PASORI: Today your new song and video, “It’s Okay To Cry,” comes out. Was this your plan all along — eventually showing yourself physically to the world?

SOPHIE: I’ve never really thought of it in that way, anyway. The intention has always been to be how I want to be and how I’m comfortable in the world, never to be anonymous. Right now, I’m just going with my instincts, and this is what I feel like doing. I don’t see any difference. It’s just expression. I’m always honest in what I put across.

PASORI: Would you say that “It’s Okay To Cry” is meant to be a departure from the music you’ve previously released as SOPHIE or a continuation of it?

SOPHIE: It’s very much the same. I’m still embodying and communicating the way I’m feeling and living at a given moment. In that sense, it is a continuation, because it’s equally an accurate reflection of the person I am, my interests, and what I want to put across to the world — the questions and ideas I want to express.

PASORI: People may hear the song and think it’s different production-wise from your earlier music, but in tone, and in the message, it does feel like a continuation, especially in its encouraging and reassuring nature.

SOPHIE: In a basic music way, my sense of melody and my style of songwriting and production carry the same thought process into this new music. I’m thinking about machines and electronics, and how they interact with motion, which I’ve touched upon in the past. Those key themes are my main interests, and they are really the foundation for my approach to music.

PASORI: You’ve used the term “questioning” in relation to your music, and it seems to speak to the inherent uncertainty within your music. I think of the lyrics, “I can make you feel better,” in your first release, “Bipp,” alongside “It’s okay to cry.”

SOPHIE: Right, that’s an interesting parallel.

PASORI: You listen, and you could easily think, “Can you make me feel better?” or “Is it okay to cry?” I’ve always heard your music as challenging feelings and emotions and what they even mean anymore.

SOPHIE: I’m always trying to encapsulate how we, as emotional beings, interact with the world and the machines and technology around us — being able to emote through those things. They’re not antithetical or mutually exclusive.

PASORI: Do you have a relationship to the machines you make music with in the same way?

SOPHIE: Yes. They’re electronic instruments being used with the body.

PASORI: How do these concepts connect to the “It’s Okay To Cry” video? It looks like a single take that wraps you up in these sweeping landscapes.

SOPHIE: I’m really happy that we managed to realize the video exactly how I imagined it. It’s about this idea of the richness and complexity of our inner and outer worlds — the emotional world and the external world, like the planets, the weather, and the universe. Just being overawed by how surreal, mysterious, and confusing the depth of both inner and outer worlds are. The video encapsulates the quiet, internal world flatly on top of or inside these universal, shifting landscapes, and contemplates how they are related. It’s somewhere in there, that feeling, that I wanted to communicate.