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FULL BIO - WEBSITE Grammy Award-Nominee Sophie B. Hawkins’ Art Traverses Music, Stage, Film, Television, and Canvas Sophie B. Hawkins burst onto the international music scene with her 1992 platinum-selling debut album, Tongues and Tails, which included the indelible hit song Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover, and earned her a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. The last three decades have brought multiple awards, sold out concerts, appearances on film and television, performances with some of the best known names in the business, a documentary feature, a critically-lauded tour-de-force performance as Janis Joplin in the nationally-touring play Room 105, songs appearing in hit films and TV shows, and five more albums, including Whaler, which featured the record-breaking longest-running single in Billboard Adult Contemporary chart history, the Number One hit, As I Lay Me Down. Much more than just a singer, Sophie writes all of her own songs, is a multi-instrumentalist, and has been fully involved in every aspect of the production of her records herself, from background vocals and playing her own instruments, to engineering and production of her albums. She has proved an enduring artist with a fierce commitment to artistic integrity while both constantly evolving, and remaining steadfastly true to her own authentic history and experience which connects her to her fans at the very deepest levels. “The passions, strength, and spiritual beauty that your music and performance possess is something I respect deeply, look up to, and after my 29-year long journey of survival in darkness, I am so grateful for your own courage, strength, and honesty which helps those of us who are battling our own ghosts and demons from the past.” - Shanda, Massachusetts, USA I listen to your music whenever I feel I am alone because you make me feel like I am not. I listen to your music when I feel I need to be strong because you make me feel strong. – Jill, Michigan, USA Sophie’s interest in music started as a four-year-old obsessed with drums. Her love of music and the need to connect with and through it came into her consciousness as early as second grade. “I really remember this moment so well,” Sophie reminisces. “I was living in New York, listening to Bob Dylan and I put on my father’s dark sunglasses and I started to cry underneath them. I said to myself, ‘I want to be that,’ and “that” was a song. I wanted to be a song. I didn't want to be Bob Dylan. I didn't want to be the voice or the instrument. I wanted to be the song, the need and the depth and the whole story of a song. It's strange that I would say that now because I still feel like I'm living life as stories.” At fourteen, Sophie’s early desire to learn drums returned with great urgency. “I knew I had to play African drums – I found an African drum teacher and then from that moment on I practiced as much as I could every day and I never stopped. The thing is, I never even thought becoming a songwriter would be part of my journey.” Music: Sophie B. Hawkins has been tugging at heartstrings for decades with her powerful storytelling, crafting dizzying tunes that idle between the potently forlorn and the strangely comforting. Born and raised in New York City, Sophie has always been an artist at heart. After attending Manhattan School of Music as a percussionist, Sophie left to pursue a professional music career. She started singing her own songs from her drum set in various bands, playing in legendary New York City venues like Kenny’s Castaways and CBGB. She got her first professional gig playing percussion for Bryan Ferry. After that job ended, while working in the coat check at a popular Manhattan restaurant, she handed a cassette full of demos she had written to a patron who loved her speaking voice. That tape made it into the hands of a producer at JSM Music and it included what would be the hit single Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover. “I got to the point of being [Roxy Music’s] Bryan Ferry’s percussionist,” Sophie says, “which is a huge gig for a young female in New York City. But then at a certain point during rehearsals he said, ‘Look, you’ve done all these beautiful arrangements of vibraphone and marimba, but what I really need on the road is a Cuban percussion player – and you’re not that.’ So he fired me. Life said to me: ‘You can try as hard as you want but you’ll never be a Cuban percussionist. You’ll never be something you didn’t grow up as. But you are an artist, so be an artist.’ And then I wrote Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, so I consider that a milestone. And it wasn’t like I wrote it to make a hit, I wrote it from my heart. I’d written many songs before and I knew when I wrote Damn I had arrived where I needed to be. I knew it was big, I felt it. Years after that I got a record deal. I was a coat-check in Joe Allen’s Restaurant at 46th Street, and Mark Cohn walked in and said, ‘You have such a beautiful speaking voice I bet you’re a singer.’ And I said: ‘I’m a crappy singer, but I have about 1,000 songs. Do you want to hear any?’ And he took my demo tape and left it at a studio and somebody picked it up and the next thing you know, I had literally seven record companies fighting over me.” Her first album, Tongues and Tails, full of primal, fiery pop, was an immediate international success, earning her a Grammy nomination for “Best New Artist” and going gold in the United States and platinum in many European countries and in Asia. The Top 5 single, Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover has been featured in many TV shows and movies to date. Sophie came up with the chords for this song in a happy accident when her hand slipped on the piano. "That was the mistake I was looking for," she says. "I almost shivered because I thought, now this is the big song you've been waiting for. There was this strange sense. It was like something big was coming. You've never been able to do it before and now you have to do it. It was like a baby coming out. Now that I've had a child, I can sense it was like the feeling that you may not be able to do it or that it may go badly - just an indescribable fear - but also knowing that you can't do anything to stop it." “While Ms. Hawkins has her share of raptures on "Tongues and Tails," she confidently defies current protocol in both her lyrics and music. She is in her mid-20's, but her music looks back to handmade, pre-computer styles, especially gospel and soul music, even as it exploits layered voices and synthetic sounds. It's well within the bounds of rock, but it uses rhythmic crosscurrents and a conversational give-and-take that reflect an unusual background: African drumming. On ‘Tongues and Tails,’ Ms. Hawkins's music doesn't sound diagrammed on a digital grid; it ripples and surges and billows, unfurling spacious choruses or narrowing down to a conversational voice and a few instruments. Her singing sprawls on pillowy, airy keyboard tones, and her songs are sultry grooves, a mesh of wah-wahing funk guitars and a percussive pulse. Often, a single percussion instrument -- a bell, a hand drum, a chime -- is at the center of arrangements that are built on studio jamming rather than rhythm machines.” – New York Times “She can write pop songs so gorgeous they melt in your mouth.” – Wilson & Alroy Record Reviews Sophie followed the success of Tongues and Tails with her second album, Whaler, for which she first moved to Europe to promote, embarking on sold out tours and resulting in four smash European and Asian chart singles, before moving back to the U.S. to promote the album stateside. Whaler featured the international smash ballad, As I Lay Me Down, which won an ASCAP award and was the longest-running hit single on the Billboard charts in American music history at the time of its release spending 67 weeks on the Adult Contemporary chart, including six weeks at #1. Sophie also performed the song on the hit television series Party of Five, and it was featured prominently on the show Dawson’s Creek and in the film Now and Then. The song was also included on the Columbia Records album, All Time Greatest Movie Songs. Whaler also featured one of her most beloved international hits, Right Beside You, which spent time climbing the dance charts as a remixed single. In fact, Whaler had so many international hits, Sophie moved to Europe to promote it, and returned to the United States four years later to start promoting the album stateside. The album, as equally gutsy as Tongues and Tails, yet an atmospheric departure, sealed her rising reputation for musical breadth and lyrical depth. The album also featured the Billboard-charting hit Only Love. “Unlike other current practitioners of over-the-top pop, such as Toni Childs and Tori Amos, Sophie B.