Severance, the hit TV show about people who use a brain implant to split into a personal self (an “outie”) and a work self (an “innie”), with neither persona able to access memories of the other, may seem like science fiction, but it’s eerily close to how Sophie Payten, aka recording artist Gordi, has had to live her life while creating new album Like Plasticine.
As a junior doctor who worked at Prince of Wales hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic, Payten had to manage two professional personas: the celebrated singer-songwriter whose emotive music has won her a legion of fans, and the health professional who had to keep it together during one of modern history’s darkest eras.
“I’ve just finished watching the latest season of Severance, so I’m kind of thinking in that vein of like, I walk through the hospital doors and suddenly, I switch my brain out.” She smiles. “But yeah, not quite as dramatic as that.”
As diametrically opposed as those two roles may seem, Payten suggests they are more linked than they appear on the surface.
“The thing that binds music and medicine together is this sense of connection and storytelling.” —Gordi
“The thing that binds music and medicine together is this sense of connection and storytelling,” she says. “In songwriting, it’s this really unfiltered approach of telling a story and trying to connect with someone out in the ether, or someone at a live show. In a medical setting, it’s someone else’s story, but in the same way I’m having to package it up and redeliver it to the patient in a way that makes sense.
“Obviously the stark difference is how you allow your emotions to become a part of that process. With songwriting, the more emotions involved, the better the result. But in medicine, you replace feeling everything so deeply with compassion. As an innately emotional person, I definitely find it challenging to sometimes separate all that out. There are those few moments where something really stays with you.”
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In her life as Gordi, Payten is going from strength to strength. She’s had songs of hers synced in TV shows like The Walking Dead, she co-wrote the theme song to the Oscar-nominated animated film The Mitchells vs. the Machines, has performed with the likes of Bon Iver and Phoebe Bridgers, collaborated with Troye Sivan, and has released two critically acclaimed albums, 2017’s Reservoir and 2020’s Our Two Skins.
Third album Like Plasticine sees Payten stretching her wings even further, exploring territory both dark (the moving, pandemic-inspired “PVC Divide”) and light (“Peripheral Lover”, a Robyn-esque banger that’s Payten’s most upbeat song to date).
“When I’m writing an album, it’s happening over the span of a couple of years and like in any life, there are light and dark moments,” she says. “On balance, there were more dark moments during that period, but I was so weary of the sadness and didn’t want that to dominate the whole record. So I leant as hard as I could into the brighter moments that presented themselves during that period.
“[Writing the album] happened in this context of working a lot in hospitals, but then still reflecting on things like falling in love and coming to terms with my queerness and being proud of that. So I was trying to scatter some brightness amongst the dark.”
One of Payten’s new songs, “Lunch at Dune”, managed to snag a famous fan before it was even released after a chance encounter with Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
“I got this text message from my manager, and he was like, ‘Apparently Chris Martin wants to meet with some local artists,’” Payten explains. “So about seven or eight artists went to meet him, and he asked things like, ‘Tell me what it’s like being a musician in Australia right now?’
“It was a great night and before he was about to go, he said he wanted to hear a song. We were at a little rehearsal space in Melbourne, and there was a grand piano there, and he was like, ‘Does anyone here play a piano?’ There was just this silence in the room, so I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ I decided to play ‘Lunch at Dune’, which I’d never really played for anyone before. He was sitting literally one metre from me, looking dead into my eyes, so I just started to freak out midway through the song. I closed my eyes to concentrate and powered through to the end, and when I opened them at the end, he had tears streaming down his face. He said it was beautiful and that he wished he’d written it.
Credit: James Robinson
“As an artist, you’re searching for that thing that just makes you feel things that you can’t describe.” —Gordi
“He’s clearly someone who’s searching for that feeling all the time, which I identify with. As an artist, that’s why you do it. You’re searching for that thing that just makes you feel things that you can’t describe.”
Despite being created during a dark time — album title Like Plasticine is a reference to how the skin of a person who’s passed away looks — Payten says she emerged on the other side with a greater recognition of life’s innate beauty.
“Look at the things that we get put through in this life, whether it’s dealing with grief, whether it’s saying goodbye to a loved one on FaceTime because you can’t get into the hospital because of lockdown, whether you’re living in an apartment by yourself and you are suddenly cut off from all your friends and family because of public health requirements,” she says. “Or to take it away from the pandemic, if you come to terms with your queerness and you have to deal with the idea of intense rejection from people who’ve known you your whole life because of their beliefs.
“You can obviously view that through an intensely negative lens, but if you throw in the mix the other things that change us, like falling in love or having a family or moving to a new country or whatever, we just have to take the full spectrum of all of that and all of those pressures that come with being alive.
“I think that in this record, I tried to focus my energy on the kind of breathtaking resilience that we have as human beings to be able to navigate all of that and still just get up the next day and keep moving forward.”
Gordi’s Like Plasticine is out now via Mushroom Music.
This Gordi interview features in the June-August 2025 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ. If you’re eager to get your hands on it, then now is the time to sign up for a subscription.
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