In Conversation: SOHN
Charles Bukowski once said that only the crazy and the lonely can afford to be themselves. For independent artists, the duality of so-called independence is a question of perspective, and Christopher Taylor, better known as SOHN, is no stranger to navigating the complexities of human connection and the nature of individual freedom. After kick-starting his music career on Soundcloud over a decade ago, followed by three studio albums under a London-based label 4AD and numerous co-writing and producer credits across genres, he continues reinventing himself and exploring the depth of introspective writing. True authenticity is a long and winding road paved with glory and pain, highs and lows, self-doubt and hard work. The incentive, however, is not what you get, but who you become.
KELLY KORZUN: Let’s go back to the very beginning and your first introduction to music. Do you remember how your relationship with sound began?
SOHN: The first instrument I picked up was guitar when I was around six, but I remember my parents listening to the radio all the time. They were mostly into the mainstream pop music radio, and they would play it all day every day. They had some vinyls and cassettes in our household, but I don’t remember my parents ever playing them. They clearly loved music, and when they heard from the teachers that I was good at singing and playing guitar, they really encouraged it. Growing up, I would always sing and play guitar, but I didn’t like where these things started going once they reached academia, be it guitar notation or sight-reading in choir, which you don’t connect with at all. When I was eight, I remember we were at the pub with my parents and their friends after a musical we had gone to see – I was a huge fan of Buddy Holly at the time because we had The Buddy Holly Story on a cassette, and my parents loved musicals a lot. At this pub, all adults were talking, but, as a kid, I wasn’t being talked to, so I’d just work out the chords of the music that was playing, and I’ll never forget the look of shock and wonder on my parents’ faces; they couldn’t believe that I could pick up guitar at that age and precisely mimic what I was hearing. That night was a defining moment for my confidence. My sister was into pop bands at the time, so I went along with whatever she was into. After singing in vocal groups and doing talent shows, I got into guitar music. In my late teenage years, my voice was still high because it hasn’t broken yet, so male singers with high voices always resonated with me: Jeff Buckley, Thom Yorke, and female singers like Bjork. Rock music was really thriving in the UK back then, all that Britpop era. When OK Computer came out, I was about 17.
KK: Such a masterpiece. To this day, Lay Down is a forever staple in my winter melancholy playlist.
SOHN: Yes, I still come back to it, as well as Airbag, Tourist, and Lucky. I’d sing along to the artists I loved, but I’d say Jeff Buckley was a guiding force for me vocally because he could do a lot of things I couldn’t do. Back then, I was listening to Soundgarden a lot, and they had a song called Mailman where Chris Cornell does this amazing flip, and I remember spending hours and hours until I could do it. These singers were my teachers. Later, I had alternative rock bands in the Radiohead & Muse realm, and I was a hundred percent set on that. Then, two things happened at the same time. On one hand, I was trying to make it in the music business, but I had no idea what I was doing. Back then, I had no contacts, I lived in a very unfashionable area, not in central London, feeling like a massive imposter. My perception of the music industry was very naive – I thought that at one point an agent just magically shows up with a contract and tells you that now you’re famous. I’d play lots of shows in Camden and beg my friends and family to come along. We didn’t have any money to record us, and since I couldn’t get the drums sound right on my minidisk 4-track recorder, I started to experiment with drum sounds. Then Kid A came out in early 2000s, and as soon as I heard the opening notes of Everything In Its Right Place, I was blown away because it sounded nothing like what I expected it to sound like based on OK Computer. Instinctively, I didn’t like it vocally at first because I disconnected from it emotionally until I got used to the record, but it was my first realization that synthesizer was even a thing. Growing up, I liked Michael Jackson, but I never thought of it as electronic music, although it totally was. Hearing drum machines in a live band record made me think about implementing it in my own music, so I started replacing live drums with electronic drums.
KK: A lot of the 90s music was heavy on drum machines, and, stylistically, there was little difference between drum machines and live drums played by, say, Phil Collins.
