Sophia Thakur has a quite absurd run of plaudits against her name. A spoken word poet whose work has touched countless souls, she’s been featured in Vogue, worked with England’s all-conquering Lionesses and acclaimed by the BBC as “the poet of this generation”.
Yet one moment still brought the London talent to her knees – the release of her debut single. ‘My City’ was a point of inflection, with Sophia finally succumbing to her lifelong love of music, and placing her voice front and centre. When the song finally arrived, it was a heavenly construction – soft and sonorous alt-R&B, the slight jazzy impulses made for elastic musicality, driven by a purity of heart.
Sophia sat with her friends, counting down the clock until the song went live on Spotify at midnight. “I went through all of the emotions,” she gasps. “I felt nervous, I felt scared…”
We’re seated in a coffee shop in Farringdon – Sophia is just done leading a class on her poetry, and CLASH felt like the time was right to soak up some eloquent creativity. Words tumble forth when chatting to Sophia – she’s wide open, unflinchingly honest, using each sentence as a chance to re-connect with her own emotions.
Looking back on the single launch, she relishes his communal it felt. “I suddenly felt like I needed people a lot more than I had experienced needing people before, and that gave me anxiety,” she says. “I’m gonna have to be telling people to stream my song! I was nervous for a bit, but then my brother – who is also a musician – told me: you’re tracking a moment in time, and ‘My City’ is exactly where you are right now as a person.”
“I think when he said that, I kind of reframed it in my brain from being challenged, to the release being an adventure… and that’s really, really allowed me to enjoy the process.”
—
—
In a strange way it’s re-affirming to hear someone so honoured, so eloquent as Sophia admit to those emotions. She’s published four books, travelled the world, and fully immersed herself in her craft, after all. But music has played an ever-present role in her life – as a kid, her mum packed her off to piano lessons, and when she’s writing the London poet will continually play music in the background, both as a balm and as a point of inspiration.
Travel is one key factor in ‘My City’. Moving outside of London let her see who she really is, and a spell in New York provided a sense of contrast. “Going to New York as a poet, and suddenly being in a land that loves poetry… it’s like, there are 70 poetry shows on any given night, and on the train, people are writing poetry. And I meet these people that are in their 80s, and they’ve been poets all life, and I just never come across that! It was literally like walking into Alice In Wonderland. So that really liberated a lot of my beliefs.”
Her debut single was “me trying to figure out, what do I want when I take the reins of my life? When I do take the paint brush of this canvas, what do I want things to look like?”
One thing that draws Sophia to music – and to songwriting in particular – is the sense of rigour, the necessity of rules. “When I’m writing poetry, I guess I don’t need to sing in key, or anything like that. It just has to fit the mood of what I’m writing. But with songs, I definitely have to be a bit more intentional.”
“’My City’ was a poem before it was a song,” she explains. “And I think that allows me to just spitball what I feel exactly into a wide spoken word, vast way… and then I guess condense it into songwriting.”
Sophia’s passion for words extends back to childhood. Her mother may have had musical dreams, but her competitive streak took her into sports, notably basketball and athletics. That arena still pulls her attention – she’s a passionate Gooner, after all – but words, and their inherent musicality, are like an addictive perfume to her.
“I’ve always felt really big emotions,” she explains. “Luckily, I was always reading as well. So in reading, you have language to explain how you feel.”
“I always had my head in a book, and that meant I always had words to explain how I felt. I don’t know what it would have been like if I felt such big emotions and didn’t know how to get them out.”
“I think that’s also why I obligate myself a lot to what I’m saying as well,” she continues. “I take it seriously, because I know how much it helped me. I try to be a mirror to someone who might be going through things, but perhaps doesn’t have the language to figure it out. I try to offer that with what I write.”
—
—
New single ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ continues her rise. A beautiful cavalcade of words, her heavenly delivery offers an incantation of positivity – pushing back against negative self-talk, it’s a semi-chant of golden light for the soul. Built in New York, the band jammed for 90 minutes with the lights dimmed down to amber before the track clicked into place, Sophia’s voice purring on top.
