Issue 113 / April-May 2021

SARA
WOLFF
Exploring the literate, genre-dodging songs of the Bergen-born singer-songwriter, scouring
away at the surface of butter-wouldn’t-melt-blokes in the process.
In the video for SARA WOLFF’s recent single Cotton
Socks, filmed by Mimi Šerbedžija, the camera meets
Wolff’s gaze as her eyelids flutter in time. Her head
appears framed, as if on a platter. She then tucks
into a dessert buffet of jellybeans, muffins, doughnuts
and a lovely looking Victoria sponge, Bruce Bogtrotterstyle.
It all ends with Wolff in a sugar coma, face and
hands covered in jam, looking like a cannibal passed out
at a crime scene. For a song that sounds like drowning
in honey, this saccharine display fits her barbed, sicklysweet
lyrics perfectly.
While society buffers, we’ve had ample time to
ponder what we’ve missed, as well as clarity to address
some serious issues surrounding inequality. And,
although it might have been written long before our
current winter of discontent, Wolff’s debut EP When You
Left The Room remarkably still captures the zeitgeist, as
Sara chews over that which she’s willing to stomach and
spits out the rest. Cotton Socks flaunts this in all its glory.
Couplets such as “Oh bless your little toffee heart
/ don’t you let them sting you when you tear their hive
apart” and “’Cause they are little bumblebees without a
single clue / they are bumping into everyone ’cause they
don’t know what to do” find Wolff biting back. Softly
spun melodies and wonky, woozy arrangements might
draw you in, but it’s the cunningly reflective songwriting,
with its pointed humour and carefully crafted narratives,
that’ll keep you hooked.
“Cotton Socks is a song about feeling underestimated
by someone,” she begins, speaking over video call, with
no traces of jam to be seen. “It could be about toxic
masculinity, a person who maybe has a skewed view
on women in general. It comes back to, I guess, the
expectations of women, or your feelings not being taken
seriously, being brushed off as someone who’s all over
the place. It’s a reaction to that by saying: ‘I know exactly
what’s going on and why you’re behaving this way… and
I’ll sting you any day’,” she explains, with an effortless
lyrical charm.
Through addressing men in this sympathetic,
mollycoddling manner, Wolff is able to poke holes in a
privileged sense of security. It could even be seen as
an impression of the belittling tone some do actually
take around the opposite sex. In this way it feels like a
predecessor to the equally eerie Scarf Song. Directed
by Wolff and Andy Martin, Scarf Song’s monochrome
music video has a more Lynchian slant with Sara and
Co. appearing onstage like mannequins. Yet it still serves
as an uneasy commentary about the treatment and
objectification of women. And when Sara dreams of
retaliation in the chorus (in this case, a light garrotting by
knitwear) it’s hard to blame, frankly.
Fiona Apple’s lyrics for Relay from last year’s
groundbreaking Fetch The Bolt Cutters spring to mind: “I
resent you for never getting any opposition at all / I resent
you for having each other / I resent you for being so sure /
I resent you presenting your life like a fucking propaganda
brochure”. It’s a directness
Wolff finds particularly
refreshing.
“We’re so much
stronger if we stand
together and lift
people up, rather
than tearing each
other down”
“My favourite song is
definitely Ladies,” Wolff
responds, “she’s singing
to her ex’s new girlfriend
and it’s all about women
standing together. She
says: ‘There’s a dress in
the closet that you can
have because it will look
way better on you, it
was actually left to me
by another ex who was
there before me’. I feel
like sometimes women can tend to fight each other, or
there can be this culture of competition. Usually you can
see that with any marginalised group, if there is a sense
there’s not space for you somewhere.
“I suppose in a male-dominated music scene,” she
continues, “there’s less space for women to begin with.
You suddenly have women turning against each other
because you’re fighting for those few slots that are
available for you. [Fiona Apple] definitely touches upon
something very important there. We’re just so much
stronger if we stand together and lift people up, rather
than tearing each other down.”
Naturally, we move onto the topic of female artists
being pigeonholed, as we question where her adopted
hometown fits into all of this.
“Being a woman musician isn’t a genre. The amount
of line-ups I’ve been put on billed as ‘Ladies Night’
or times it hasn’t made sense that I’m opening for a
band. The only similarity is our gender identity,” Wolff
explains. However, she is keen to note the supportive
aspects of Liverpool’s scene and the groups looking to
tackle unequal diversity. One of which she highlights is
Where Are The Girlbands, who she commends for their
promotion of female musicians, opening discussions,
covering the scene and connecting creatives.
“Maybe this time is what we all needed, a little reset
and then we can come back with more objectivity,”
Wolff ponders in response to the prolonged pause of
live music. “Knowing that we’ve had some space to think
about what’s important to us and what we really want
the scene to look like: more inclusive, interesting and
accommodating.”
In September 2019, Sara visited Manchester’s Eve
studios to track the EP with her live band and coproducer/engineer
Adam Rothschild. Replete with vintage
synths, analogue outboard gear
and even a cat (also named Adam),
16-hour stints of recording found
the pair entirely submerged in the
project. Since then, she’s swapped
what was “basically an old mansion”
where King Krule, Everything
Everything and The Orielles record,
for the familiar makeshift duvet
vocal booth.
“I was just recording all of my
vocals under my little duvet castle
in my bedroom. There were dogs
barking outside the window, loads
of construction work going on,
plus my interface was really shit,
so whenever I had my computer plugged in it made a
buzzing noise,” she illustrates. “Somehow still, it’s nice, I
always feel most comfortable in my own surroundings.”
Thankfully, persistence and time invested honing
these tracks – the liquefied All We Are feel of Hands
having evolved significantly over the past six years
– means we’re now hearing Wolff at her most selfactualised
as an artist. Her stay at Eve and the room for
experimentation this allowed has only pushed her sound
further as well. A minimalist at heart, in-studio Sara
opted to either extract guitar parts in place of synths,
noise machines and the distinctive 1960s Farfisa organ,
or instead fed them through effects units, such as the
Roland Space Echo used to produce the delay we hear
tripping over itself on off-kilter standout You Like Talking
About Yourself.
Charged with all the manic energy and queasy
cutesiness of a carnival funhouse, in Wolff’s words
You Like Talking About Yourself is “a silly song about
someone who loves themselves too much and sucks all
the attention out a room”. In the chorus the kit actually
breaks down for a bar or two, mimicking the blowhard
losing steam, or rather his victims losing the will to
live. By the time we reach the bridge, it’s looking more
Dismaland than Disney, as Sara sings, “What have you
done? You ate my firstborn son” as raving voices pile up
against a wall of distortion.
Sara’s conscious use of contrast calls to mind Aldous
Harding and Cate Le Bon, but it would seem she’s not as
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