SOHN: A hundred percent. Many live bands in the 80s sounded like they were electronic because of how drums were recorded for a while, and Phil Collins is a great example of someone who sounds like a drum machine. Now that I’m reflecting, even though I loved music, I don’t think I met anyone who would listen to music in the way you and I listen to music today until I was 18. Growing up on only mainstream music makes you think of music as songs rather than pieces of art, and if I’m listening to the radio all day, my exposure to music is gonna be very different from someone like you who had mostly listened to jazz. When I went to the music college and met other kids my age who grew up in a completely different environment, and they introduced me to Sting, Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius, I didn’t get it because of my CD-generation mentality. Growing up working class, I had very little exposure to music outside of the mainstream, but when I met my middle class peers who had stereo systems because their parents would smoke weed and listen to music at night, it was so far away from where I came from, and all of a sudden, this music started to touch me. Paul Simons still remains one of my all-time favorite artists because, at one point, I finally got his storytelling, his interesting rhythmic style, but that shift in my taste wouldn’t happen without connection with other people.
KK: Speaking of your high voice and choir experience. There’s this very interesting quality in the way you harmonize that makes it sound like prayers. Layering multiple high-pitch vocal tracks is what naturally creates this choir-like spiritual setting. If we think about music as prayer, be it a hymn, a ballad, or a pop song, it becomes far more profound because it connects us to God and each other. Even your name Christoper means Bearer of Christ. Did religion play any role in your life?
SOHN: That’s interesting because I have a really weird relationship with religion, and I’ve never thought about the name from that angle before, but you’re totally right. My parents weren’t religious at all. In fact, they were very anti-church just like many other working class people, so the name they chose for me had nothing to do with religion. Growing up, people would ask me if I knew what Christopher meant, and I definitely took this image of Christ’s carrier into my brain, which gave me this weird feeling of weight because religion wasn’t something ever explained to me. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been terrified of churches because they felt like graveyards to me, with all that imagery displayed on windows. When I was a teenager, I’d feel like I was reincarnated after a past life as a priest or a monk because anytime I would walk into a church or cathedral, I’d feel this immense sadness for humanity. As I got older, I would touch the walls and it would ground me, make me feel the weight and depth of history, and I’d feel the generations of life and death deeply in my soul, the punishment, all that suffering. I’ve never thought about it until now, but I definitely grew up with this really weird narrative of being terrified of it, but also feeling involved.
KK: As a sensitive kid, just like you, I’ve aways felt so much emotional pressure in these massive churches and cathedrals. This idea of being told what to wear, where to go, and what rituals to perform didn’t sit well with me, so I’ve always had this strong resentment towards religion. God is this devine creative energy that can be found outside religious institutions – in nature, art, or human connections.
SOHN: Yes, it’s something we can’t logically explain, but we can feel that energy because it resonates with us.
KK: Another person who possesses a very similar quality as far as a vocal performance goes is Jamie Woon. You two recently shared a stage in Vienna alongside Sandrayati, which I’m sure was a very special moment, especially considering how much Jamie’s fans have been craving this comeback, myself included. How did your paths cross initially?
SOHN: Jamie and I have been friends for years, and I can’t even remember exactly how we met, but it was probably on the open mic scene in London when we were super young. Back then, I remembered his name because he was much more amazing than anyone else, including me. He was doing his loop pedal stuff and I’d see him in these small open mic clubs, but I didn’t get to know him until a mutual friend of ours, who was Jamie’s manager at the time, became my manager. Jamie is a very spiritual guy, very reflective, and just an amazing musician. We’ve been on a similar journey, and even though we took slightly different paths, we came from the same place. Last fall, a friend of mine who had always done promotion for all my gigs in Austria, reached out asking if I’d be interested in playing and curating the show, and if Jamie would be open to it. Jamie was down, which was surprising because he hasn’t performed for a while, but I knew that my fans would know who he was and would appreciate it. He is about to re-emerge with an amazing new record and open his doors to the world any minute now. Everyone in the audience was so happy to see him perform again, and it was a great opportunity to offer him a safe space to do whatever he wanted to do.
KK: Was Unwavering the first track you and Sandrayati collaborated on back in the day?
SOHN: Yes, but we did Unwavering at the very early stages of our discussions before we even worked together. The song was written with Jordan Rakei who was originally singing that part, but for some reason he ended up not singing on that track. When Sandrayati asked if I would sing on it, I said yes because I was pretty open at the time, although I’ve never sung on other people’s songs before. Sandrayati is very spiritual and esoteric, and as we started working on more songs together, there was this beautiful dark energy about her that I don’t think she has explored before.
KK: There’s this beautiful thing she said in one of her interviews: “The challenge in making meaningful music is conveying empathy through sound.” You both collaborated with Ólafur Arnalds who also produced her debut record. What do you think is so special about his music that keeps him on top of the game in the neo-classical genre for so many years?
