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Interview Magazine, 1994

Title: Sophie B. Hawkins: the lion of pop music - hear her roar, listen to her hush. (Interview)
Author: Martina Navratilova

Abstract: Singer Sophie B. Hawkins considers her mother, Beethoven and Billie Holliday as her greatest emotional influences. She sees her music as a lover because it has the ability to inspire, threaten or expose her.

MARTINA NAVRATILOVA: Hi, Sophie. It's funny we know a lot of people in common, but I don't even know what you look like.

SOPHIE B. HAWKINS: That's what's great about doing this on the telephone. You know why it is? You just have to respond to what you get.

MN: My number one question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

SBH: Lord have mercy.

MN: O.K. Do you want to grow up?

SBH: I think I came out of the womb grown-up. I'd love to have the chance to tend to natures more basic than human nature. You know, one day I guess I'd like to be an incredible gardener.

MN: Wow. I would also love to be able to have a garden and just go out and pick what I want. My mother does that. When she's ready to cook she just goes into the garden. I am so envious. I always have to call and have people send it, or steal fruit.

SBH: Really?

MN: Yeah. I'm very good at climbing fences.

SBH: That's funny. In Czechoslovakia?

MN: Once I stole a whole bunch of cherries, and I put them under my shirt; then when I was climbing over the fence I fell, and when I landed, the cherries splattered all on my stomach.

SBH: Oh, my God.

MN: So were you a tomboy when you were growing up?

SBH: My mother definitely raised me to be a boy--although when I got into adolescence I questioned it. I was a total slut. I now see how that was my way of becoming a woman, my kind of rite of passage.

MN: So what's your most comfortable outfit? And if you go out, what do you like to wear? What do you think looks great?

SBH: Well, I'll tell you. In fact when I'm comfortable is when I feel beautiful. I think I look most beautiful when I feel most beautiful. If I'm really going out with somebody I love and I want to be very sexy, I like this long black dress that a friend of mine in Paris gave me, with a beautiful black coat, and my black high heels.

MN: How tall are you?

SBH: Without heels I'm five feet nine.

MN: That's pretty tall.

SBH: How tall are you?

MN: I'm five feet eight. You got me there.

SBH: [laughs]

MN: I listened to the tape of your record that's coming out in the spring, and it struck me that every song is different. It's not like you can say, Oh, this one thing is Sophie. Tell me a little bit about how you made the record.

SBH: For this record I shipped my whole studio over to London to a house I'd rented.

MN: How'd you like London?

SBH: Well, I loved it. I'd always wanted to live in Europe, and then it was right there. I got to be there and work and be alone and spend time in the heath. It was really like being a child for the first time. I'd never had a house with stairs in it before. I ran, and I started playing tennis and rode horses. And I made my record with absolutely nobody watching me or looking at me.

MN: So who are your influences in your music?

SBH: Well, let me see. The first person I'd say is my mother. Not that she's a musician, but she always sings. And she always makes up her own words, and she sings constantly, and with real purity. She has a beautiful voice. And then I grew up listening to a lot of Beethoven, so that has to be a major influence. I think it comes out in the moodiness of my music. I studied lots of people when I was becoming a musician, but I would have to say that my most emotional influences have been Beethoven, Billie Holiday, and my mother.

MN: That's quite a trio.

SBH: Yeah, it is. But to tell you the truth, I don't think most of my influences are musical. I think they're more literary. God, I don't even think they're literary. I think they are just the people that I love, because those are the rhythms that feel so natural with my music. It's really, really intimate. It's not so much influenced by art.

MN: So tell, what's your best quality?

SBH: My sense of humor.

MN: Oh, you're funny? You haven't been funny yet.

SBH: Martina!

MN: Well, tell me a joke.

SBH: [silence]

MN: O.K., I'll tell you a joke I made up. It's pretty bad.

SBH: Let's hear it.

MN: I thought of this while I was meditating: what do you get when you cross Napoleon and a donkey?

SBH: I have no idea.

MN: You get a man who doesn't know his ass from his Elba. Sophisticated joke, yes? I'm amazed that I remembered it.

SBH: [laughs] I'm amazed that you made it up. That reminds me of a joke I made up in a movie theater when I was like six or something.

MN: Oh, great! That's embarrassing. A six-year-old's joke!

SBH: I won't even tell it, but I still remember it. It's worse than yours.

MN: So what's your worst quality, then?

SBH: I have a lot of worst qualities. But probably my most worst quality is that I have a wandering left eye. To me that's metaphorical for ... it makes people nervous. I make people nervous with the way that I ...

MN: Do you want to get it fixed?

SBH: Do I want to? No, no. It's one of those quirks that I feel ... like I said, it makes people nervous, but it keeps me reaching out and reaching deeper, and reaching and reaching, and discovering other qualities than those that necessarily want to be seen.

