INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY SAGE GROVES ☆
Ellie Kim
INDIE-POP SENSATION SOPHIA JAMES RETURNS WITH AN ALL NEW SOUND—in her fifth studio EP Sleepwalking At 65MPH. Following James’ May EP release, The Wrong Shoe Theory, which boasted mostly irresistible upbeat tracks, Sleepwalking At 65MPH serves as a tonal shift for the artist. The six-track project brings listeners a melodically dynamic set of songs, expressing complicated feelings about breakups, friendship and living in the United States during these unprecedented times.
After the viral breakout of her jazzy-pop song “So Unfair,” the LA-based artist has continued to spoil her devout listeners with unmatched musical talent, crafting a series of singles leading up to both of this year’s EP releases. Replete with shimmering guitar hooks, anthemic beats and vulnerable lyricism, Sleepwalking At 65MPH marks another certified hit project from Sophia James.
Ahead of its release, Luna had the pleasure of sitting with James to discuss the project, finding balance and navigating a non-linear career path.
LUNA: Sophia, thank you for sitting down to chat with us. First of all, congratulations on the new EP.
JAMES: Thank you! Did you listen to it?
LUNA: I’ve been listening, yeah, I’m pretty plugged in. It's so good. This project feels like a tonal departure from your past releases.
JAMES: Totally.
LUNA: Could you tell me what inspired this project both sonically and narratively?
JAMES: I'm gonna be so honest, I wasn't going into this project with a narrative in mind at all. It really just came about from a collection of songs that I vomited out. Just following complete emotional instinct. I had just come off of releasing this EP, The Wrong Shoe Theory, that was very loud and absurd and explored aggressive joy for the first time. When I was releasing the EP, I was in a completely different state of mind. I felt emotionally mismatched to what I was releasing and promoting and performing. I think one of the reasons that was the case was just looking around at the political state of the world. Living in an America where Trump is the president and there were all these ICE raids going on, and surveillance cameras [were] being put up everywhere. It felt very dystopian, and here I was, singing about joy and freedom—it felt very weird and ironic and clashy.
Ellie Kim
I also went through a very serious breakup with a partner that I was basically living with and imagined a life with. So there was a lot of reality change and a lot of emotional change. This has been short story long, but for this EP, it [was made] in a phase where I just wanted to be more honest and brutal with myself—not shy away from my own flaws and darkness—and that felt very present in this time. Instead of shoving it down, I'm trying to express it and synthesize it in that way.
LUNA: I think you captured those feelings really well. I want to talk about “Ryan,” one of the lead singles off the EP. It very quickly became a fan favorite earlier in the year. You’ve said it’s one of your favorites as well. Where was this song born from?
JAMES: Okay, so there's a lot of misinformation about “Ryan.” Mostly because I've never set the record straight. I've never actually talked about it or who it was about or when I wrote it. I wrote “Ryan” back in 2024. I've been doing these 30-day songwriting challenges for three years now, where you write a song a day for 30 days, and it was just one of those. I had a crush on someone at the time, it wasn't very serious, and I just wrote it in an hour.
It sounded very different than it does now, but then I brought it to my producer maybe a year later, and he was like, "We should actually flesh this out, and we should try and make it a little more unique and zhuzh it up and maybe add some piano to it.”
A lot of people were saying the person who [I] broke up with earlier this year is who Ryan was originally about. It's not. Just for the record.
LUNA: Glad we’ve set the record straight on that. Despite the aforementioned “Ryan” not being the subject of your breakup, it’s still a fairly ecstatic love song. Was that song still one that felt jarring to perform after it came out?
JAMES: I think that experience was fine. Especially just because that's still one of my favorite songs I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of making. The one that was really tough was this song called “You Make Me So Happy, I Wanna Die” which I promoted probably a month or so earlier. I was able to separate the heartbreak from the flirty love song of it all a little bit more by the time “Ryan” was rolling around.
LUNA: Did that experience influence “Never Write a Love Song Again?”
JAMES: Yeah, absolutely. Especially with “You Make Me So Happy I Wanna Die,” I wrote it at the beginning of this particular relationship that I had just ended and, as I was having to promote it, I was like, "Oh, my fucking god." I was having to dance around and perform it, and really lean into the joy of the song. And I was like, "God, I'm just so disconnected from this."
That definitely led into writing “Never Write a Love Song Again” during another 30-day songwriting challenge. I was like, "Oh, my fucking god, I'm reaping the consequences of what I've sown." You know, everyone says be careful about who you immortalize in music, and I just went ahead and did it anyway.
LUNA: Are you ever gonna write a love song again?
JAMES: Oh, absolutely. Yeah—me when I lie.
LUNA: Listen, we all do it.
Ellie Kim
JAMES: I love writing love songs. I just can't help it. I've already written, like, five this year.
LUNA: And we’re excited to hear them! Circling back to the rest of Sleepwalking at 65MH, “Gun in the Garden” sounds very unlike anything you've put out, yet simultaneously feels very unique to you as an artist. What was your writing and production process for that one like?
JAMES: This one was the most original writing process I had ever pursued, which was so fun. I'm trying to approach writing in different ways these days, because I don't wanna just write the same thing over and over again. So for this one, my producer and I were talking about the differences between Millennials and Gen Zs, because he's a Millennial [and] I'm a part of Gen Z.