SOHN: It’s interesting because he’s off of piano a lot. He’s very analytical and knowledgeable, and he could’ve easily been a programmer. When he’s at the piano, he is so incredibly connected to the instrument, and the music that comes out of him is undeniable. Just as you said, he’s playing out his feelings in such a pure and empathetic way that you can feel this immense depth of life, regardless of whether or not you like piano music or neo-classical music.
KK: There’s this ongoing debate around streaming platforms with many ethical questions being raised. Streaming monetization is really hard, and the best way for any fan to support their favorite artist is through buying merch, going to live shows, and via platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon. On one hand, we have artists like James Blake who’s been criticizing streaming platforms for devaluing music, and, on the other hand, we have artists like Weekend who’s just recently done Spotify’s first Billion Club Live film. What’s your stance on it?
SOHN: It really depends on the numbers you’re getting, but, to be honest, it’s hard to have a stance on these things and still be reasonable. One thing is very clear – Spotify doesn’t have the interests of musicians at the center of their ethos. Streaming platforms and social media is the market where you can put your produce, and it’s similar to a farmer being screwed over by a supermarket. Yes, you always have a choice of not stocking your stuff in the supermarket, but how much are you gonna sell? As a user, I love the experience of streaming platforms, but it’s become recently very clear that the music community has been exploited by the people who own Spotify in order to generate more money, especially with all the content they keep adding like podcasts, audiobooks, all the AI music that they own, all of which makes it even harder for artists to make money. And as much as many of us would love to take our music out of Spotify, it’s almost like saying fuck you to your fans because it might be the only service that they are using.
KK: One of the main values of streaming is discoverability, and the use case that comes to mind is Dijon, whose sample was used in the opening track on VULTURES. Back then, Dijon had very low streaming numbers, he was super niche, and to think that you can be an emerging artist yet still be discovered by Kanye or his team is mind-blowing.
SOHN: Dijon is amazing. His album Absolutely is one of the best things I’ve heard in years. What track was this sample from?
KK: It’s called Good Luck, and it was recorded years before Absolutely, which, I agree, is a masterpiece, as well as the film that accompanies that record.
SOHN: Yes, discoverability and the user experience of Spotify is great. Personally, I’m using Apple Music, which is a happy medium for me at the moment, but it doesn’t have as good of a user experience yet. Again, it’s all very complicated.
KK: What’s very disruptive is linking music and stats. There’s this interview with Matthew McConaughey by Rick Rubin, in which McConaughey said that on one of his vacations in Europe, he ended up chatting with this elderly lady about their mutual love for swimming. At one point, he asked her how far she normally swims, and she couldn’t understand the question. She explained that she would swim until she didn’t want to swim anymore – unlike McConaughey, she wasn’t counting miles. How did your definition of success evolve over the years?
SOHN: Numbers have changed the way we think about music, the same way social media dictates whether someone is relevant or not based on the likes and followers. If you like running and I like running, the difference in our pace doesn’t change the fact that we both love running. Some people only run a hundred meters, but they’re the fastest on the planet, and some people run marathons, but at a slower speed. When I first started, my idea of success was becoming Radiohead and playing live shows and festivals. After years and years of being entirely DIY, having 50 people showing up to a show and seeing people expressing interest in working with me would be a definition a success. My life took a weird turn when a guy from Austria came to one of the open mic nights and offered to put on five live shows for me in Austria, and even thought these were really small random places, people would show up, and then more people would show up, and multiple times. On the last show of that week, I flew in with a suitcase full of CDs that I printed myself, and when I left, that suitcase was empty – that was a success to me and I couldn’t believe it. Then it was Myspace era, which made it possible for people from around the world to learn about me and my music. When I got to the point where I lived in Vienna and was considered a cool alternative artist, with the national radio station playing my music and live shows for a few thousands people, I still couldn’t play a show in London because people from where I come from had no idea who I was. At the time, I had around 5k Facebook followers, but in the first week I released my first song as SOHN, which was Oscillate, that number went up to 50k. Having 35k listens on Soundcloud when streaming wasn’t a thing yet, was mind-blowing. Red Lines was released next, with a new wave of blogs talking about it. By the time The Wheel came out, 4AD was contacting me and saying they’d love to sign me. Artists like Bon Iver and Grimes were on 4AD, so I was living in a dreamland in that moment. When it happened, I was considered a young artist, although I was in my 30s and already had a million failures and successes as a musician. My first show was at the