Sonia Stein on Golden: Embracing the Journey Over the Destination
Sonia Stein X FAULT Magazine
Sonia Stein is a singer-songwriter whose soulful voice is matched by her soul-piercing lyrics.
Born in Berlin, she spent 13 years in her native Poland before studying music at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, eventually moving through New York on the way to launching her career in earnest in London. Early releases in the 2010s hinted at bigger things to come, with stand-out tracks like 2019’s ‘Co-Exist’ steadily picking up enough traction to eventually secure coveted gigs ranging from Glastonbury Festival to London and NY fashion weeks.
Golden – the latest Sonia Stein EP – is out today, and follows on from a series of burgeoning successes that seem to have unfolded naturally over time. Rather than exploding overnight, Sonia’s musical journey to date has been a slow burn: a steady stream of organic successes rather than an artificial injection of hype. It’s fitting, then, that Golden is a celebration of exactly that: the journey itself over the destination. It’s a record that enjoys itself as it goes, taking in hopes for the future with reflections on the past with equilibrium.
In the build-up to the release of Golden, we spoke to Sonia Stein about her journey so far, looking back to look forward, and her decision to plan an EP release to align with the imminent birth of her first child…
FAULT: There’s only one place to start, really: why are you releasing this EP now? There’s a belief – probably even an expectation – out there that pregnant women in their third trimester will spend the later antenatal stages preparing for and adapting to their new arrival. That’s not to say that they stop working – far from it – more that late-stage pregnancy often means reorganising things so that higher intensity activities (like recording and releasing new music) take a back seat to lower intensity activities during a period where physical discomfort is quite common, and there are somany other personal matters (emotional, logistical, etc) competing for your attention…
Sonia Stein: This is a great question and one I am asking myself daily…! [laughs]. I decided to release the EP at the very beginning of my pregnancy , when I had no way to foresee how I might feel by the time It is coming out but the songs had been written already and I knew that if I waited till after having the baby, the songs would feel completely irrelevant and connected to a time I couldn’t relate to anymore. So I felt an urgency to release them out into the world before they “expired” in my own heart and mind.
I knew I would have to spend some time in the studio but what actually feels the most labour intensive about this process is more of a mental block. In particular, trying to find ways to promote the EP in this late stage of pregnancy. Being so visibly pregnant and filming content where I just exist in this state but don’t mention it feels strange… however making every bit of content around new songs AND acknowledging the fact that I look massively pregnant feels strange too.
What have you learned from the experience?
Every release feels like a big learning, this one in particular feels interesting because I am having to find new meaning in songs that I wrote at such a different stage in my life even though it feels so recent and within reach. I am also learning to be more spontaneous and intuitive with creative decision making on this project. Knowing that I have a limited bandwidth and time for things I used to be able to mull over for longer, I have been really leaning into trust and that has been a really useful tool both on this project and preparing for things like birth.
I love the theme of the focus track, ‘Golden’ – you’re questioning that hollow pursuit of goals and achievements that is so endemic to “first-world” society. I say hollow because, as you put it, “The road is long and it keeps stretching/It feels like infinity”, as in: relentlessly pursuing your destiny doesn’t actually bring fulfillment. It seems like Generations Y, Z and A have been hard-wired to think and behave teleologically – everything is about the outcome, rather than the journey itself. Why do you think that is? And what’s the antidote to that?
I think we are taught that from a young age, whether it is through conscious or unconscious messaging. The people who are celebrated, are celebrated for their outcomes – their tangible “successes”. It is much harder to televise, write about or create content about “the journey” that is engaging to people. I almost think it is a wisdom that has to come with age – the realisation that there is no destination. You have to get to a few of those perceived destinations to start realising how anticlimactic they feel, how unfulfilling they become. And a life that centres around the journey is much more subtle and nuanced, something that is hard to put into words, or turned into a video or something short and consumable, the way that we have gotten used to life being.
Tell us a bit about your background – how did you get into music? (You’ve probably answered the ‘origin story’ question lots of times before but, as another theme of the EP is nostalgia, perhaps this is a chance for a fresh look at things!)
I can’t remember my earliest memories of singing, just that I was encouraged to do it and by the time I was 6 or 7 it was what I wanted to do. I had piano lessons that I stopped enjoying at around 10 years old, but it then ended up being a very useful skill when I returned to it to write songs rather than play classical pieces. When I was a teenager, writing and singing songs became my preferred way to process and express emotions. As I got older and expanded my tool belt of processing skills, songwriting stopped being this uncontrollable urge but rather an intentional way to name feelings and express myself, and this is where I am now.
Sticking with that retrospective theme for now: you’ve toured with massive names in Dido and James Arthur. Would you count those experiences among your career highlights? Or are there moments that stand out more from a personal perspective?
I would definitely count those tours as career highlights. Being able to perform my songs to a room full of people consistently over the period of a few weeks made me grow so much as an artist and performer in such a short period of time. It really reminded me of what I loved about the career path I chose in the first place. I’ve always loved singing for people and I didn’t realise how little of that I would be doing in my day to day, so it was like this reminder and injection of love for what I do that I really needed at the time.
Golden was co-written with no fewer than five other collaborators: Polish indie-pop artist Julia Po?nik, songwriter Taneisha Jackson and producers Jungleboi, Bubba McCarthy and Palmr. How challenging was it to coordinate all those different creative inputs across countries?
We wrote all of these songs on a writing camp where every day we had two studios set up and the six of us would mix up the people in them in all different combinations. Some people had met and worked with each other before, some people were completely new to each other but we all connected and gelled really well. Every night we would sit in one of the studios and play the songs we had written that day, it was such a fun and creative week.
Is there anyone out there who you see as a dream collaborator? Someone you’ve always admired and/or wanted to work with?
I would love to work with producers like Rob Milton or Stint.
If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?
I am not sure exactly what I would be doing , but something to do with building community around events that have to do with creativity: connecting to oneself and each other, motherhood, movement, food… I’m definitely feeling the pull to explore that once the baby is here. That being said, I know the bug for writing a new project will hit me at some point, and I’m excited to see where that takes me and when.
What’s next for you? Is it going to be full-steam ahead factoring motherhood into your music? Or are you planning to take a step back for a while?
I’m not putting any pressure on myself to come back on any sort of timeline. I’m really looking forward to letting motherhood take over for a while.
Want to share the baby’s name? Go on, we won’t tell anyone…!
We’ve chosen both a full name and nickname already but we’re keeping it to ourselves until she arrives – which won’t be long now!!! We have gone with some ancestral names in our families which feels like a really nice way to honour both our lineages.
What is your FAULT?
I’m sure I have many, but probably being conflict-avoidant is the main one that comes to mind. I like to keep the peace, and that can be a good quality, but it often makes me delay addressing issues at hand, so I would love to keep working on that.