He didn't know what a lockdown drill was. And I was like “You guys didn't have those?" We started talking about gun violence, and I realized growing up in America—maybe it's not Gen Z-specific really—school shootings were such a present thing in the media when we were growing up that it's always been top of mind for me. I'm always very terrified of stepping outside and getting shot, or staying inside and getting shot. I think I have such a paranoia around that. And then we started talking about a bunch of other things that make us paranoid. I have a lot of paranoia surrounding this descent into fascism and descent into the surveillance state. It's all becoming a little too Orwellian for me. We just started talking and I started just writing down random words.
Then I went home [and] I looked through a coffee table book. I just started writing down words of images that I was seeing. I started puzzle-piecing a lot of it together to create this stream of consciousness-esque flow of lyric in a way that would capture the feeling I have of walking outside and looking around at America right now.
LUNA: I love the lyric “someone take the wine and turn it back to water.” The whole song is packed full of this visceral imagery. Speaking of lyricism, “It's Up To You” paints a vulnerable post-breakup picture, and takes your listeners back to the type of piano ballad that you're known for. Can you elaborate on the song's titular lyric? What does this song really mean to you?
JAMES: I wrote it after a friendship breakup. I had done a friend wrong, and I had fucked up and let him down. I realized that there was possibly no coming back from it. I had made a mistake and he sent me this text that ended with “good luck, Sophia.” We've since patched things up actually, but I was just sitting in this place of like, “Wow, he doesn't owe me forgiveness, and that really hurts.” I hate the feeling of letting people down. This was a very clear example of letting someone who I really cared about down. So that's where “It’s Up To You” came from. It was basically teetering on the edge of goodbye, not begging for forgiveness because our relationship, our friendship was completely in his hands, I realized. In a weird way, it also applies now to the relationship I ended earlier in the year. It's weird how some songs can apply to different situations at different times in your life.
Ellie Kim
LUNA: You’ve had a super busy year, with your previous EP releasing in May. Have you been able to ground yourself or do you still feel like you’re sleepwalking at 65MPH?
JAMES: That's a great question. It depends on the day. I'm making a more conscious effort these days to ground myself and really absorb the world around me and not make such quick and brash decisions, while trusting my instinct. I mean "You just have to find the balance," is such an overused phrase, but it's overused because it's true.
I'm trying to find the balance, as cliché as that is. Especially having this whole EP and this collection of works I've made while feeling like I was sleepwalking right in front of me, staring back at me, I've been able to look at it and say, "Oh man, I was very ungrounded here” and make a change.
LUNA: Yeah, it's really great when we look back at art and can realize "I was a different person while doing this, but this still applies to my life right now."
JAMES: Right. It's like a portrait.
LUNA: Totally. In an interview at the VMAs earlier this fall, you explained that you're “not trying to be influenced by anything or swayed any which way creatively.” Has your outlook on the marketing and business side of your career been influenced at all by last year’s Group 7 virality?
JAMES: Yeah, definitely. Group 7 came from a kind of marketing science experiment, if you will. The reaction to the Group 7 video that blew up really acted as data for me. I tried to take what I learned from that and apply it here and there to my marketing techniques without replicating it entirely. [I try] adding an authentic creative edge because why do anything if it's not fun? From that, I learned that the “posting every day” thing is bullshit. A lot of people will make you pay a lot of money for them to tell you to just post every day and you will blow up. What I learned from Group 7 is that sometimes that's not the case.
So, I guess in that way, it's influenced my marketing. Other than that, I still try to think of creative ways to present my music to the world.
Ellie Kim
LUNA: In your last interview with Luna, you mentioned that you want a lifelong career of either being in the studio or being on tour. When you reflect on how your career has evolved over the past year, what has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced?
JAMES: Hmm. That's a good question. With this career, it's always the up and down of it all. It's never a steady line. You don't go to college, get your degree, then go to grad school and get your degree, then do this internship, then you work this job, and then you can become a doctor or whatever. There's no linear path to it. My life goal has not changed since the last time I spoke with Luna.
I still very much want a life that consists largely of either being in the studio recording and writing music or touring and performing that music. I haven't done a ton of touring this year because it's not realistic. So I think part of me still feels like I haven't arrived at my goals. But at the same time, I'm living my dream in many other ways. I still get to write music, I get to record music, and that's a large part of what I'm always trying to do. I think the goalposts of this career are challenging because you're not always in control of if you meet them or not. It's very circumstantial sometimes.
LUNA: For sure. What accomplishment has meant the most to you or been the most fulfilling?
JAMES: Ooh, this year?
LUNA: Or in general, but it could be this year.
JAMES: Oh god, I don't know. I think my proudest accomplishment has been being able to still have a career in music while changing my fucking mind about genre every day. Not putting out a consistent discography by any means, and not picking one lane to follow genre-wise. I'm very proud of how I've been able to get away with that for this long. You're not supposed to be able to get away with that. And I don't know how or why I've been able to do it for this long. I think my listeners are just really awesome and very open-minded. So I'm grateful for that and proud to have made it this far being able to change my mind so much.
LUNA: What are you hoping listeners will take away from Sleepwalking at 65MPH?
JAMES: I hope they take away truly whatever they want. I hope they're able to feel and process and synthesize some of their own emotions, whether they be completely overwhelming or completely welcomed. I hope it makes them feel and dance around a little bit. I hope they walk away wanting to be more honest, I guess. You can take whatever you want. Everyone's gonna have a different opinion on it, and I think that’s all I can ask for.
Ellie Kim