Eurosonic festival, which was filled with many industry people – they all loved it, and things went flying from there. After a few years of just looking at the numbers, it got to the point where the numbers no longer compute because once you get past a certain number, you get disconnected from the fact that these numbers are real people playing your music in their living room. As a creative, a music lover, you don’t think about the market fit, reviews, none of that – you just wanna make music you love. When things took off, success became this disability that I had to carry with me for years, fueled by imposter syndrome and inferiority complex. The pressure of making the right moves and thinking about everyone’s expectations became greater and greater. There was one review by Pitchfork that really knocked me down, although I’d always get great reviews from them. Imagine that you’re a kid performing at a family gathering, and everyone’s cheering and saying how great you are, and then one person calls you a show-off. That Pitchfork review had the same effect on my ego because my music has always been an expression of my authentic self. Since I’ve always made music alone, especially when living in Vienna, this little voice of criticism started to get louder and louder, to the point where I got completely paralyzed. The hype continued when I moved to LA: Grammy-winning people were telling me how great I was, I felt on top of the world, I met my wife there, but I was hiding the fragility I kept feeling everyday. The way it manifested itself into my art was me making an overblown, very confident-sounding record, something that I thought would lead me to playing Coachella and getting even bigger. Even though we did get Coachella and Jimmy Kimmel, the confidence that I kept projecting was absolutely fake, especially after being completely invisible in Vienna just a few years earlier.
KK: There’s such a huge difference between the first two albums and the third album Trust. It’s such an open and vulnerable record, and I could tell it was fueled by real human emotion – not perfectionism, ego, or the idea of control.
SOHN: Exactly. Trust was about being open to outside elements, trusting other people, trusting the process. Rennen was the opposite of that because I was so paralyzed of making the wrong moves. There are no wrong moves when you’re an artist, but, the thing is, I was no longer an artist. When supporting Alt-J on tour, I remember watching the soundcheck and realizing that it was all wrong, and that none of that felt authentic to me. My wife and I moved to Spain and had three kids over a short period of time, things got chaotic, and I felt very weak, disconnected from the industry, and terrified of losing my label. In fact, I did make a third album, and it wasn’t Trust. Because I was so lost and depressed, these songs were just cries for help, and the reaction I was getting from everyone around me wasn’t good. However, I kept pushing forward, booked a trip to LA to finish the album, but none of it was working until I met Yakob, who was Austrian, ironically, and when we wrote I Won’t on the first day, I felt like four years of weight finally came off me. It just came out of me, and it didn’t come from a negative space. It was full of gratitude and love for my family, it was so pure, and I didn’t do it alone – I did it with Yakob. This is when the theme of trust started to emerge, including trusting myself again.
KK: Fear and love can’t coexist, so you either create out of love, or you create out of fear, which is a dead end. We can fool ourselves all we want, but nothing we make would ever feel right unless it’s authentic.
SOHN: This moment changed my idea of success completely, but I was on a three-album deal with 4AD, with Trust being the last one, and although I loved it so much and was proud of it, there wasn’t a lot of promotion for that record, and I didn’t feel supported by my manager and the label the way I needed to be supported at the time.
KK: If you look at the industry as this money-making machine, it pushes artists to perform like athletes, but we are not athletes and never will be. You can’t apply this type of mentality to the process that was never supposed to be measured like that. Can you put the stats on the sun, the moon, the skies? Can’t we just appreciate their beauty and the fact that they all exist?
SOHN: Nobody really understands it, including the industry. Somewhere along the lines you forget what you’re doing it for. Being great at something and being commercially successful are two things that are tied together, but it’s important to remember that artists don’t make music with these things in mind, and if they do, you can see exactly who they are. Today, my idea of success is freedom of doing what I want and when I want, but I had to destroy a lot of infrastructure around me in order to get to that point. I’m about to release a synth record, which is a career suicide, but I feel like I have a responsibility to do it if I wanna make a change. That said, I’m very fortunate to be in a position where I’m writing other people’s music too, which allows me to enjoy the process with zero pressure of releasing my own music.
KK: With all that in mind, I’m curious about your current writing process and what role intuition plays in it. Autechre’s music has always been entirely based on improvisation and going with the taste, as opposed to relying on predefined ideas. Richard James (Aphex Twin) didn’t know how to play a single instrument, which Philip Glass found extremely fascinating about him – he’d just go to junk stores and buy anything that could potentially make sounds.
