RS: Well obviously not because you're still around.
Sophie: Oh, that's amazing, well, yes. So anyway, its hard to look back but yes, I do have some really good memories, but they're mostly of Europe.
RS: Talking about Europe, one thing that blew me away is I picked up this CD, it says co-produced by the Berman Brothers. I thought these are the guys who did Real McCoy and Amber, what are they doing with Sophie?
Sophie: Well it's interesting, this is the honest-to-God truth how it happened. The Berman Brothers called up my manager and they had a mutual friend. I had never heard of them and I had never heard of the Real McCoy. They called up and said they wanted the song "Lose Your Way" for Vangellen, who has an album out now. They said they would love it if she could do it as a duet. I thought this was a wonderful opportunity, because I've always wanted to be covered by other artists. I went down to their studio in downtown New York, I walk in and their version of the track "Lose Your Way" blew me away, it was so vibrant. They took the album version, copied what they thought was the best from the album and then they added just such cool sounds. Then they said come and play your banjo and sing.
The Berman Brothers were so much fun and they're really the perfect artists' producers because they don't have an agenda other than the joy of making music, which they're good at. They don't speak English very well, so we got along really well because it was all based on feel and nodding and just totally unabashed. No head trips! One afternoon there was too short, I could have stayed all day with them. Then I said to my manager, do you think that they might take my demos? Because they had taken the album version of Lose Your Way, so I wondered what they would do with my thirty-two track demos, I thought it would be magic. I'm really glad that I made that decision and it's only since the record's come out that people have asked me, like you, 'why the Bermans?' I never knew they were dance, I just thought they were really brilliant and kind of unappreciated. I knew they had a deal on Sony one time but I never get into those things, it doesn't really strike me as mattering.
RS: So were you in the studio with them when you recorded the album?
Sophie: No, I wasn't, it was really beautiful. I sent them my demos, the thirty-two to forty-eight tracks that I had done. I sent it to them FedEx and then they would load it in their ProTools, because I'd done it on my ProTools. I'd done it in my little room all alone, so it had this wonderful vibe, with these great orchestrations. They didn't change any of the writing or arranging or any of the instruments, they didn't take off one vocal, they didn't take anything away, they only added. They would overdub other musicians, they would add cool things, they would tweak some of the things they had, they'd send it back and say how do you like it? And I'd say brilliant. That's exactly what they had done with the first track originally. It was great for me at the time because I think one of those struggles that people have is that you don't really want to let go of the demo because you know it's so great. But these guys were able to have the perspective of keeping all that great vibey stuff and not being threatened by it. I kept saying, don't you want me to rewrite things, don't you want me to do things at different tempos? And they said <in German accent> no, no, no, it's all cool, it's all cool.
RS: You just mentioned instrumentation. On Adrian, it mentions you worked with the Brimbro and the Djembe. First, what are those, and then two, how do you discover these interesting instruments?
Sophie: Well I started as an African percussionist. When I was fourteen years old the first instrument I ever learned to play was a Djembe and I actually just call it Jembe, I didn't put a 'd' there.
