Sophie Payten has lived two lives. In one, she is Gordi, the Aria-nominated singer-songwriter who has worked with Bon Iver and Troye Sivan, and made Chris Martin cry (more on that later). In the other, she is a medical doctor.
“In the early years of my career, I tried to really not talk about medicine in my music life, because they felt so separate,” the 32-year-old says. “The pandemic really merged them together in a way that I didn’t ask for or anticipate.”
We meet midweek at Heartbreaker, a Melbourne dive bar close to Payten’s heart – “I’m a huge advocate for a late-night pizza slice,” she grins. But the time we’re talking about is far removed from the hustle and bustle surrounding us.
In early 2020, Payten had just completed her first year as a junior doctor and quit to focus on music. But when touring ground to a halt, she was whisked back to hospital wards for the next 18 months. “I didn’t write anything during that period … I had no space for creativity,” she recalls. “I am an intensely emotional person … but in the hospital, you have to really learn how to disassociate in a way, because you’re surrounded by suffering, and if you take all that on, you would explode.”
It was a while before Payten started writing her third album, Like Plasticine, the title inspired by the medical exam performed to certify death: “I was really struck by the way that people appear after they’ve just passed away, and how their skin has this waxy appearance … That made me think of plasticine and how we change into all these shapes in our lives.”
A “very nice friendship” with a patient inspired the ethereal Anaïs Mitchell duet PVC Divide, which opens with a powerful, harrowing lyric: “She said that she watched him die on FaceTime.”
The patient was recovering from a brain tumour and preparing to go home – but then it aggressively returned. Payten sat with him while he video-called his daughter to say he wouldn’t survive. “That was just indescribable, to witness someone contemplating that,” she says. “I’d never been motivated before to take my experiences from the hospital into my songwriting, but I was so profoundly affected by that.”
After lockdowns ended, Payten booked herself into a studio for two intensive 10-day writing sessions, six months apart. “It was a funny sensation, because I had always felt like songwriting was this impulse that I couldn’t control, or like a tap that I couldn’t turn off, and suddenly it was off,” she says. “It was – not to harp on the water metaphor – more like fishing things out of a well.”
Payten’s partner, fellow singer-songwriter Alex Lahey, accompanied her to the studio on the first day, resulting in the album’s latest single, Cutting Room Floor. “It’s truly a positive, inspiring force in my life, to be that close to another songwriter,” Payten says. “It’s like having two brains instead of one.”
Like Plasticine’s first two singles, Peripheral Lover and Alien Cowboy, are sonically worlds apart. The first is a glittering synth-pop anthem that Payten was initially unsure about. “I was terrified of that song for so long … I just wasn’t sure if I was ready to embrace that kind of deep pop,” she says. “I got to a place where I was like, ‘I’m just going to get out of the way of this thing and [let it] be what it wants to be.” The latter is all distortion and experimentation, as Payten ponders a speculative queer utopia.
On the album, fuzzy iPhone recordings sit alongside polished pop, with one thing holding it all together. “The reason I love making music, and the reason that I think some people relate to my music, is simply because of the emotion of the thing – I wanted to preserve some of the rawness of those emotions,” Payten says. “In some moments, you feel so close to the origin of the actual song, and [in] some of them you feel like you stand back and are looking at them from afar.”
The album’s eclecticism reflects Payten’s own diverse taste; her influences include Tegan and Sara, Broken Social Scene, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lomelda, Hurray for the Riff Raff and Caroline Polachek. That range makes Payten’s music widely accessible, too – it has featured on soundtracks including The Walking Dead, To All the Boys and, in a full-circle moment, Grey’s Anatomy. “When I was a teenager, I absolutely feasted on Grey’s Anatomy and the One Tree Hill soundtrack,” she says.
These days Payten lives between Melbourne and Los Angeles, but tirelessly advocates for the Australian music scene as a member of the Music Australia Council, and with Over Our Dead Body, a live music initiative she co-runs with Lahey. “The issues that the music industry is facing … are very big cultural, economic, social issues,” she says, listing the discoverability and charting of Australian music, and dwindling gig attendance numbers, as some. “Sometimes it feels like Whac-a-Mole.”
As for the moment she shared with Chris Martin? The story goes that Coldplay wanted to meet local artists during the band’s Australia tour last year, and Payten went along. Martin singled her out, inviting her to play a song on the piano. She performed her song Lunch at Dune, and when she opened her eyes, he was crying. Her video retelling the story went gangbusters online – but sadly, there’s no footage of the actual moment. “The only viral moment I’d had previously was a video I’d posted of someone brushing their cat in a park,” Payten laughs. “[I was] pleased that this moment actually was so attached to the song, because I just want people to listen, at the end of the day.”
Like Plasticine by Gordi is out 8 August (Mushroom Music)
Gordi’s songs to live by
Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.
What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?
1998. Believe by Cher, Together Again by Janet Jackson, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, Wide Open Spaces by the Chicks, Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden.
What’s the song you wish you wrote?
I Know a Place by Muna.
What is the song you have listened to the most times this year?
Marvin Descending by Christine and the Queens.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Sorry by Justin Bieber.
What’s a song you can never listen to again?
Shortnin’ Bread (the Wiggles version).
What is the first song/album you bought?
Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park.
What song do you want played at your funeral?
This Year’s Love by David Gray.
What is the best song to have sex to?
Thinkin Bout You by Frank Ocean.
