{"id":8077,"date":"2020-05-01T16:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=8077"},"modified":"2020-05-01T16:00:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-01T15:00:12","slug":"musician-of-the-month-maija-sofia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/05\/01\/musician-of-the-month-maija-sofia\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Mary Gaitskill, Veronica<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to start with a secret: I haven\u2019t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.<\/p>\n

Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.<\/p>\n