INTERVIEW - Gordi releases new album 'Our Two Skins': " It almost doesn’t feel like a choice, because you’re just drawn to something"
Image: Jess Gleeson
Australian singer-songwriter Gordi (full name Sophie Payten) today releases her second album Our Two Skins, the follow up to her critically acclaimed debut album Reservoir which peaked in the top 20 of the Australian album charts in 2017.
Payten, who, perhaps uniquely in the music industry, is also a newly qualified medical doctor, started writing Our Two Skins not long after the release of Reservoir after she experienced a tumultuous event in her personal life - for the first time in her life, she had fallen in love with a woman. “I was twenty-five and that was a really strange thing to experience because I’d never experienced it before,” she says. “I was about to go out on tour for three months on my own in Europe, and this person had come into my life. It was like I was sitting across the table from this person and they started speaking, and I felt like I’d never heard words until they started speaking them.”
The confusion and anxiety her new relationship brought her came to a head tens of thousands of feet in the air. “I had this juxtaposition of this amazing, adrenaline-filled infatuation, and then suddenly I was on a plane flying to Europe on my own, trying to work out what everything that had just happened meant,” Payten says. “I just started to really, you know, come undone and panic and think ‘What’s my life going to look like now? I have no frame of reference. Everything I thought was going to happen has now changed.’” Stumbling to the bathroom in an attempt to compose herself resulted in the creation of the tender piano ballad ‘Aeroplane Bathroom’, the second single released from Our Two Skins. “Do you see yourself unravelling?” Payten sings, in a vocal much higher and more fragile than the deep, husky tones she usually brings forth. “I’m so sick of coming undone / Cos I can’t get my shit together / In this aeroplane bathroom.”
Although this new relationship, and her newfound understanding of herself, forms the core of Our Two Skins, Payten is quick to point out that it’s not all centred on the anxiety that initially hit her. ‘Radiator’ is a moving love song with torch-ballad overtones, with Payten singing “The way you touch me / The way you love me / I have never known”. ‘Unready’, with its chugging beat, is a gloriously upbeat pop tune full of hope and joy. To get into the mood recording the song, Payten turned off the lights and plugged in an old strobe light. “It worked,” she says. “I was dancing and singing the song. It was like I was talking to this old version of myself who was living life to a fifteen per cent capacity. It was a proper euphoric moment.”
‘Hate the World’, full of restrained anger set to a shuffling, bass-heavy beat, was written after Payten watched Hannah Gadsby’s critically acclaimed comedy show Nanette. The song deals with the frustration, disappointment and anger Payten felt during the debate on legalising same-sex marriage in Australia. “Challenge all your empathy / That’s moving at a glacial speed / … I will not illuminate your words / I will persevere until it hurts,” she sings. “It all comes back to this individual experience that I was having, but in the context of these massive world events and these shifting paradigms of people growing further and further apart,” she explains. “I felt this sense of outrage. People are allowed to have opinions, and debate is good, but where was the level of respect and kindness for other people? When it suddenly feels much more personal, that can be a hard pill to swallow.”
Payten hopes sharing her intensely personal story on Our Two Skins helps individuals to be more accepting of our differences and to perhaps look at relationships in an entirely new light. “[My experience] wasn’t so much a question of sexuality or any of those things,” she says. “It was just about a person, and that’s the way everybody should look at it. Someone falls in love or has a relationship or finds some common ground with another person. Categories, whatever they are, don’t really matter anymore. That’s not the thing that defines you. It almost doesn’t feel like a choice, because you’re just drawn to something.” The album, she says, is there for people to find their own story in. “I’m a big believer in people getting out of a record whatever they want. As a listener I appreciate when an artist offers up something personal because it does help me dig into the record a lot more and helps me get a lot out of it. That’s really important.”
Our Two Skins is out now via Liberation Records. You can download on iTunes and stream on Apple Music or Spotify.
To keep up with all things Gordi you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Read more about Gordi and Our Two Skins in the upcoming issue 8 of Women In Pop magazine out in July. To get your copy subscribe now.
