“Being lonely makes you special/But being special makes you lonely too,” Sophia Kennedy sings in “Being Special,” one of the witty, mysterious songs on her bewitching debut. Loneliness is a running theme throughout the album, yet her voice radiates delight; her language wears a faintly hallucinatory halo, placing the humdrum mechanics of living and longing in the shadow of melting clocks and “volleyball weather,” whatever that might be. Special she certainly is: Sophia Kennedy introduces us to a powerhouse voice and a unique sensibility, one where flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage, and where knotty bon mots and curious non sequiturs make heartbreak seem almost surmountable.
Her specialness begins with her trajectory. Raised in Baltimore, Kennedy moved to Hamburg to study film and ended up staying there, writing music for theater—hardly the usual path for an emerging singer-songwriter. Given the kind of music she makes, it’s also unusual that her album appears on DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records, a label far better known for house and techno. Granted, the artists on Pampa’s roster—Axel Boman, Ada, Robag Wruhme, Isolée—are no strangers to quirk, and Kennedy’s idiosyncratic music is as at home there as it would be anywhere else. Her co-producer here is Mense Reents, a veteran of a number of oddball Hamburg acts including Egoexpress, Die Goldenen Zitronen, and the Pampa-signed Die Vögel. The latter duo’s primary claim to fame is “The Chicken,” a minimalist house track that turns an off-the-cuff comment from Werner Herzog (“Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity”) into an unlikely dancefloor refrain. Here, though, offbeat details never overpower the music’s sentimental pull.
If you are accustomed to hearing pop music largely as a nexus of comparison points, a collection of small differences, Kennedy may leave you pleasantly flummoxed. It’s not entirely sui generis; she borrows Lou Reed’s sneering diction and boogie-woogie piano in “William By the Windowsill” and Stereolab’s gleaming organs for “Kimono Hill.” A trim, salsa-inspired bassline nestles inside the flickering machine beat of “3:05,” and “A Bug on a Rug in a Building” offers flashbacks to the DIY electronic pop of the German Wohnzimmerszene (“living-room scene”) of the 1990s. But these fleeting reference points function mainly like windows within an interior of her own design, one defined largely by bold, declarative keyboards and multi-tracked vocals. In “Foam,” trap beats and Phil Collins-grade drum fills serve as fuses for Kennedy’s close-harmonized fireworks. In “Dizzy Izzy,” a buzzing jaw harp twangs against cellos sampled from Nat Baldwin’s “In the Hollows”—an incongruous pairing, perhaps, but one that somehow makes sense in the glow of Kennedy’s arcing melodic line.
It all adds up to a frequently exhilarating listen, so it’s ironic that Kennedy’s lyrics are so often full of doubt. In “William By the Windowsill,” her character longs to stick his head into “The gutter of the roof/And whistle all the saddest tunes.” Behind the inscrutable roll call of “Dizzy Izzy” lies an observation that any high-school-reunion attendee will recognize as true: “In the mirror of our hometown/We are all the troubled ones.” Much of the album’s anxiety revolves around home. “I don’t know/Where I live,” she admits in the slinky, nervous “3:05,” and in the opening of “Build Me a House,” one of the album’s most gripping and immediate songs, she pleads, “Build me a house/Where I can live in.” It’s the most prosaic of requests, but the intensity of her singing elevates the sentiment until it seems almost existential.
Is this longing a kind of homesickness? A clue might be found in one of the album’s most affecting songs. In an early version, titled “Springtime in New Orleans,” she sings of blooming flowers and aching hearts in a voice reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. It feels like a pastiche of a silver-screen tearjerker, but in the album version, her voice has mellowed; gone is any trace of archness or irony. On the album, the song is called “Baltimore,” and with its new closing lines—“Gone without a trace, my love/Lost in Baltimore”—it no longer feels like a character study. Wreathed in warm strings but pierced by a sliver of digital noise, like a reminder that the prettification of grief has cold limits, it feels as real as a song can feel.
