Sophie Payten keeps an endless on her phone where she jots down lines or words as they come to her. During the eighteen months that she couldn’t bear to write songs, while working as doctor through the pandemic (having just quit to focus on music), those ideas were reasonably scattered. But when she sat in Phoenix Central Park in an early attempt to start piecing together Like Plasticine, it was clear she had absorbed enough accumulating emotion – grief felt and observed, love gained and lost – to mould it into shape. Like both her writing and recording process, the songs on the album aren’t as linear as 2020’s Our Two Skin, but they are revelatory in its softness and malleability, asserting that we are as open to transformation in life as we are in death. “All the grit to which you cannot cling/ What if everything feels suddenly like nothing?” Gordi sings on ‘Broke Scene’. There’s always something, she ultimately suggests, just never quite the same.
We caught up with Gordi to talk about Broken Social Scene, Play-Doh, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and other inspirations behind Like Plasticine, which is out today.
You Forgot It In People by Broken Social Scene
The obvious connection here is to ‘Broke Scene’, which is named so because you were listening to Broken Social Scene the morning you wrote it. How do you remember that day? And were you inspired by the record as a whole, too?
I was really inspired by the record, but I remember that morning. I was staying in my sister’s house in Sydney, and it was probably like a half-hour walk to the little space I was working in every day, so I kinda treated it like school. I’d get up early and pack my lunch and get my backpack, and I’d walk to the studio, and I’d pick something very specific to listen to each morning to sort of try to influence me that day. I’ve listened to that record many times, but something about it kind of jumped out at me. I think there were elements of that record’s rawness – parts of it felt really unvarnished, but then parts of it felt really intentionally played with and reprocessed. The contrast of those things – that’s where I get most excited about music.
I went into the studio that day and wrote ‘Broke Scene’, but that record itself, I listened to it ad nauseam for a couple of years, and I was listening to it a lot when I went into the studio with Brad Cook where I recorded a large bulk of the record. There’s something bombastic about it and you can hear the band in the room thrashing around in some of those songs. ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ was a real touchstone for the song ‘Diluted’. Though it’s not clear in every song on the record, for what felt like the heart and soul of Like Plasticine, that is the record that I kept coming back to.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
I actually only saw it more recently – it came out in the early 2000s, but I had never seen it. This spooky thing happened with it where I had somehow discovered this theme from the movie, ‘Phone Call’ by Jon Brion – I’d never seen it, but I knew it was from that film. I just loved the way that thing sounded, and I had it on the playlist that I was listening to for this record with all the Broken Social Scene stuff. I got into the studio with Brad Cook, and he showed me this digital plug-in instrument, and it had all these old samples on it. I’d never seen it before, and he was like, he was like, “See if you can guess what this is from.” He started playing one of the samples, and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s the Eternal Sunshine thing”. He was like, “No one has ever gotten that no matter how many times I’ve shown them.” And I was like, “Well, that is on the reference playlist for the record that I am in here making.”
It was this really serendipitous moment, so that was the origin of it, but then I had gone and watched the film. The concept of wanting to erase painful memories is such a fascinating concept to have made this film about. For me, that was a real reference point for this record. A lot of it is about embracing those painful moments in your life because they fundamentally change you, whether you want them to or not. And the title of this record, Like Plasticine, is about all the things that transform us in our life. That’s broken hearts, and that’s experiencing death, and it’s experiencing loss whatever that might mean to you. The film obviously comes to that conclusion too, that we can’t ignore the painful parts of our life for ourselves because then we wouldn’t be our whole selves, and there is beauty in some of that agony. This film became a real touchstone for me.
Do you usually find yourself writing to remember, to kind of transform memories, or even to forget? Is that a tension that exists when you’re writing?
Yeah. That’s a very sad and beautiful way to put it – writing to forget. When I started writing music, I often felt like writing a song about whatever had happened was the final chapter, and then I could kind of let it go. Which was interesting before I was a recording and touring artist because those songs would just exist for me, but now I almost become desensitized to my own music. These songs that were about such a painful memory that I was writing about to try to process, the more I perform them, the more it feels like I’m kind of holding it in a snow globe and looking at it as if it belonged to someone else. In that instance, it’s not so much forgetting that it existed, but your body is kind of forgetting the feeling of the pain and you just being able to admire it.
