Soko will release her highly anticipated debut album ‘I Thought I Was An Alien’ on February 20th.

‘I Thought I Was An Alien’, is full of love and loss and worry – the kind of fundamental, life-dictating human feelings, which are so far beyond rational explanation, they really ought to be kept under lock and key, along with that strange apparition from Roswell. Like one of her heroes, Daniel Johnston, however, Soko has the rare ability to sing openly about those feelings, in a way which is utterly compelling, sometimes devastating, but also, just from the fact of their articulation, completely uplifting.

Like innumerable bedsit troubadours of her generation, Soko started out with just her voice, her acoustic guitar, and her laptop, the latter equipped with her favourite application, GarageBand. Her early songs talked frankly about sex, romantic jealousy and depression, as well as peanut butter, cats and tigers. Unhappy with how her recordings were losing their magic due to over production Soko decided to leave music proclaiming, \’Soko is dead\’.

However In late 2010 whilst living in LA, Soko was introduced to Fritz Michaud, who had her instant admiration, having worked on the late Elliott Smith’s final album, ‘From A Basement On The Hill’. The pair worked every day for eight months and the result is a delicately wonderful debut LP. Soko says she writes best and most prolifically, when she has a muse in her life. Alex Ebert, from Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, was apparently one of them.

Soko’s acoustic playing, too, has grown up from the punky thrumming of before, often arriving at the complex, fluid picking of the \’old 60s folk dudes\’ she’s been listening to, such as Roy Harper, Michael Hurley, Davey and Jackson C Frank. Having asserted her control over her music, Soko realised that rules are made to be broken, and allowed others – close friends, this time – to add their expertise; “When I needed a new take on something. Stella [Mozgawa] came and added some magic. I said, ‘Can you play some weird guitar solo in a hooky Television style?’ She came up with that and we would write the harmony to that, so it was very collaborative.” Likewise, she called in her friend from Australia to provide string parts on ‘We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow’.

The air of mortal tragedy in Soko’s songs comes from bitter experience. Soko’s lost a lot of close relatives over the years (‘I’ve Been Alone Too Long’ is a song for her father who passed away) and her song, ‘We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow’ is like an urge to live life to the full. When she sings of a rootless existence, always sadly moving on with her suitcase and her guitar, you know that this is her existence – and it really is. Her songs may not always be easy listening, but the gains are all the greater. She’s had a fan come up to her after a show, saying that they’d come off heroin, after hearing her tortuous, in-love-with-an-addict number, ‘For Marlon’. Her songs literally change lives.
After such a long and soul-searching evolution, ‘I Thought I Was An Alien’ finally introduces a truly singular talent, at her point of fruition.