Sophie May knows the secret to songwriting, and it’s all in the jokes
When Sophie May first wrote a song, she didn’t think you could just ‘do’ that.
“It was with two other girls that I didn’t know very well on a summer holiday,” she remembered, “They were like, ‘Let’s write a song’. And I was like, ‘We can do that?’ I was a bit like, ‘What do you mean write a song? We’re ten!’”
Strangely though, now in her 20s, there is something about her work that still holds on to the innocence and whimsy of a ten-year-old writing songs on holiday. “Am I a girl in a dog body? / Or a dog in a girl body? / It’s really serious and not funny,” she sings on ‘Dog Body’, a song that sees her transform into a canine in an extended metaphor about women’s hormones. Or, in her latest song of yearning, there is no greater compliment she can give but to sing, “They peaked carving you”, calling her lover a ‘Greek Statue’ and drunkenly asking Cupid to bring him back.
This is something that’s come to be her signature. Even when grappling with huge topics on earlier projects, like her experience of incredibly distressing OCD, her songs always come with a wink and a nudge, and that kind of laissez-faire attitude that a kid would write with, shrugging off what they should say, for simply what they want to say.
“I mean, what’s the point if you can’t laugh?” May says when we get talking about the role of humour in art, “Maybe that’s also just the kind of lyrics I like listening to. It’s the balance of a bit tongue-in-cheek, but also, you don’t want to feel too cynical by making jokes all the time.” However, she’s come to realise, both through writing and listening, that sometimes the punchline is the most emotive bit. “
“With my favourite songs often the most real, hard-hitting lyrics are often the ones which are kind of making fun of themselves,” she said, looking towards some of her heroes like Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse, even modern rock heroes like Alex Turner and the gags of an Arctic Monkeys song. Perhaps part of that comes down to who May is as she says, “If something’s really shit in your life, often making a joke about how shit it is is the way to go for me,” admitting, “I’m a big laugher at the funeral, which is actually an awful trait, but I feel like it does bleed into probably my kind of lyrical style.”
But it’s also an underrated key to artistic greatness. While plenty of people are tricked into thinking the most gripping emotion is direct, if you want the crowd to come along with you, you need to warm them up first. “Once when I was crying for drama school, this acting coach said, ‘You never want to start a scene crying, because nobody will care. They don’t know any backstory or anything, so it’s too much. Suddenly, you haven’t earned it’,” she said, recalling one streak of wisdom earned for a youthful side quest.
“I think it’s similar with songwriting,” she said, “If you’re just sincere, and you go in with like, ‘I feel so bad’, or like ‘you don’t love me’, I think it can be a bit boring, because why would I care?” But at the root of all of that, it’s honest. We talk about how it’s the same in real lifel if you see someone crying on the tube, you want to look away because it feels evasive. But if you see a couple talking, then breaking into an argument, and then someone crying, it feels impossible to look away. Humans are naturally looking for the story, and that has to include the built up.
Beyond even that, though, humans are naturally looking for the truth, and that’s the most gripping bit of all of it, even if the ‘truth’ is a fabrication in a fictional story, or a little glimmer of gossip.
As soon as May started writing songs properly again after her first foray into that world at ten, the truth, she’s come to realise, is really the key to it all. ‘I’m With The Band’ came as the first song she believed in, and that was born out of her exhaustion with dating musicians. “I felt a lot of shame in watching a man sing and play music, because it put me in that kind of groupie role, instead. I remember just feeling like, ‘Fuck this’,” she said. That was the truth of the matter, so she wrote it into a song and became the musician herself.
Years on, May isn’t even just a musician for herself as her name is found in the credits of tracks for countless other artists, including her regular collaborator Matt Maltese, and recently, Rosalía, as May and her friends wrote ‘Magnolias’ from Lux years ago. The truth came into play there, too, as the birth of the original English language version was inspired by her childhood home and the flowers around it. Upon hearing the beauty of Rosalía’s Spanish version, despite knowing she wrote the lyrics, May could hear the honesty, stating, “I was like, ‘Wow. I wonder what magnolias means to her’”.
As she began co-writing with and for other people, May took all this knowledge with her: her penchant for humour, her love for wit, her drive to write the truth. “I saw Amy Allen actually talk about this on a podcast, saying that when you’re writing for other people, as opposed to trying to get into that person’s head or thinking ‘What would they say? What are they going through?’ Actually, the best thing you can do is try and write what you would say,” she said, “I think it’s easy to end up writing worse stuff when you start to try and get in someone’s head and write from their perspective, because you’ll never have their perspective truly.”
Understanding that the best art always comes from a place of personal honesty, she takes that approach into the writers’ room for others just as much as she applies it to herself. And when the magic of her work, and watch likely draws other artists to her, is that unique tone and wit, May reminds herself to always simply be herself when it comes to writing, leading to the creation of a debut like Stars and Teeth, which truly couldn’t have come from anyone else.
