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On this week’s episode my guest is SOAK. Bridie Monds-Watson has been making music since they were a teenager in Derry, releasing their Mercury-nominated debut Before We Forgot How to Dream in 2015 at just 18, followed by Grim Town in 2019 and If I Never Know You Like This Again in 2022, all on Rough Trade.
The last few years have been a strange and quiet stretch for SOAK. Vocal issues left them wondering if their time in music was coming to an end but an undiagnosed autoimmune disease was quickly discovered. Bridie talks about coming out the other side of it having “remodelled everything for joy”, writing in the present tense rather than nostalgia, and only trying to make themselves laugh.
There’s also the full story of how ‘just stand there’ with Fred Again.. came about, from a lockdown spoken word piece made with Ellius Grace and Gemma Doherty to Fred texting through a finished remix unprompted, to becoming the most heard vocal of their career, racking up over 25 million plays and the surreal moment Fred and Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk closed a show with the song segueing into ‘One More Time’.
SOAK is big on collaboration having recently also worked with Gordi, Niamh Regan Katie Malco, Julien Baker andGeorge Fitzgerald.
Fresh from an intimate tour of Ireland’s small rooms, venues and bookshops, ‘death valley fridge magnet’ is their first solo song in over four years, a song about feeling lost and finding your way back through your friends.
You can catch SOAK live this summer at The Circle by Jameson Music at All Together Now Festival, which features some Nialler9 favourites.
For this conversation, SOAK picked five songs to frame the chat: Big Thief, Samia, Julia Jacklin, Mitski and Ryan Beatty. We get into all of them, along with losing your voice, writing to your younger self, and over a decade of being SOAK.
On the vocal issues that changed everything
“I have an autoimmune disease that I didn’t know about, and I only found out about it because I started to lose my voice. After one show, my voice would just become hoarse. When that started happening, I was like, well, maybe there’s a reason I’m not meant to do this… In the end I did really need a moment to ask, what do I care about? Why did I want to do this in the first place? It recentered everything. I just remodelled everything for joy. It’s been a big relief.”
On touring while losing their voice
“I would play a show and then my voice would just go, or I’d be straining so hard it was painful to sing. For a lot of those last shows I would literally be on vocal rest during the day to save my voice for the show that evening, strain it again, and repeat the process. And there’s a band there and everybody’s getting paid. It was just so stressful.”
On how the writing has changed
“A big difference in the stuff I’ve been writing is that it’s very present. Before, I would have been very nostalgic in my writing… I notice a change in myself, that I’m trying a lot less. I’m only trying to make myself laugh now, to be honest. I used to punish myself a lot and seek some sort of optimisation in music, which is the worst combination of words when it comes to art.”
On redefining success
“My aspirations have never been to headline Glastonbury. To me, success is having the freedom of time and space to actually make the next song. Nothing will stop the next song except for you. You can be an artist and it doesn’t have to be your entire income. That’s a big distinction I had to learn.”
On writing ‘death valley fridge magnet’
“I wrote it in the car, it was starting to snow around Christmas a couple of years back. I was driving past St Stephen’s Green and it brought on all these memories of my best friend. We did a road trip in America years ago, and I was trying to take the complication of adulthood out of things and remember how it felt to be eighteen and really not care much and just want to do stupid things.”
On the Fred Again.. collaboration
“I got a chain of texts from him and he referenced really deep cuts from my first record. So I was like, okay, respect, you actually know what’s going on here… I find it so funny that what he wanted to use was my pretty intense Derry accent. Even at that level, everybody working on this stuff was so kind and genuine. He genuinely is so obsessed with music, does not stop, always singing into his phone or tapping a table. It’s truly an inspirational thing to witness.”
On seeing Fred and Thomas Bangalter close a show with ‘just stand there’
“They finished that whole show with ‘just stand there’ going into ‘One More Time’ by Daft Punk. At my thirtieth birthday, my friends got it up on their phones. That was crazy. You need to talk about it more.”
On Irish music right now
“It really feels like we’re flying as a country musically. The standard of stuff coming out is ridiculous. I just listened to the new Joshua Burnside record, which I think is his best yet. How that and the last CMAT record can be so different and so brilliant, our range is pretty impressive in this country.”
On Big Thief’s Double Infinity
“All those songs are three, four chords and pretty simple song structures, and I appreciated the choice of that. ‘Incomprehensible’ is an all-time Big Thief song. You can hear them laughing in the background, they allow it to be a bit rusty, and that’s what I like most.”
On Mitski
“The through line through all of these artists is the honesty of it all, not trying to be a shiny happy person, just all the good, bad, beautiful, ugly. I love that in Mitski’s music especially. She’s not afraid to be perceived negatively or pathetically. She leans into it and I think it’s great.”
On revisiting old songs
“It freaks me out. It’s literally like being face to face with your younger self. Sometimes it’s too intense emotionally, why I wrote them, what I was feeling when I wrote them. I can’t just pop in and out of that. It’s a real deep thing.”
On Ryan Beatty’s ‘Secret Language’
“You know when people produce these phenomenal, perfect songs but they do it in a way that’s so low-key? It’s such a windows-down-in-the-car anthem. A non-self-conscious love song, just straight to it. He writes lyrics like no one else.”
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
