On the cusp of finishing her debut album at a studio in Seattle, French songwriter SOKO, in a rare interview, tells ANTHONY WALSH what she hates (her old songs) and loves (her new songs), and how she wants it all her way.

Soko, the French actress and singer, is in a recording studio in Seattle. She is a mere four days of mixing away from completing her debut album. Born Stéphanie Sokolinski, Soko is reluctantly famous for her barbed indie pop ode to jealously, I’ll Kill Her, and rarely grants interviews. All the press she is doing in Australia is a brief spot on Triple J and this interview, so I begin to fret when my first question, about her only previous release, the Not Sokute EP, turns out to be a sensitive issue.

“The Not Sokute EP shouldn’t even have existed. If I had thought I would do music, I would never have put that out because I hate it!”

The songs we know her by were written two years ago when she just started as a musician and struggled to play instruments. The EP with guitarist Thomas Semence was a partnership that left her deeply unhappy with the final sound.

“It’s way too polished and way too mainstream for me.”

And on Thomas?

“I’m like even so angry that when I talk about him, my hands get wet.

“Now”, Soko says, “nobody is deciding for me what is going to be there and what is not and how something is going to be played.”

We agree not to talk about it and Soko laughs and quickly forgives me. The initial awkwardness gives way to a hyperactive stream of consciousness that flirts from one topic to the next. In an interview that runs ridiculously over schedule I’ll only get a chance to speak three or four times.

The issue of a false first impression remains. When demos are hyped it builds a certain expectation for the final product. Citing how quickly some turned on Black Kids – from lauding their rough cuts as the second coming before heaping scorn on the album – one of the few questions I manage to ask is, is she worried?

“I think if I start worrying about that, it is the end. I am not concerned about how people are going to like things or not. I am just concerned about doing my music the best I can and being happy with it.”

Pressed to describe her new sound, Soko hesitates.

“I don’t even know how to say a style or anything.”

Thirty songs have been recorded and Soko says all seem completely different.

“Some songs are super big and really arranged with a lot of instruments and strings and horns and organs and big drums, and some songs are just like four tracks, and some songs are just ukulele and vocals recorded live, and some songs are just drums and vocals recorded together where I play drums. Some are pretty raw and pretty punk and some are more polished, and some are very, very naked.”

Soko has co-produced this album – tentatively due out in February and as yet unnamed – with Ryan Hadlock, whose resume ranges from the massive hit for The Gossip, Standing In The Way Of Control, to the rich soupy texture of the Blonde Redhead albums. Soko describes it as a perfect match.

“Before I met Ryan, I was not looking for a producer. I wanted to produce my records and have a sound engineer doing it with me … I tried to work with just a sound engineer and he was so not passionate and not putting any love into the project. It was really just work for him. I would say ‘does this sound cool?’, and he’d just say ‘yeah’. It made me doubt so much.”

It was after playing a show at the Great Escape festival in Britain when Ryan came up to her and confessed he cried listening to Soko’s songs and asked to work with her.

“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I am not really looking for a producer, I’m looking for a sound engineer’, and then explained to him previous frustrations before deciding there were so many random coincidences causing us to meet that it was ‘meant to be.’”

Two days later they went to London together to audition members for a recording band, searching for a double bass player, a drummer and a violinist to accompany Soko on guitar.

“He gave me his impressions on people and we formed the band together. So he was here, not from the beginning beginning, but from the beginning of finding the right people to record my record that won’t be trying to control me, and would be serving my ideas and my visions of the songs and my arrangements and everything.”

During recording Ryan worked around the whims of Soko, which must have worked as she talks excitedly about the process.

“If we were about to do a song and suddenly I was like ‘I have a new song! New song! We should do my new song!’, and he wouldn’t even know it and he’d be all ‘we’ll just change the room and you take the bass and you play whatever.’ We would do the song in three hours and it was done. I was very free. He let me be as creative and crazy as I wanted.”

Known in native France best as an actress, I wonder whether she views her songs like an acting performance or whether it is something more personal. That’s funny, she tells me. She’d just had this conversation with Ryan.

“Some of the songs I wrote at the beginning, because I didn’t consider myself as a writer or a poet, I didn’t think I had anything to say, so most of my songs I was writing as an actress. Taking a real story and changing stuff.”

Touring and becoming more proficient on a variety of instruments has given her confidence in her writing to the point where, “Pretty much every single word that is on paper now is autobiographical, because when it really happens I have a real link and a real connection to myself.”

Soko rarely plays her old songs on tour anymore. She is constantly writing and the set-list changes every night.

“When I play my new songs and it really happened and it’s a story that is really close to me, I find myself literally in tears doing all the songs each time I am singing, and that’s more what I want to do. Not crying on stage, but delivering a true story rather than pretend to be a singer about stuff that didn’t happen.”

Music, to Soko, is more about truth and true stories.

“Being on stage and telling things that didn’t happen. I mean, I can do movies for that,” Soko quips.

Soko is touring in Australia soon and will be bringing the band she has just been recording with, saying it’s probably the last time it will happen because of the cost of bringing American musicians to Australia. There are even unsettling hints that there won’t be more tours at all.

“I want a quiet life. I love touring but I think I in a year I will be tired of it and want to get married, have kids and a garden and a vegan restaurant and work there.”

SOKO will play Sunset Sounds on Wednesday Jan 7 at the City Botanic Gardens. Sunset Sounds takes place Jan 7-8, and features Franz Ferdinand, The Hives, The Kooks, Tegan & Sara, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Gomez, Santogold and many more. www.sunsetsounds.com.au / www.myspace.com/mysoko

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