When a fiction writer composes music, you get some of the best lyricism of 2024: It was a nostalgic summer night when singer/songwriter Sofia Wolfson sang of the West Coast in a Ridgewood basement.
Stream: ‘Imposing on a Hometown’ – Sofia Wolfson
A month after her debut LP Imposing on a Hometown was released, and a month after her hometown reclamation show in Los Angeles, Sofia Wolfson started her New York album release show in true form. With a modest stack of paper in her hands, she declared that we would begin with a reading from her short story. “I don’t know if I have to say this,” she said, “but this is fiction.”
Sofia and I had a fiction workshop together in The New School’s MFA program, so I am intimately familiar with the feeling of folks asking did that really happen to you? It was clear to see how the threads of her new album Imposing on a Hometown connect to her short story about a couple on a “break” who decided to get high on MDMA and look at art, notably Edward Hopper at the Whitney (the album cover is a recreation of Hopper’s Soir Bleu). While there is truth in all fiction, Sofia would say that the album is closer to memoir, with autofictional elements. There are just a few altered details to better serve the songs.
And thank God for that, because the detail – the specificity and sound of the language – created not only a fully realized narrative record, but also some of the best lyricism of 2024. The album begins:
Last time I was here, wanted to disappear
Phosphorescent lights glued to the satellite
I thought I loved you but I didn’t
All magic with no magician
The best love spreads like wildfire
And it burns down, there’s ash all around
My hometown hero
It’s almost like when poets write novels, a fiction writer composing music is a gift. Seriously, only a writer would find a way to squeeze solipsistic into a song. In “From Up Here,” she sings:
Everything feels heavy and I can’t hold
Another pound of ashes in the Boston cold
Everything is plastic in possessive nouns
Solipsistic people keep bringing me down
Welcome home
The praise of her songwriting is not to downplay Sofia’s voice, which is in turn wispy and fleshy, light and heavy. Hearing the contours of her vocals live was even better than the recording. It also helped that the downstairs at Cassette in Ridgewood was an intimate venue, warm air and low ceilings like a hometown basement show. As a writer, I have to appreciate the thematic cohesion. The refrain of home.
Sofia asked the crowd to move closer to the stage, moving her bangs off her forehead just for them to fall back in place.
“My bangs are having a life of their own because of this shvitz,” she said. A charming clamor of “YOU LOOK GREAT” sprang up from the left of the stage. Sofia laughed. “Thanks Vivian,” telling us, “that’s my sister.”
The crowd agreed it was warm in self-conscious grumbles, but Sofia’s roommate, Pele Greenberg on the drums, claimed it was just “cozy.” And he wasn’t wrong, the ambience was exactly that: cozy. Sofia laughed like you would say that, her friends arranged in what she called a “Big Thief Semi Circle.” She claimed it as self-indulgent, saying, “but I just want to see them do their thing.” The friends: Margaux Bouchegnies, Pele Greenberg, and Isaac Stalling up there with Sofia Wolfson felt organic and true. Stalling opened for Sofia, before the fiction reading, and it was incredible to see his talent translate seamlessly into the arrangement.
Ever the storyteller, Sofia introduced “Donuts (Everyone Reminds Me of You)” by saying, “It’s like when you get left and they still want to be friends but then date someone who looks like you except ten years older.” The song has some of my favorite lines off the whole album.
Burning memories with a blunt precision
Trying to hold onto any sort of remnant
Waking up from dreaming, holding resentment
I don’t know where life starts and the fictional ends
Donuts in the parking lot, I think I need to make new friends
This song establishes the cyclical motif that the album itself mirrors, in the notion of a homecoming, in reconnecting and rediscovering. The continued thread of fiction, obviously a personal passion, works on many levels. It seems to get at the way we project desires and narratives onto partners, confusing the distance between the reality of people and our perception of them. But it was on my favorite song, “View,” that I became convinced that this is an album for writers:
So maybe I’ll jump on the cafeteria table
Shout all my baseless secrets
It’s not religious to say what you really mean
Held my breath in the pool to accelerate the dream
Every time I think about it, I’ve got something new to say
Sometimes I think that writing is just a way for us overthinkers to continue the conversations we start in our own heads. I relate to this craving for honesty, storytelling as a roundabout method for unveiling truth. More than anything, it is that seeking of the dream, a heady feeling like being underwater, that is a catalyst for writing. It is that alchemy of inane internal monologue into something resembling a story.