Are you finding new ways to embrace the feeling of the songs the more you play them?
There are a few songs in my catalog that when I play them live, I do feel those original feelings sometimes. But most often, I’m connecting to the emotion of the song rather than the details of the story. It’s kind of like looking at old photographs of yourself. If you looked at a photograph of yourself as a teenager on a really shitty day that you had, you probably would feel all the things you felt that day as acutely, and that’s what performing old songs feels like to me.
A Fazioli grand piano
I know that piano in Berlin where you wrote ‘Radiator’ and ‘Volcanic’ was an important part of Our Two Skins. Was it a similar case with this piano?
Yeah. I basically wrote a lot of the record in two weeks, but the weeks were six months apart. The first week I did at this place called Phoenix Central Park in Sydney, which is a big, beautiful wood-paneled performance space, and then the second week was in this old restored church. But the two spaces are owned by the same woman in Sydney, and in both spaces, she has a Fazioli grand piano, these beautiful, expensive Italian grand pianos. I’m not sure if you’re a fan of Nick Cave, but he has these letters called The Red Had Files, and he has this whole series of letters where he’s writing to the Fazioli family asking if they would give him a piano, and they’re writing back to him saying, “We have never heard of you, sir. Please stop bothering us.” I came across the name from that, and then I saw them in those spaces.
It’s hard to describe just how beautiful they sound in the room. I wrote a lot of the songs on those pianos, and I recorded them sort of simultaneously, so most of the piano that you hear on the record is that piano. It was funny because I would try processing the piano normally with EQ and compression and all those things, and I just felt like everything I was doing to it was ruining it. It’s the kind of thing that just wants to be as untouched as possible. So I would get into those spaces each morning and, almost like a ritual, set my bag down and then wash my hands before I touch the piano and open the lid and just play for an hour. The piano is where my relationship with music began when I was three years old, so it was nice to have that as the center of the process.
Is there still something uniquely inspiring to you about the intimacy of sitting down at a piano?
Maybe by virtue of me not being good at the guitar, the piano feels to me more endless. The possibilities feel more endless because all the notes are out in front of you. But at the same time,there’s nowhere to hide because it’s just you and this thing. There’s nothing for the lyrics or the melody to lean on, so just creating a song with bare bones on the piano means it’s got to really stand up on its own two feet.
The Samplr app
It’s interesting that you juxtapose the piano and this app, because they’re obviously very different creative tools. What role did Samplr play in your process?
It was Ethan Gruska, who I produced ‘Broke Scene’ with, that showed me the app. It’s an amazing piece of software that exists on an iPad, and you can just record any sample, chop it up, reverse it, pitch it up and down, slow it down, speed it up, all those things. It exists over a number of songs on the record. I think sampling is an amazing tool because it’s so singular and idiosyncratic, especially if you’re recording your own voice or something in the room that doesn’t exist outside that space. It has a certain harshness, which I loved in juxtaposition to some beautiful piano. I would often do an entire pass on a song using the Samplr app and spend hours on it, and then I would take two-second snippets of that and insert it in the song. Using it sparingly was the way to go, but I think it really kind of adds a whole interesting kind of texture – often I was looking for something for a song, and the answer was inevitably the Samplr app.
Do you feel like there was also a beginner’s mindset aspect to it?
For sure. I’m a big believer in the beginner’s mindset in terms of creativity – if something is new and shiny, you’re more excited and more motivated to create something new. It’s often easier than sitting down at an instrument that you’ve known for years and trying to pull something new out of it.
Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen
This obviously feels like a reference point for ‘Peripheral Lover’. Were you listening to that record in the same way that you were Broken Social Scene?
Yeah, I was listening to that Carly Rae Jepsen record to give me courage a lot of the time. There are a few moments on this record of mine where it’s much more pop-leaning than I have ever been, and I grew up in a world where pop music was so often a dirty word. I think in the early parts of my career, we were all trying as hard as we could to get as far away from the pop title that comes and is so often given to particularly female artists, whether you’ve earned it or not. But I think there’s been a real reimagining of what pop music is in the past five years, and Emotion is a really amazing example of how pop music can be: simple in its execution, but still fascinating and really cool. It doesn’t have to kinda be the lowest common denominator type stuff. The song ‘Gimmie Love’, I listened to it nonstop on the way to the studio. For songs like ‘Peripheral Lover’ and to a lesser extent, ‘Alien Cowboy, it just inspired me to get out of my own way and not try to make these songs that wanted to be pop songs into something that they didn’t want to be.
