At some point during the day, each day, a city dweller will experience a variation of this thought: “I need to get out of this place.”
We need time to breathe, to escape the sprawl and people and excess. Craving such relief, Sofia Machray left behind the confinement of Wellington for an idyllic, restful place 90km north of the city.
“I booked a cabin a few hours away from Wellington at Waikawa Beach and spent a few days there, leaving my phone in the car to step away from distractions and reset after a busy year,” she recalls.
There, the indie-folk musician spent her days walking along the beach, seeing nobody else, absorbed in her own thoughts.
“I found that being alone with my thoughts was as if I was being reunited with an old friend, which was a nice surprise. In the afternoons I’d get back to the cabin and write ideas down, bringing them to life, and then play them out loud,” she says.
Is it any wonder, then, that Machray created one of her best songs during the rejuvenating trip?
“Pulling on a String”, released last Friday (September 6th), is a song that revels in the beauty of simplicity. Machray’s whispery vocals invite us in for a moment of quiet self-reflection, as the musician herself reflects on how “recognising dissatisfaction in life and appreciating what we have before seeking more.”
“Sometimes, if we keep chasing because we think we don’t have enough, we’ll never stop. I loved thinking about the concept of two people pulling on a string as a metaphor for this idea and used dissonant chords and textures towards the end of the song to musically represent this mental tug of war,” Machray explains.
Simplicity is key in her tender lyrics, too, Machray singing of a hopeful connection between two people: “You only want what I want / You only have what I have.”
Machray works in gentle indie-folk, not messy hyper-pop, and in her chosen genre, the adage “less is more” becomes a mantra. The inviting warmth of “Pulling on a String” is the sound of an artist purposefully slowing down her music (and life).
Machray’s first standalone single of the year was co-produced by Will McGillivray (0therwise known as Goodwill, the Christchurch songwriter-producer who will release his debut album, Kind Hands, next month) and mastered by Greg Obis, who has some notable indie credits to their name (Slow Pulp, Babehoven, Mia Joy).
The single sets things up for, hopefully, a full-length album (which would follow last year’s well-received Language of Flowers), which Machray is raising funds for through a one-off show at San Fran in Wellington tomorrow night (September 13th). Tickets are available now here.
Sofia Machray’s “Pulling on a String” is out now.