SOHN: I’ve been thinking about it myself a lot, especially after struggling for quite a significant time to create, and it comes and goes. When you’re young, you have a lot of ego, which makes it easier to generate ideas, but as you get older and become more introspective, it becomes harder to write because you start thinking about whether what you’re about to say is relevant or not. When we are told that we’re good at making music, we start to think that we’re the architects of music, but we are not. We’re sculptors, and the only thing we have control over is our reaction to stimulus, our taste – this is what makes us unique and interesting. What doesn’t make us unique and interesting is deciding what to do and then doing it. When you’re in a flow state, when you’re allowing yourself to be a vessel, things come out very intuitively, and you can always feel when it’s about to happen. Trusting your taste and going with what feels authentic to you is the key, but I also think that another huge part of creating is consuming. Between Bon Iver’s album 22, A Million and Dijon’s Absolutely, there wasn’t a lot of music that would inspire me, which was probably the result of everything happening in my life at the moment and being quite cynical about music.
KK: Not being inspired by music for five years can look like like a lot of time, but creativity is always in this state of flux, and, as you said, we don’t have full control over it. As far as I know, you’re in the process of revising your old material to build a repository of samples. What made you think about turning them into reusable components?
SOHN: Ironically, I was talking to another Chris Taylor (from Grizzly Bear) about that lost record that I never released and that there’s probably some good stuff in there, but it’s also loaded with the way I felt about the record. Recently, I’ve been thinking about putting together a sample bank with snippets of sounds or soundscapes to experiment with sampling more because your muscle memory leads you down the same avenues instead of sculpting it without trying to control it. To take it even further, I shared this idea with my followers to encourage them to send me 10-second samples and get them involved in that process too. Chris made a great point of reusing samples from my old material, which made total sense because all of it was already made to my taste. Also, I’ve been recently inspired by Sara Gray and her two EPs, QWERTY and QUERTY II. There’s so much fun in her production, and the way she pivots in songs is so wild and interesting. The freedom that I heard in that record is the result of letting go of the architect entirely, which you can’t reverse engineer with an analytical brain.
KK: It’s one of the things I keep coming back to in my own process because the same idea can be received completely differently depending on the environment in which it’s being looked at. There are so many factors that come into play, timing being one of them, so revisiting old ideas and samples is a very healthy creative practice. In one of your previous interviews, you’ve mentioned that melancholy has always been a huge part of you process and that it comes with a price of not being able to fully enjoy things in a moment. Has it changed since you had kids?
SOHN: I would love to say yes, but I clearly have a disposition of seeing everything in the grand scheme of things and constantly questioning who we are and our place in the universe, so I don’t tend to experience these exhilarating moments of happiness that people say they do. Sure, I have lots and lots of moments when I’m so in love with my kids, but it’s always accompanied by this narrative that it’s not gonna last forever and how lucky I am right now to experience it. On the other hand, I feel very lucky to experience things on such a deep level and being able to process them as an observer. Making music and being in a flow state is as close as happiness as it can get because I feel like I’m not even there, like I don’t exist anymore.
KK: It’s a blessing and a curse. Society praises success, but I don’t think people realize that art-making process is a lonely game. Creativity flourishes in solitude, and the need for isolation and space doesn’t make us defective. In your lyrics, you tend to come back to this idea of longing for home, which I find very interesting.
SOHN: Home is a metaphor for truly knowing yourself. I’ve always been good with people, which is rooted in empathy and consideration of other people’s needs. The downside of being a chameleon like that is not fully understanding who you are because, depending on who you are with, you tend to adapt your behaviors, personality, and even morals.
KK: On the other hand, your ability to empathize and deeply connect with people is what I think makes you such a great producer.
SOHN: It’s actually something BANKS pointed out the other day after one of our sessions, that I’m making space for the person I’m with and that I can read what they’re feeling, sometimes even before they do. Weirdly, I’ve never felt connected to the way my fans would talk about my music and how important it is to them because it doesn’t fuel me, and I’ve always struggled with taking compliments. The more we talk about it, the more I’m thinking that maybe I’ve been looking at it the wrong way. I’ve always thought that my superpower is putting my feelings and emotions into the music I make, but maybe it’s not actually my superpower. Being vulnerable and transparent is easy and natural for me, so I’ve never seen being vulnerable as a risk, or the act of bravery. Maybe my main superpower is being vulnerable to lead the way for others to be vulnerable too…
KK: And help them to find home.
SOHN: That’s it.
