Editors' Notes “The juxtaposition between my music and me is that I am a very bubbly person—I love to talk to people,” Sody tells Apple Music. “From the outside, people might think, ‘Oh, how can this music come from you?’” It’s certainly true that joy and effervescence aren’t the first things that spring to mind while listening to the piano ballads on the London singer-songwriter’s second EP. Across four songs, she revisits a challenging period in her life, exploring the feelings sparked by some upheaval. “The song ‘What We Had’ is about when you break up with your partner and you don't love them anymore, but you just can't stand the thought of them kind of being with anybody else,” she says. “You know it's really selfish and unreasonable. Sometimes, though, you can't really help how you feel—and that’s what the EP is. It’s a way of expressing myself and putting it down on paper.” Let Sody take you through it, track by track.
What We Had
“It’s a concept that I think people are scared to talk about—when you’ve ended a relationship and either it’s you still love them or you don’t, but you feel like, ‘I don’t want anybody else to share the things that we did.’ You have his T-shirt there, you know you might never see him again, you might never talk to him again, but it’s just, ‘What do I do with it?’ Or you’ve got all these pictures, all these memories. Do you bin it? Do you keep it? Is there a chance that you're going to get back together? What do you do? That was what I was going through when I wrote this.”
Reason to Stay
“‘Reason to Stay’ and ‘Nothing Ever Changes’ are from the same realm. It’s been a really unexpected year in my personal life—things have happened that have been quite life-changing. I want to keep those things close to my heart, but music is a way for me to express myself. The lyrics do the talking: Everything that I’ve ever wanted to say, I put into those songs. And what’s been nice and comforting is just people having their own experiences without me having to put a label on it.”
Nothing Ever Changes
“What I was planning to do for last summer was release loads of happy songs. Then things happened in my personal life and I just thought, ‘I need to stay true to myself.’ So I took some time off social media—self-care is so important—and I didn’t write for three months. I didn’t have the words to say what I wanted. Then I was sitting on the tube listening to a piece of piano music and I felt really inspired. Suddenly this melody came into my head; I went into a session and the whole song just poured out. I thought it was very hard-hitting. I thought it could be potentially triggering to some people—the first line: ‘You’re a monster when you drink.’ And I just wasn't sure [about releasing it]. It’s very personal. It’s not got the structure of a normal song. But I just thought, ‘You know what? This song’s really helped me when I listened to it.’”
Love’s a Waste
“I wrote this with an artist called James Smith. We’ve been friends for four years. And we were catching up—we had a [writing] session and were chatting the whole day and then it got to 5:00 and we were like, ‘Oh god, we don't have a song!’ But we’d been talking about our lives and stuff and [the song] just all came along. It’s about being in a relationship: You might make mistakes, I might change my ways, but I'll never let go. You want to get through it: Even though you might be going through some rough times, when we’re not together, we actually suffer more because we’re so close.”