Tuesday, April 30, 2024

New Music Monday: Sofia Miller harnesses confidence in debut album ‘Prologue’

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Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.

Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!

For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.

This week, Sofia Miller is the New Music Monday highlight!

Miller grew up mostly in Toronto, but has spent time in many cities before calling Victoria home. 

During that time, she had been slowly but thoughtfully writing songs, but hadn’t had much stage-time before arriving on the west coast. 

Here, she began to share her music and released her debut album, Prologue.

“I guess technically it was seven years in the making,” Miller told Victoria Buzz. 

“The first song I wrote for it, I was like, 18, so that would have been 2016, which is a while ago. But most of it I wrote four or five years ago and then only started recording it properly in 2022.”

Some songs are somber and soft, featuring just Miller’s voice over an ethereal instrumentation while others are more fulsome and wistful with a full band backing her. 

Acts that are fronted by women such as Julia Jacklin’s Phantastic Ferniture, Alice Phoebe Lou and Angel Olsen while she was writing the record, but had numerous sources of inspiration from the time she was writing to the time she was in the studio. 

She says that because Prologue is an amalgamation of several years of writing and developing the songs, she was able to take space from some of the songs in order to produce them as best as she could. 

“A lot of the time when I was writing it, I was much younger and not very confident in my voice and I was still building a lot of skills—especially singing and finding my taste and style,” Miller explained. 

“What really developed over that time was how I would eventually produce it and make it come to life. I could do that a lot better when I was further away from it, from how I originally felt when I wrote them.”

Miller chuckled when explaining that it may have been a much sadder, slower album had she recorded it back when she first wrote some of these songs. 

One song Miller chose to highlight off of Prologue is “In Dirt,” a song about tree planting which was completely different prior to her getting into the studio, and one that was almost cut from the record.

Now, “In Dirt” is Miller’s most played single from the record and she couldn’t imagine it not being on Prologue. 

“I didn’t like it, I thought it sounded too much like U2 and it was just too corny,” Miller laughed. 

“I just really didn’t resonate with that song and it maybe just didn’t fit the album so I decided I maybe just wanted to scrap it, but my producer said that sucks because I spent the money on the studio and the band.”

Miller decided to try and see what she could do to salvage the song and wound up playing with the raw drum track and re-recorded the other parts along with her producer until it worked. 

“I’m super stoked that song made it on the album—I chose it as the first single because it’s real easy to listen to and it’s really fun,” she concluded. 

Listen to Prologue in its entirety on Sofia Miller’s Bandcamp, or stream it on Spotify and Apple Music

Currently, Miller is working on her sophomore album and is gearing up to play some shows around town throughout the summer, after a brief hiatus to go tree planting. 

Also, keep an eye out for a live session video with a full band that Miller has in the works. 

In the autumn, she plans to go back to her former hometowns of Montreal and Toronto to play some shows there, as most of the record was written in those cities, but she has never performed there.


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CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal. 

Miller says she never expected the kind of support that she has been given by a small radio organization such as CFUV. 

“I’m about to do my third radio show for CFUV and they’ve been playing my stuff so much,” Miller explained in her interview with Victoria Buzz on Thursday, April 4th. 

“I don’t even know how, it just happened and it’s just really nice to be supported and helped.”

Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!

Let us know what you think of Sofia Miller in the comments below.

mm
Curtis Blandy
curtis@victoriabuzz.com

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