There are different emotions that are expressed on that record through the language of a euphoric pop song. I’m curious, for you, how the euphoria you get out of writing a pop song compares to the catharsis of something like a piano ballad.
It’s mostly reflective of the full spectrum of music that I like and enjoy and listen to. I get different types of catharsis – I’m thinking of watching Bon Iver play ‘715 – CR∑∑KS’ at Primavera once and just crying my eyes out in the audience and feeling insane levels of emotion. And then I’m thinking about being with my friends, watching OutKast play ‘Hey Ya’. Those two experiences, while completely at opposite ends of the spectrum, were just as meaningful to me. There’s something very liberating about making euphoric pop music for sure, and then having it blaring through the speakers, and it makes me feel lighter in the same way making a heart-wrenching ballad makes me feel lighter. At the same time, they’re very different feelings, but two feelings that I can hold space for.
Play-Doh
There is the whole metaphor that the album revolves around in its title, but is there any nostalgia or literal connotations attached to it as well?
It’s a relatively morbid story. I was finishing my medical degree, and I was on a geriatrics term, which is elderly people in the hospital. I was studying for the exam of certifying death. When someone passes away, it’s usually the job of the junior doctor to go in and declare that the person has actually passed away. So you walk into the room and you see if this person responds to your voice; you listen with his stethoscope for absence of breath sounds and heartbeat, and then you do a few other things to complete the exam. I found it a really moving experience learning this exam. I had just lost my grandmother, and been with her when she had passed away, and I felt like death was everywhere. And while being moved by it, I was also, I think, dissociating quite a lot in trying to just mentally get through this period of time.
I was really taken with how people appear just after they have passed away, the changes that their skin undergoes. It almost looked to me like, literally, the life had gone out of someone and they had set in place almost a statue. In my disassociating, I was taken back to this memory of being a child and playing with Play-Doh at my mom’s kitchen table, thinking about how I would move it into all different shapes and press it through the little thing that turns it into spaghetti, and then push it back together again and make it into figurines or make it into buildings and stretch it out and squash it down. Then I would leave it in whatever shape I did at the end of the day, and I’d go to sleep that night. I’d come out the next morning, and it would have this waxy layer on top of it. It didn’t look like it did the day before. It almost looked like it was set in place, because I had left it out open to the elements.
I was thinking so much about that memory when I was studying for this exam, and I wrote a note on my phone in 2018 that said, “Like plasticine.” It was before I’d even started writing this record, three years before. I kept coming back to that and thinking about, if we are like plasticine in death, if we have this structure that sets in place, how are we like plasticine in life? Plasticine is not a breakable substance. You can put it under all sorts of pressure and forces, and it can change into a million different shapes. But something about its substance remains the same. Going into the pandemic years, to me, it was a concept about resilience. We can be locked in our houses. We can be in this global crisis. On a personal level, we can deal with heartache and grief and loss. Or on the other end of the spectrum, we can deal with the absolute highs of falling in love. As human beings, we’re just going about our lives, going through those things every day, and still forging ahead. In the broad context of the pandemic, I found that really inspiring, and that concept stuck with me right through the writing of this record.
When you were thinking about that memory that you shared, were you also thinking about the person that you were back then?
I was. Our family friend used to look after me a lot of the time before I started school – I’m the youngest of four, and both my parents were working, so I would often go over to our neighbor’s house, and that was often where I was playing with Play-Doh. I had such a vivid memory of being that kid at her kitchen table, and it really was a time that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. It was funny to try to connect to that little person – obviously, that that was me, but so much life has happened and so much has changed since then, so that person feels like another life.
I’m curious if this concept extended to the way you saw the album as well, as this malleable thing.
There was a big part of making this record that felt like creating a sculpture. After working in various studios, I took most of those files with me back home to Melbourne, once I’d sort of finished that phase of the process. And I basically spent six months in a room in my house in Melbourne by myself, just sculpting the edges of all of these songs. Sometimes it was more dramatic than that; the song ‘Consolation Prize’, we’d recorded all the parts, and then I completely rewrote the chorus in those last six months. I had time, and I gave myself time to really finesse these songs, as opposed to Our Two Skins, where we had four weeks, and that was it. Whatever we had at the end of the four weeks, that was the record. So this felt like a beautiful experience, to be able to sit with these songs for a while. If something wasn’t coming that day, I’d put it away and come back later. This record definitely felt more malleable than things I have worked on in the past
The geriatrics hospital ward
You said in an earlier interview that you’d never been motivated before to bring your experiences from the hospital into your songwriting. Were you also daunted by it, or was it just that lack of motivation?