“It’s almost like a chant,” she says. “Sometimes we live in a world of low self-esteem. And the song says, why don’t we leave that world of low self-confidence, and actually think big? What happens if I believe in myself for a day? What happens if I do actually look at my reflection and try to love it? What happens if I affirm myself?”
“It’s just a simple thing, and you need to hear it for it to sink into your spirit. I know I’ve had really hard times, and sometimes I just wanted to hear someone in my headphones, telling me it would be alright. I wrote it with the hope that people can hear it with their ears, but then feel it with their spirit… and then come to believe it as well.”
A peculiar moment of alt-R&B alchemy, ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ contains both wisdom and innocence. “When we’re young, we didn’t need someone motivating us to believe in ourselves,” she points out. “Because you just have this audacious certainty when you’re young. I’m trying to bring people back to a version of themselves that probably does exist somewhere, and just bring it to the surface, basically.”
Content to follow a trail of singles, Sophia contains an innate longing to see her name on an album sleeve – it’s the way she grew up, poring over records from Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, and wondering at the teams behind such creations. She’s building a live experience, too, and Sophia will headline North London venue the Jazz Café in February.
“I think music is a very spiritual thing,” she reflects during one point in our conversation. “In every culture, every form of worship is accompanied by music. Even if you don’t believe in like a God or a maker, you’ve been in a club before, and you dance and you dance until you feel like your spirit’s left you. You’ve sung a song until it’s like made you happier. And that’s all worship – like, all of that is worship.”
“Music, intrinsically, is a way for the Creator to talk to people and through people.”
For Sophia Thakur, music and poetry “dance together”, and she’s relishing the path these releases have set her on. Aiming to bridge a gap between two, she seeks to “make music that makes people feel seen, and brings language to things they might be going through, but don’t have words for yet.”
“I’m loving this,” she admits towards the close of our conversation. “I’m loving the journey it’s taken me on, and where it’s placed my mind.”
—
—
Stay in touch with Sophia Thakur on Instagram.
Words: Robin Murray
—
Join us on WeAre8, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine HERE as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and
photo shoots. Get backstage sneak-peeks and a view into our world as the fun and games unfold.
Sophia Thakur has a quite absurd run of plaudits against her name. A spoken word poet whose work has touched countless souls, she’s been featured in Vogue, worked with England’s all-conquering Lionesses and acclaimed by the BBC as “the poet of this generation”.
Yet one moment still brought the London talent to her knees – the release of her debut single. ‘My City’ was a point of inflection, with Sophia finally succumbing to her lifelong love of music, and placing her voice front and centre. When the song finally arrived, it was a heavenly construction – soft and sonorous alt-R&B, the slight jazzy impulses made for elastic musicality, driven by a purity of heart.
Sophia sat with her friends, counting down the clock until the song went live on Spotify at midnight. “I went through all of the emotions,” she gasps. “I felt nervous, I felt scared…”
We’re seated in a coffee shop in Farringdon – Sophia is just done leading a class on her poetry, and CLASH felt like the time was right to soak up some eloquent creativity. Words tumble forth when chatting to Sophia – she’s wide open, unflinchingly honest, using each sentence as a chance to re-connect with her own emotions.
Looking back on the single launch, she relishes his communal it felt. “I suddenly felt like I needed people a lot more than I had experienced needing people before, and that gave me anxiety,” she says. “I’m gonna have to be telling people to stream my song! I was nervous for a bit, but then my brother – who is also a musician – told me: you’re tracking a moment in time, and ‘My City’ is exactly where you are right now as a person.”
“I think when he said that, I kind of reframed it in my brain from being challenged, to the release being an adventure… and that’s really, really allowed me to enjoy the process.”
—
—
In a strange way it’s re-affirming to hear someone so honoured, so eloquent as Sophia admit to those emotions. She’s published four books, travelled the world, and fully immersed herself in her craft, after all. But music has played an ever-present role in her life – as a kid, her mum packed her off to piano lessons, and when she’s writing the London poet will continually play music in the background, both as a balm and as a point of inspiration.
