Maija Sofia - True Love (track by track)
Maija Sofia takes us through each of the 10 songs that make up her brilliant second album True Love
West Cork-based artist Maija Sofia released her second album True Love on Tulle on September 1. She was on episode 275 of the TPOE podcast, which was a live interview, as part of Cork Podcast Festival, in Maureen’s pub in Shandon. This is an edited part of the chat, focusing just on the track by track of the album - for the full interview, listen/subscribe to The Point of Everything on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your pods. Maija Sofia launches True Love with a show at Whelan’s in Dublin on September 28 (tickets). She also plays McHugh’s in Belfast on September 30 and Servant Jazz Quarters in London on November 22.
Saint Sebastian
St Sebastian, who was he? How did he come to be the opener on your album?
St Sebastian...
Your "favourite saint"?
Yeah, I mean, I suppose he was at one point. He's like, martyred Catholic, patron saint of plagues and lacemakers. I don't know that much about him really apart from he's the original gay icon. So he's been he was like, adopted as a gay symbol. I don't actually know why but he has been. I used to go to the National Gallery in Dublin a lot. I used to go to counselling in the building next door and then go to the gallery and look at the paintings to sort of bring myself back down to the real world after sessions. And I became very taken by St Sebastian's martyred, torso impaled by arrows against a tree and thought, 'why not give him a song?' I'm sure there are many St Sebastian songs. I would be surprised if there weren't.
Four Winters
Was this a tough song to write?
No. No, that one came out really easily. It was originally a commission at the Dock, the arts centre in Leitrim. [They] commissioned me to write a new song, basically. And that was the song. I'm not sure if that was what they had in mind. It was meant to be about trees. But it is a little bit about trees. No, I guess the only hardness has been, yeah, not knowing what to do with a song like that in live situations, I suppose. But writing it is fine.
You've been on tour the past couple of weeks, you've been playing with Mega Bog and [Laura Groves]... Did you play that song in your support sets? And did you find it difficult?
Um, no.
So it's like it weighs less on your shoulders maybe or something?
Yeah. Singing it is fine. Yeah, I guess it's just a song now. You take something from the world and then you turn it into something else. And then it's just the song. I guess like a really strong feeling in time always kind of becomes an anecdote. And then it's just an anecdote without the feeling attached.
Telling the Bees
Do you want to talk about what that song is about?
Sure. So the Rita in the song is a saint, a 14th-century Italian saint called Rita.
Oh another saint?
Yeah there's a few saints (laughs). She was canonised after her death, I guess, as the patron saint of domestic abuse and impossible causes and a few other things. And then she's also associated with fresh figs and honey bees, which are two things that I like.
So you have all of this swirling around. You're like, ‘let me see if I can make a song about this’.
Yeah, I think so. I think I read about her, and I knew that she would be good to put in a song. I read her Wikipedia page, and thought that she sounded cool. And then telling the bees is an old folk custom by beekeepers. I think it's Irish but maybe it's not specifically Irish. But I think it's an Irish custom. People who kept bees would nominate someone in the household to go and tell the bees if someone had died in the family or if some grief had struck the house because the bees might sense the lingering grief in the air and then there'd be mass hive death. So someone had to go and warn the bees that there was impending grief. So they won't die.
Musically on that song, do you feel like you've gotten better as a musician? It sounds like there's a lot going on sonically. Just like with the keyboard…
Yeah, maybe. I just don't think my piano playing is very good. But thank you. I wrote it in Sirius and I was really bashing it out. There was no one else there so I didn't have to be aware of people listening to me. So I was just really playing it quite hard. And then when we recorded it, I wanted that energy in the song I suppose.
Is it hard to capture that energy in songs?
Yeah, it can be but we recorded it in the exact room where it was written and there's a very specific energy and sound, like the natural reverb and the vague echoing that's happening in that space anyway - it was part of the song because that's where I was playing it and then I wanted it to be recorded there as well.
Smile Please
That seems like a very pointed title. I'm guessing a lot of women would probably be able to relate to that - ‘smile please’, ‘good girl’.
It's taken from the title of Jean Rhys's unfinished autobiography. She was a very miserable woman. So I'm not sure how serious [the title was] or maybe it was meant to be ironic. I think it was. Yeah, I haven't actually finished reading it either. But it was beside my bed for years. I always thought I would come back to it. But I was never able to get past her childhood misery. And I know that it probably only got worse. But the title of the book was Smile Please. And I wrote the song while sitting on my bed and looking at the stack of books beside my bed.
Jean Rhys is someone that you wrote about on the first album as well. She's someone that you go back to?
Yeah, she's one of my favorite girls.
One of the questions that I asked you in our last interview was whether you found songs cathartic… Where are you with that idea of catharsis, maybe with these songs?
It's like I've come to think of it as a kind of exorcism. I think exorcism feels more apt than catharsis - well, no catharsis, I guess it's the same as an exorcism. So yeah, in a way, yeah.
This song, is it kind of personal again, or is it very much kind of character driven, like Telling the Bees?
Yeah, I mean, they're all personal. I suppose that is a personal song. Like I never differentiate whether I'm writing in character or a character or whether I'm writing about myself; like the boundaries become blurred every time I suppose. Autofiction
Weird Knight
Does that feel like a full stop to some of the songs up to that point?