I was extremely daunted. I also felt like, in the early parts of my music career, I was still in medical school, so I hadn’t really had a lot of real-world hospital experiences where I was working. And I didn’t particularly want to talk in the press about the fact that I was a medical student. I felt self-conscious about it or something, I think. But for this record, I did feel daunted because I had really existential questions about songwriting and music, and we had so much dialogue, in those years, about what is essential to life. In the context of lockdown, that was: You can’t go to live music because that’s not essential. You can’t go to work in your studio because that’s not essential. If you’re a doctor or a nurse or a health care practitioner, yeah, you can go to the hospital because that is essential.
I had that conversation all around me, which was making me think, what is the purpose of music and songwriting if it’s not essential to our survival? I went down that road and concluded that while it may not be essential to survival, it is essential to living. In tandem to having a virus as a pandemic, we also had a mental health crisis because people weren’t living their lives as they normally are able to. But I also found it daunting because I thought, who am I to write about this? This is something that has affected every single person on the planet, and some people a lot more than it affected me. So I felt unsure about how to take those experiences, or if I should, into my own writing. Obviously I didn’t want to take other people’s stories because it just didn’t feel right. But I thought that I would do what I usually do, which is write from my own voice, from my own experience. So rather than write songs about someone from the perspective of a patient that I had, I wrote it from my own perspective.
The thing that I found most challenging about the pandemic was the role that health care workers were expected to play. People are sick in hospitals; there’s nothing new about that. That’s why they exist. But the difference in the pandemic was because of lockdowns; people’s families and loved ones couldn’t come into the hospital because of infection control. So I had a couple of instances, one which does feature a bit on a couple of songs on the record, where I had to go in and tell this man that the worst news you could imagine hearing. And instead of being able to deliver that news and then leave him with his family to comfort him, his family couldn’t come in. So I sat with him for hours, processing the news that he probably had weeks to live, instead of going home to be with his family.
We spoke to his daughter on FaceTime, and I had to try to contain all my emotion because I didn’t feel it was my place to be emotional because it wasn’t my life. But it’s a pretty challenging thing to sit in an environment like that and be the intermediary and a vessel for all the emotion in the room. And at the end of that day, I went down to my car and just sat in my car and just couldn’t turn the key in the ignition. I felt so overwhelmed by the day and by what I had been a part of. Writing these songs, which I didn’t write for probably another year, it was a really important part in the process for me to let some of that stuff go.
It wasn’t until a year after that you wrote about it?
I really struggled to write any music for the whole of the pandemic, really, at least for the first eighteen months while we were in and out of lockdown. Every other week, I was getting on a tiny plane with a bunch of other doctors, and we were being flown to different parts of Australia to fill in emergency departments and places that staff were sent home from COVID. I was so tired. I barely had time to do anything, and I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to do it. It wasn’t until about eighteen months into the pandemic when I booked that week in my calendar to go up to Sydney and try and play something for a week, and that was when all this music came out.
It’s interesting that some of the most emotional songs were written retrospectively. I was expecting you to say you wrote ‘PVC Divide’ in the car, when you couldn’t turn the ignition on.
Normally, I am much more then and there, trying to process what’s happened. But I think that was reflective of just how much I was storing my emotions outside myself, because I felt like I couldn’t let all of that out. I don’t think I would have gone back to work the next day.
You were storing them, though, as opposed to hiding or simply observing them.
I think that’s something that’s come with growing older for me. Ten years ago, I don’t think I could have been like, “I’m going to take this emotion that wants to completely destroy me and put it over here for twelve months, and then I’m going to come back to it.” I did a lot growing up during the pandemic when I was surrounded by people having such profound personal tragedy, and I sort of thought, “I’m not the main character here. I’ve just gotta play my role as best I can. And when I’ve got time to revisit how I’m feeling, I’ll do it.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Gordi’s Like Plasticine is out now via Mushroom Music.