Travel is one key factor in ‘My City’. Moving outside of London let her see who she really is, and a spell in New York provided a sense of contrast. “Going to New York as a poet, and suddenly being in a land that loves poetry… it’s like, there are 70 poetry shows on any given night, and on the train, people are writing poetry. And I meet these people that are in their 80s, and they’ve been poets all life, and I just never come across that! It was literally like walking into Alice In Wonderland. So that really liberated a lot of my beliefs.”
Her debut single was “me trying to figure out, what do I want when I take the reins of my life? When I do take the paint brush of this canvas, what do I want things to look like?”
One thing that draws Sophia to music – and to songwriting in particular – is the sense of rigour, the necessity of rules. “When I’m writing poetry, I guess I don’t need to sing in key, or anything like that. It just has to fit the mood of what I’m writing. But with songs, I definitely have to be a bit more intentional.”
“’My City’ was a poem before it was a song,” she explains. “And I think that allows me to just spitball what I feel exactly into a wide spoken word, vast way… and then I guess condense it into songwriting.”
Sophia’s passion for words extends back to childhood. Her mother may have had musical dreams, but her competitive streak took her into sports, notably basketball and athletics. That arena still pulls her attention – she’s a passionate Gooner, after all – but words, and their inherent musicality, are like an addictive perfume to her.
“I’ve always felt really big emotions,” she explains. “Luckily, I was always reading as well. So in reading, you have language to explain how you feel.”
“I always had my head in a book, and that meant I always had words to explain how I felt. I don’t know what it would have been like if I felt such big emotions and didn’t know how to get them out.”
“I think that’s also why I obligate myself a lot to what I’m saying as well,” she continues. “I take it seriously, because I know how much it helped me. I try to be a mirror to someone who might be going through things, but perhaps doesn’t have the language to figure it out. I try to offer that with what I write.”
—
—
New single ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ continues her rise. A beautiful cavalcade of words, her heavenly delivery offers an incantation of positivity – pushing back against negative self-talk, it’s a semi-chant of golden light for the soul. Built in New York, the band jammed for 90 minutes with the lights dimmed down to amber before the track clicked into place, Sophia’s voice purring on top.
“It’s almost like a chant,” she says. “Sometimes we live in a world of low self-esteem. And the song says, why don’t we leave that world of low self-confidence, and actually think big? What happens if I believe in myself for a day? What happens if I do actually look at my reflection and try to love it? What happens if I affirm myself?”
“It’s just a simple thing, and you need to hear it for it to sink into your spirit. I know I’ve had really hard times, and sometimes I just wanted to hear someone in my headphones, telling me it would be alright. I wrote it with the hope that people can hear it with their ears, but then feel it with their spirit… and then come to believe it as well.”
A peculiar moment of alt-R&B alchemy, ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ contains both wisdom and innocence. “When we’re young, we didn’t need someone motivating us to believe in ourselves,” she points out. “Because you just have this audacious certainty when you’re young. I’m trying to bring people back to a version of themselves that probably does exist somewhere, and just bring it to the surface, basically.”
Content to follow a trail of singles, Sophia contains an innate longing to see her name on an album sleeve – it’s the way she grew up, poring over records from Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, and wondering at the teams behind such creations. She’s building a live experience, too, and Sophia will headline North London venue the Jazz Café in February.
“I think music is a very spiritual thing,” she reflects during one point in our conversation. “In every culture, every form of worship is accompanied by music. Even if you don’t believe in like a God or a maker, you’ve been in a club before, and you dance and you dance until you feel like your spirit’s left you. You’ve sung a song until it’s like made you happier. And that’s all worship – like, all of that is worship.”
“Music, intrinsically, is a way for the Creator to talk to people and through people.”
For Sophia Thakur, music and poetry “dance together”, and she’s relishing the path these releases have set her on. Aiming to bridge a gap between two, she seeks to “make music that makes people feel seen, and brings language to things they might be going through, but don’t have words for yet.”
“I’m loving this,” she admits towards the close of our conversation. “I’m loving the journey it’s taken me on, and where it’s placed my mind.”
—
—
Stay in touch with Sophia Thakur on Instagram.
Words: Robin Murray
—
Join us on WeAre8, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine HERE as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and
photo shoots. Get backstage sneak-peeks and a view into our world as the fun and games unfold.
