and be alone and spend time in the heath. It was really like being a child for the first time. I'd never had a house with stairs in it before. I ran, and I started playing tennis and rode horses. And I made my record with absolutely nobody watching me or looking at me.

MN: So who are your influences in your music?

SBH: Well, let me see. The first person I'd say is my mother. Not that she's a musician, but she always sings. And she always makes up her own words, and she sings constantly, and with real purity. She has a beautiful voice. And then I grew up listening to a lot of Beethoven, so that has to be a major influence. I think it comes out in the moodiness of my music. I studied lots of people when I was becoming a musician, but I would have to say that my most emotional influences have been Beethoven, Billie Holiday, and my mother.

MN: That's quite a trio.

SBH: Yeah, it is. But to tell you the truth, I don't think most of my influences are musical. I think they're more literary. God, I don't even think they're literary. I think they are just the people that I love, because those are the rhythms that feel so natural with my music. It's really, really intimate. It's not so much influenced by art.

MN: So tell, what's your best quality?

SBH: My sense of humor.

MN: Oh, you're funny? You haven't been funny yet.

SBH: Martina!

MN: Well, tell me a joke.

SBH: [silence]

MN: O.K., I'll tell you a joke I made up. It's pretty bad.

SBH: Let's hear it.

MN: I thought of this while I was meditating: what do you get when you cross Napoleon and a donkey?

SBH: I have no idea.

MN: You get a man who doesn't know his ass from his Elba. Sophisticated joke, yes? I'm amazed that I remembered it.

SBH: [laughs] I'm amazed that you made it up. That reminds me of a joke I made up in a movie theater when I was like six or something.

MN: Oh, great! That's embarrassing. A six-year-old's joke!

SBH: I won't even tell it, but I still remember it. It's worse than yours.

MN: So what's your worst quality, then?

SBH: I have a lot of worst qualities. But probably my most worst quality is that I have a wandering left eye. To me that's metaphorical for ... it makes people nervous. I make people nervous with the way that I ...

MN: Do you want to get it fixed?

SBH: Do I want to? No, no. It's one of those quirks that I feel ... like I said, it makes people nervous, but it keeps me reaching out and reaching deeper, and reaching and reaching, and discovering other qualities than those that necessarily want to be seen.