Sofia then shared with the audience, “getting left by an older man is not the most interesting thing about me. I also worked at a leather jacket store that was a front for Scientology.” This information surprised her bandmates and worked perfectly to present “Half Heart.”
I gotta go about it from the sideways view
I gotta see it in a new light
Why would you tell me to come over to the show when
You got a warm body holding you tight
I am obsessed with the way this song begins, showing Sofia’s writerly sensibilities as she calls into question the point of view. It is an expert way to establish that the tone is slightly different than the rest of the album, the lens clouded with a little bitterness (and rightly so). Sofia said, “I allowed myself one angry song.” My only feedback is for the next album to have more anger. It suits her voice.
Not to sound like I am writing Sofia a feedback letter at this point, but it is very important for me to note how real the inclusion of dialogue feels in “IJWBWY.” The song feels like an instant classic, perhaps another literary reference, a modern Romeo and Juliet. Sofia said that the song is just jooblyboobly in her head because of the acronym, which I find hilarious, but of course it stands for I Just Wanna Be With You:
She’s the kitchen sink, he throws in everything
Waits and sees what sticks, she’s a hypocrite
The way she talks about dying, makes him want it too
She says anywhere, anytime, I just wanna be with you
I’m just going to come out and say it! I usually get pretty pissed when people are compared to Phoebe Bridgers. She is a foundational artist for me, and I disagree with lazy comparisons. It’s more than the Marshall Vore connection, and it is not a comparison that I make lightly, but I stand by it. Sofia Wolfson has the lyricism, the talent. The first time I heard “New Year’s Eve,” I thought of “Funeral” by Phoebe Bridgers. It’s the self-awareness, the intellect, dark humor, certainly the yearning and latent anger. It’s not just “sad girl music,” though there is nothing wrong with that, but it’s more nuanced. Sofia is carefully articulating emotions and their expressions, perceptions and projections.
It’s not like I knew him well
It’s more that I was
complaining about the small things
When Aaron was dying
When you ended it and I started not to feel
I’m desensitized to the shockingly real
Wish I could show my emotions
I f*ed up this time last year
Is it selfish that I want you here?
To lighten the mood after “New Year’s Eve,” Sofia asked the crowd for a question. “What’s your favorite holiday?” someone shouted out. “Red,” she said. We worked out that Sofia had heard color, not holiday, so she said, “Oh, Halloween obviously, because I like dressing up.” This recalled the Hopper painting and subsequent clown imagery. “The clown thing is over though,” Sofia declared.
In the spirit of feedback, I’d like to say, for my part at least, I am a fan of the clown bit.
Sofia closed the show with “History.” She introduced it as a “delusional girl song,” saying, “I think you’re end-game, so I’ll just wait around for you.” I love an ambiguous ending, that not-quite closure which recalls the themes but nods to the open-ended nature of life and relationships. A person may not be in your life but they live on as part of your narrative, you may think of them, that past will affect your future relationships, and you take some of them with you. This is true of fictional folks too.
Read the last page from the beginning just to know
What’s gonna happen to fictional people I wish I wrote
This is a feeling that will be familiar for any book lover – connecting with a line or a character so deeply that it almost feels like it came from your own mind, or if that author hadn’t written it, maybe you would have written something that resembled it. I feel a similar kinship with these songs, some of the themes and details.
Since Sofia was a classmate, I was nervous to sing out loud in the basement even though I knew the words. I knew all of them. A little embarrassed, I just hummed and took my notes. I was even a little nervous to write this review. I just want to do it justice. Imposing on a Hometown is one of my new favorite albums.
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Stream: “History” – Sofia Wolfson
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© Wrenne Evans
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