Sophia Thakur has a quite absurd run of plaudits against her name. A spoken word poet whose work has touched countless souls, she’s been featured in Vogue, worked with England’s all-conquering Lionesses and acclaimed by the BBC as “the poet of this generation”.
Yet one moment still brought the London talent to her knees – the release of her debut single. ‘My City’ was a point of inflection, with Sophia finally succumbing to her lifelong love of music, and placing her voice front and centre. When the song finally arrived, it was a heavenly construction – soft and sonorous alt-R&B, the slight jazzy impulses made for elastic musicality, driven by a purity of heart.
Sophia sat with her friends, counting down the clock until the song went live on Spotify at midnight. “I went through all of the emotions,” she gasps. “I felt nervous, I felt scared…”
We’re seated in a coffee shop in Farringdon – Sophia is just done leading a class on her poetry, and CLASH felt like the time was right to soak up some eloquent creativity. Words tumble forth when chatting to Sophia – she’s wide open, unflinchingly honest, using each sentence as a chance to re-connect with her own emotions.
Looking back on the single launch, she relishes his communal it felt. “I suddenly felt like I needed people a lot more than I had experienced needing people before, and that gave me anxiety,” she says. “I’m gonna have to be telling people to stream my song! I was nervous for a bit, but then my brother – who is also a musician – told me: you’re tracking a moment in time, and ‘My City’ is exactly where you are right now as a person.”
“I think when he said that, I kind of reframed it in my brain from being challenged, to the release being an adventure… and that’s really, really allowed me to enjoy the process.”
—
—
In a strange way it’s re-affirming to hear someone so honoured, so eloquent as Sophia admit to those emotions. She’s published four books, travelled the world, and fully immersed herself in her craft, after all. But music has played an ever-present role in her life – as a kid, her mum packed her off to piano lessons, and when she’s writing the London poet will continually play music in the background, both as a balm and as a point of inspiration.
Travel is one key factor in ‘My City’. Moving outside of London let her see who she really is, and a spell in New York provided a sense of contrast. “Going to New York as a poet, and suddenly being in a land that loves poetry… it’s like, there are 70 poetry shows on any given night, and on the train, people are writing poetry. And I meet these people that are in their 80s, and they’ve been poets all life, and I just never come across that! It was literally like walking into Alice In Wonderland. So that really liberated a lot of my beliefs.”
Her debut single was “me trying to figure out, what do I want when I take the reins of my life? When I do take the paint brush of this canvas, what do I want things to look like?”
One thing that draws Sophia to music – and to songwriting in particular – is the sense of rigour, the necessity of rules. “When I’m writing poetry, I guess I don’t need to sing in key, or anything like that. It just has to fit the mood of what I’m writing. But with songs, I definitely have to be a bit more intentional.”
“’My City’ was a poem before it was a song,” she explains. “And I think that allows me to just spitball what I feel exactly into a wide spoken word, vast way… and then I guess condense it into songwriting.”
Sophia’s passion for words extends back to childhood. Her mother may have had musical dreams, but her competitive streak took her into sports, notably basketball and athletics. That arena still pulls her attention – she’s a passionate Gooner, after all – but words, and their inherent musicality, are like an addictive perfume to her.
“I’ve always felt really big emotions,” she explains. “Luckily, I was always reading as well. So in reading, you have language to explain how you feel.”
“I always had my head in a book, and that meant I always had words to explain how I felt. I don’t know what it would have been like if I felt such big emotions and didn’t know how to get them out.”
“I think that’s also why I obligate myself a lot to what I’m saying as well,” she continues. “I take it seriously, because I know how much it helped me. I try to be a mirror to someone who might be going through things, but perhaps doesn’t have the language to figure it out. I try to offer that with what I write.”
—
—
New single ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ continues her rise. A beautiful cavalcade of words, her heavenly delivery offers an incantation of positivity – pushing back against negative self-talk, it’s a semi-chant of golden light for the soul. Built in New York, the band jammed for 90 minutes with the lights dimmed down to amber before the track clicked into place, Sophia’s voice purring on top.
“It’s almost like a chant,” she says. “Sometimes we live in a world of low self-esteem. And the song says, why don’t we leave that world of low self-confidence, and actually think big? What happens if I believe in myself for a day? What happens if I do actually look at my reflection and try to love it? What happens if I affirm myself?”