MN: I asked you because one of my former coaches is Rene Richards, who's an ophthalmologist.

SBH: I read a book by her. She's fascinating.

MN: She's a wonderful human being, but that's her specialty, strabismus. But here's another question. If you had a choice of, say, five people you could invite for dinner, alive or dead--they don't have to be alive--who would they be?

SBH: Oh, my, I'd invite Shakespeare. I'd invite Virginia Woolf. I'd invite my mother and my father.

MN: But you have dinner with them all the time!

SBH: But they're so fun. O.K., do you want me to not include them?

MN: No, that's fine; it's your dinner.

SBH: It's a mix, so I want my mother, and my father; let me think, I'd invite a lion.

MN: Is that an animal?

SBH: Yes.

MN: Oh, I thought maybe I didn't know who that was.

SBH: Well, that's who I'd invite.

MN: Hmmm. What would you serve for dinner, then?

SBH: [laughs] Oh. It couldn't be vegetarian because of the lion.

MN: The lion can have a separate dish. We know what he's going to eat, don't we!

SBH: O.K., great wines and caviar. It would have to be stuff that would stimulate different parts of the mind and senses, but nothing that was heavy or would make them distracted.

MN: So you don't think alcohol would be a distraction?

SBH: No, it wouldn't; it would make everybody wild. Sort of light-headed, as if we were parked somewhere in eternity.

MN: That leads me to the next question: who are your heroes or heroines? Or do you have any?

SBH: Let me think. If heroes are the ones who save you, then I'd say myself.

MN: That's very good. I'm interested in a question I ask my friends when I want to know a little more about them: if you could live in any era--besides this one--which would you choose?

SBH: It's easy: I would be about eighteen years old in the 1920s in America.

MN: And would you be a man or a woman?

SBH: I would definitely be a woman. How about you?

MN: You see, I'd like to go like way back. With maybe a month here, and a year there, and maybe a few days here, just to check it out, like way back to when Greece and Rome were at their height, or to when dinosaurs were around, to when people started getting organized and figuring out fire and stuff like that.

SBH: That's really interesting. Would you be a man or a woman?

MN: That depends. It would have been much easier to be a man during most of those periods. I probably would want to be a woman who disguised herself as a man.

SBH: Like so many great women throughout history. You know, I always feel in certain ways--and I know it's not true literally--that if you use your imagination enough, you can feel like you're in another period. There are these great artists, these two guys who live and work together, Peter McGough and David McDermott, who live completely as if they're in the last couple of centuries. They dress, they speak, they come and go, they interact, and they create this way. I think it's possible to have your ideals and the things you want to project and draw from, if you're innovative enough.

MN: O.K., Sophie, so what makes you go crazy?

SBH: Falling in love.

MN: You know what I think is wonderful about falling in love or being in love is that, especially at the beginning, you are just so in tune with the other person and are just so in tune with now. You're not thinking about five minutes from now or an hour from now or a day. We're usually so [expletive]ed up in that we're always thinking: I'll be happy five months from now, or a month from now, or when this happens, or I can't wait to go on my vacation. And we're so rarely in "the now." But when you're in love, you're just thinking about right now. You're not thinking about what's for dinner or whether you're going to go out, or anything like that. Some players play better when they're miserable and alone and they sort of get lost in the game. I play better when I'm in love. But anyway, what else do you think is important in life? What are your goals?

SBH: To be able to tell the exact and utter truth, and live that truth.

MN: So have you started that yet?

SBH: I'm definitely trying, Martina. I'm really trying. God almighty.

MN: Do you associate that kind of truth with being naked?

SBH: Yes. It's hard to talk about it. But it's funny because I've always--aw, [expletive]--even today I was at the gym and I had just been rollerblading a lot and I hate ... I don't like to catch myself in the mirror, but if I do ... it's scary ... I don't even know what I'm going to say, but I was thinking when I saw myself in the mirror, if I could look objectively, if I could just see myself and if I could appear as I am and not how I should be, it would be such a relief. And now as we're talking I'm thinking about how Bruce Weber took those photographs of me in which I don't have any clothes on. At the moment right before he took the pictures, it was excruciating because I had always tried to control my body, like run and do all this stuff to make it adequate or beautiful or something; and in that moment I realized how ultimately we can't, I realized it's my emotions that are showing, and my emotions that are making me ugly or beautiful or whatever. It was tremendously scary, as well as a relief because I know that I can't really control my body, and I know that it doesn't matter if I do. That's what was shocking to me.

MN: Do you think that your songs are naked?

SBH: Yes, completely.

Sophie B. Hawkins, pages 122-27

Page 122: Linen sheets by Pratesi available at Pratesi, NYC and L.A. Page 123: Stuffed toy bear from Penny Whistle, NYC. Page 127: Shoes by Peter Fox from a selection at Peter Fox, NYC. Valentines Special,