Get to Know Sofia!!!

An Interview with Sofia Zarzuela by Youth Culture 2000 ~Scroll in the box to read!~ When do you feel like your musical journey began? I come from a super musical family. Basically everyone on my dad's side is a musician, and I've always written little songs and stuff. In seventh or eighth grade, I got a guitar and a Taylor Swift chord book, and I taught myself how to play guitar from it. Then in ninth grade, I was going to a lot of little shows, and listening to a lot of Frankie Cosmos. I just kept writing music, and then I wrote an EP that was all about Bonnie and Clyde - that was like, my biggest obsession when I was 15. I put it out on Bandcamp then, and I've been putting out music ever since. Where did you grow up, and what was it like? I grew up in New York, specifically in Brooklyn. I feel like I hated it for most of high school, like I wasn't very grateful to be there. I had lived in L.A. for a couple of years when I was younger, and I just thought that everyone from L.A. was so cool and I wanted to go back. But, New York did have this really accessible music scene where I was going to concerts every weekend in ninth and tenth grade. That definitely led me to be like, OK, being a musician is something that I can do for real. So how did you end up leaving New York and going to Oberlin in Ohio for college? Originally, all I wanted to do was go to college in L.A. to study film, but I just didn't really connect with any of the colleges that I was visiting. I toured Oberlin and was immediately like, I have to go here. The campus is the town, and the town is the campus. They're so interlinked, and there's a movie theater in town where I have classes and I've also seen Rocky Horror. I remember passing by it on my tour and being like, this is my home and I have to go here. Also, I had this sense when I was in high school that was like: if you're not in i-D Magazine by the time you're 16, you're worthless. Like, so many people find huge success when they're really young in New York, and it's so competitive. Going to school in Ohio, it's like no one knew who I was already and no one is already famous. I can just be a teenager or someone in my early 20s without that pressure, which was such a relief and creatively very inspiring. I want to ask about 121 Elm Street, the title of your album. What's the significance there? So last year was my sophomore year of college, and Elm Street was the location of the dorm building I lived in with three of my absolute best college friends. The building was the main ecosystem of our social lives. I was also obsessed with the fact that I lived on Elm Street. Not only is Elm Street like, the horror location because of Nightmare on Elm Street, but I'm also a big fan of the Archie Comics and Riverdale. Betty and Archie are both from Elm Street in the comics and the show, and I just love how the street name is so emblematic of like, Anytown, U.S.A. That space was so important to me, and I wanted to immortalize it because I knew throughout my whole sophomore year that it was fleeting. It was going by really fast, and it tormented me. I had such a hard time picturing any future that wasn't right then, knowing that right then was just happening. It was my home for only eight months that I would never really go back to. How would you describe your musical style? So genre wise, I think a lot of it's kind of singer-songwriter, but it leans into synth pop. I work really closely on my music with my dad and I always have, which is funny because, like, I talk about sex and drugs in excess in my music. Like, my dad and I have never talked about that stuff together, but I know he knows things because he listens to my music. This album was delving into the pop side a lot more, though. My friend Eoin Schnell wrote the track "Vaseline" on guitar, and then my dad and I kind of modified it and added pop filters and some other things to make it. But also, in terms of influence, I'm really influenced by physical spaces. Like every song that I wrote is mentally super attached to a certain place. Something that's so interesting and cool about college, but also sometimes horrible, is that you walk around campus and every fucking building has like, thousands of memories and there's no where else you can go. My biggest thing was that every single time I would go to a party, I'd see somebody I liked making out with someone else directly in front of me, and I don't want to be the girl who cries at a party, so I'd leave and be the girl who cries in her room. A lot of your lyrics are about relationships, and seemingly a sense of uncertainty about who you're even attracted to. How do you explore this in your music? So crazy fact about me: I was in various relationships from eighth grade up until my sophomore year of college with effectively no break. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I found myself single and I was like, I have literally no idea how to cope with this. A majority of songs I ended up writing were just like, "All I want is a boyfriend. Like, I don't care if you like me. I just want to be a girl with a boyfriend." Or it's like going through a breakup and being like, "I don't care that it's you, but why don't you want me?" I didn't really understand what was going on at the time, aside from, like a very extreme form of loneliness. I wrote this whole album thinking I was just lonely and I wanted a boyfriend. Then I listened back to it recently and I was like, no, I wrote this album about wanting to be a normal girl and having a boyfriend because that's what would make me feel that way. The people who I was writing the song "Boys" about - I didn't know any of them. I didn't like any of them. I just needed to be somebody's girlfriend. All that and a sense of compulsive heterosexuality reared its head a lot in the album in ways that I didn't realize until after I recorded it. Now, my last question for you is: what random 2000s things are your favorites? 1: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, particularly the season where they're in college and Willow meets Tara. 2: Ginger Snaps. It's this Canadian indie film about this girl who becomes a werewolf, the best werewolf movie I've ever seen. It's all about like, eating your boyfriend. It's queer-coded horror and easily one of my new obsessions. 3: You know like the kind of weird guitar sounds that are supposed to sound kind of futuristic? Like in "Year 3000" by The Jonas Brothers or "Underneath It All" by Gwen Stefani. I think that's a really fun early 2000s music thing.