“It’s just a simple thing, and you need to hear it for it to sink into your spirit. I know I’ve had really hard times, and sometimes I just wanted to hear someone in my headphones, telling me it would be alright. I wrote it with the hope that people can hear it with their ears, but then feel it with their spirit… and then come to believe it as well.”
A peculiar moment of alt-R&B alchemy, ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ contains both wisdom and innocence. “When we’re young, we didn’t need someone motivating us to believe in ourselves,” she points out. “Because you just have this audacious certainty when you’re young. I’m trying to bring people back to a version of themselves that probably does exist somewhere, and just bring it to the surface, basically.”
Content to follow a trail of singles, Sophia contains an innate longing to see her name on an album sleeve – it’s the way she grew up, poring over records from Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, and wondering at the teams behind such creations. She’s building a live experience, too, and Sophia will headline North London venue the Jazz Café in February.
“I think music is a very spiritual thing,” she reflects during one point in our conversation. “In every culture, every form of worship is accompanied by music. Even if you don’t believe in like a God or a maker, you’ve been in a club before, and you dance and you dance until you feel like your spirit’s left you. You’ve sung a song until it’s like made you happier. And that’s all worship – like, all of that is worship.”
“Music, intrinsically, is a way for the Creator to talk to people and through people.”
For Sophia Thakur, music and poetry “dance together”, and she’s relishing the path these releases have set her on. Aiming to bridge a gap between two, she seeks to “make music that makes people feel seen, and brings language to things they might be going through, but don’t have words for yet.”
“I’m loving this,” she admits towards the close of our conversation. “I’m loving the journey it’s taken me on, and where it’s placed my mind.”
—
—
Stay in touch with Sophia Thakur on Instagram.
Words: Robin Murray
—
Join us on WeAre8, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine HERE as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and
photo shoots. Get backstage sneak-peeks and a view into our world as the fun and games unfold.
Sophia Thakur has a quite absurd run of plaudits against her name. A spoken word poet whose work has touched countless souls, she’s been featured in Vogue, worked with England’s all-conquering Lionesses and acclaimed by the BBC as “the poet of this generation”.
Yet one moment still brought the London talent to her knees – the release of her debut single. ‘My City’ was a point of inflection, with Sophia finally succumbing to her lifelong love of music, and placing her voice front and centre. When the song finally arrived, it was a heavenly construction – soft and sonorous alt-R&B, the slight jazzy impulses made for elastic musicality, driven by a purity of heart.
Sophia sat with her friends, counting down the clock until the song went live on Spotify at midnight. “I went through all of the emotions,” she gasps. “I felt nervous, I felt scared…”
We’re seated in a coffee shop in Farringdon – Sophia is just done leading a class on her poetry, and CLASH felt like the time was right to soak up some eloquent creativity. Words tumble forth when chatting to Sophia – she’s wide open, unflinchingly honest, using each sentence as a chance to re-connect with her own emotions.
Looking back on the single launch, she relishes his communal it felt. “I suddenly felt like I needed people a lot more than I had experienced needing people before, and that gave me anxiety,” she says. “I’m gonna have to be telling people to stream my song! I was nervous for a bit, but then my brother – who is also a musician – told me: you’re tracking a moment in time, and ‘My City’ is exactly where you are right now as a person.”
“I think when he said that, I kind of reframed it in my brain from being challenged, to the release being an adventure… and that’s really, really allowed me to enjoy the process.”
—
—
In a strange way it’s re-affirming to hear someone so honoured, so eloquent as Sophia admit to those emotions. She’s published four books, travelled the world, and fully immersed herself in her craft, after all. But music has played an ever-present role in her life – as a kid, her mum packed her off to piano lessons, and when she’s writing the London poet will continually play music in the background, both as a balm and as a point of inspiration.
Travel is one key factor in ‘My City’. Moving outside of London let her see who she really is, and a spell in New York provided a sense of contrast. “Going to New York as a poet, and suddenly being in a land that loves poetry… it’s like, there are 70 poetry shows on any given night, and on the train, people are writing poetry. And I meet these people that are in their 80s, and they’ve been poets all life, and I just never come across that! It was literally like walking into Alice In Wonderland. So that really liberated a lot of my beliefs.”