Actually, that was the last song that I wrote for the album. It came a bit later than the rest of them. I think it was the last one. Or maybe the Theremin one was the last one. It was one of the very last ones. It wasn't a conscious thing. It was actually - I was leaving Dublin... and I was psychically moving on from a phase of my life, I think, when I was writing that. So in my head. It's a real Dublin song. It's got a lot of my Dublin time in it.
O Theremin
Do you want to tell us about Professor Theremin?
Leon Theremin is his name. He was a Russian inventor. He invented the theremin, which was the first electronic instrument, or at least the first one that you were able to buy, I'm sure other people were inventing things before that. But that was the first mass-produced one. And he also invented the first audio surveillance device, which was in a picture frame on the wall of the US ambassador's office in Moscow for seven years. And then he got caught.
Chagall
So that seems like a song that very much kind of lives up to the title of True Love in the most romantic sense.
That one's a love song, yeah, for sure.
It's about Marc Chagall and his partner - wife?
Yes. Were they married? I don't actually know. At least his lifelong lover, or his lover from a very young age, perhaps not his only lover but once they met, they were together for the rest of their lives.
Tell me more about how you found Marc Chagall and this story.
I have the same birthday as Chagall, and my mum is a painter. So she proudly told me that when I was a child, so I felt an affinity with him. And his paintings are very childlike, as well. So when I was a child, I really liked his paintings. I think they're imaginative and colourful, so they're kind of easy for a child's brain to access. So in my head, I've associated a kind of innocence with Chagall. And then I had a lover who was a painter. And he wanted to show me his favourite painting. And we were in Madrid, at the start of 2020 and he showed me a Chagall painting, which it turns out was called Birthday. And he was like, 'You should write a song about Chagall'. And then I didn't, and then we broke up. And then I wrote the song. And then he was annoyed with me. And he was like, 'You have to credit me.' And I have credited him on the sleeve. But I didn't really write the song about the painting, but I wrote it about - I was feeling just very worn down by the world. And then I was reading about Chagall on many other websites that are not Wikipedia and read about his love, Bella Rosenfeld. They met when they were very young and she was a poet, they're incredibly photogenic. The photographs of them together are absolutely amazing. You must look them up. And she's just like, yeah, very beautiful, a very interesting poet and a mystic. She wrote about him and he constantly painted her for the rest of their lives and in every painting he has of her, the way he looks up to her and think she's so amazing is so visible in his paintings. He often paints himself standing on the ground and holding her hand as if he's like, proudly waving a flag and she's floating off into the ether. So I was probably going a little bit mad but I was like, look, true love can exist. Marc Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld did.
So was Bella his muse?
Yeah, I would say there was a mutual musing going on.
That's something that you seem to gravitate to - this idea of the muse. What is it that interests you so much about it? And is it about almost saving the person who is the muse from the title?
In many ways, yes, but then in many ways, am I not just double musing the muse by rewriting about the muse? I don't know. Yeah, it's funny, when my first album came out, everyone - everyone! the very few people who heard that album - were like, 'Oh, Maija is giving voice to forgotten women', but that wasn't what I was planning to do at all... I'm definitely interested in the figure of the muse. Like I'm always interested in the girlfriends and wives and mistresses of 'the great men', they often have interesting stories. That's something I've returned to definitely over and over again. I'm always like, 'Oh, wow, this cool artist had a cool girlfriend. I wonder what she did,' and then it turns out she did like so much more amazing things. Not in the case of Marc Chagall - he's the one good artist man.
Saint Aquinas
You've talked about other influences, such as documentaries, art with Marc Chagall. What about musical influences over the album generally?
When I was in Sirius on that residency, I only listened to three albums. And they were Love, Death and the Lady by Shirley and Dolly Collins, which is a really good late 60s album of folk songs. Shirley Collins is famous, obviously. And then her sister Dolly, who is arguably the best Collins sister, is a very experimental composer. They just did two albums together. The arrangements are extremely weird. It's extremely dark. Shirley was going through a lot at the time. So she was really gravitating towards the most melancholy folk songs, I think. I listened to that a lot. And then an album by an artist called Eartheater called Phoenix: Flames are Dew Upon my Skin, which is a really amazing album. And then the third album that I was listening to was Blue by Joni Mitchell.
OK, why were you limiting yourself to those three? Was it just they were the only three records you had?
No, I got really obsessed with each of them in turn. I think they started with Eartheater, then Joni, and then Shirley and Dolly. Sometimes I get a little bit obsessive about things. I think there's other songs here and there. But those are the three albums that I remember really rinsing at that time.
Lake Song
Sounds like it was a fun one to make was it?
Yeah, it was. It's a very silly song. It's funny, I haven't heard most of the songs in like a year. Yeah, it was fun.
Love is in the House
That was actually the original title of the album but then I thought it sounded too much like Groove is in the Heart, so I changed my mind. I wrote [this song] on Valentine's Day after a very bad date. I wanted to believe that love would eventually enter the house.
Maija and I outside Maureen’s in Shandon. Picture: Bríd O’Donovan