Her debut single was “me trying to figure out, what do I want when I take the reins of my life? When I do take the paint brush of this canvas, what do I want things to look like?”
One thing that draws Sophia to music – and to songwriting in particular – is the sense of rigour, the necessity of rules. “When I’m writing poetry, I guess I don’t need to sing in key, or anything like that. It just has to fit the mood of what I’m writing. But with songs, I definitely have to be a bit more intentional.”
“’My City’ was a poem before it was a song,” she explains. “And I think that allows me to just spitball what I feel exactly into a wide spoken word, vast way… and then I guess condense it into songwriting.”
Sophia’s passion for words extends back to childhood. Her mother may have had musical dreams, but her competitive streak took her into sports, notably basketball and athletics. That arena still pulls her attention – she’s a passionate Gooner, after all – but words, and their inherent musicality, are like an addictive perfume to her.
“I’ve always felt really big emotions,” she explains. “Luckily, I was always reading as well. So in reading, you have language to explain how you feel.”
“I always had my head in a book, and that meant I always had words to explain how I felt. I don’t know what it would have been like if I felt such big emotions and didn’t know how to get them out.”
“I think that’s also why I obligate myself a lot to what I’m saying as well,” she continues. “I take it seriously, because I know how much it helped me. I try to be a mirror to someone who might be going through things, but perhaps doesn’t have the language to figure it out. I try to offer that with what I write.”
—
—
New single ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ continues her rise. A beautiful cavalcade of words, her heavenly delivery offers an incantation of positivity – pushing back against negative self-talk, it’s a semi-chant of golden light for the soul. Built in New York, the band jammed for 90 minutes with the lights dimmed down to amber before the track clicked into place, Sophia’s voice purring on top.
“It’s almost like a chant,” she says. “Sometimes we live in a world of low self-esteem. And the song says, why don’t we leave that world of low self-confidence, and actually think big? What happens if I believe in myself for a day? What happens if I do actually look at my reflection and try to love it? What happens if I affirm myself?”
“It’s just a simple thing, and you need to hear it for it to sink into your spirit. I know I’ve had really hard times, and sometimes I just wanted to hear someone in my headphones, telling me it would be alright. I wrote it with the hope that people can hear it with their ears, but then feel it with their spirit… and then come to believe it as well.”
A peculiar moment of alt-R&B alchemy, ‘Affirmations, I’ll Be Okay’ contains both wisdom and innocence. “When we’re young, we didn’t need someone motivating us to believe in ourselves,” she points out. “Because you just have this audacious certainty when you’re young. I’m trying to bring people back to a version of themselves that probably does exist somewhere, and just bring it to the surface, basically.”
Content to follow a trail of singles, Sophia contains an innate longing to see her name on an album sleeve – it’s the way she grew up, poring over records from Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu, and wondering at the teams behind such creations. She’s building a live experience, too, and Sophia will headline North London venue the Jazz Café in February.
“I think music is a very spiritual thing,” she reflects during one point in our conversation. “In every culture, every form of worship is accompanied by music. Even if you don’t believe in like a God or a maker, you’ve been in a club before, and you dance and you dance until you feel like your spirit’s left you. You’ve sung a song until it’s like made you happier. And that’s all worship – like, all of that is worship.”
“Music, intrinsically, is a way for the Creator to talk to people and through people.”
For Sophia Thakur, music and poetry “dance together”, and she’s relishing the path these releases have set her on. Aiming to bridge a gap between two, she seeks to “make music that makes people feel seen, and brings language to things they might be going through, but don’t have words for yet.”
“I’m loving this,” she admits towards the close of our conversation. “I’m loving the journey it’s taken me on, and where it’s placed my mind.”
—
—
Stay in touch with Sophia Thakur on Instagram.
Words: Robin Murray
—
Join us on WeAre8, as we get under the skin of global cultural happenings. Follow Clash Magazine HERE as we skip merrily between clubs, concerts, interviews and
photo shoots. Get backstage sneak-peeks and a view into our world as the fun and games unfold.
