by Adelie Salagnac
photo by Isaac Buchanan
Back in August, songwriter, musician and singer Sophie Coran became the winner of the Philly Rising Showcase. She is living proof that passion, dedication, and hard-work can take you anywhere. After participating in many open mic competitions, studying music for years, and constantly trying to get her name out there, Sophie Coran successfully released her EP and is now ready to take over the world.
The first thing I noticed while talking to the lovely Sophie Coran was her passion – you could almost picture her face light up as she discusses her musical projects, even through the phone. Passionate about music, passionate about traveling, passionate about anything she sets her mind onto: Coran is the kind that lives life to the fullest, never forgetting where she came from and staying thankful for everything that has happened to her.
“I have something to say,” she says about songwriting, “and writing music makes me feel like I have done something, like I have accomplished something.”
She set her mind onto music at a very young age, never drifting away from that one goal.
“When I was two years old, I asked my mom for a ‘pi-na-no’,” Coran remembers. “I just always sort of wanted to be playing music, writing music and singing music. I knew that this was what I wanted to do when I grew up.”
Last summer, the talented Sophie Coran finally released her first EP, Better, the result of many months of hard work that reflects her journey through life and her experiences. Backpacker and world-explorer, Coran spent quite a while traveling across Europe, which definitely impacted both her self and her EP.
“I lived for a year in London, after traveling around Europe for about a year,” she says. “I released my EP in London. A couple of the songs on the EP were inspired by my travels. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to do that. When I was abroad, I wrote a lot of music. Experiencing different cultures, meeting different people, and having so much time to myself, I would always be writing down music. Whenever I could get to a piano, I would just sort of try and figure out an idea for a song.”
Having traveled quite a bit around the world myself, I could totally imagine how this kind of experiences could have impacted her.
“It definitely made me become a lot more focused on my music,” she explains. “Now that I have traveled, I feel like I am really committed to focusing on my career.”
photo by John Hayes
Always eager to discover more places, she now wishes to go check out the City of Angels, the Big Apple, and to go back to Europe. It seems like she is ready to embrace the touring life that she is so excited to live, hopefully in a near future. However, she definitely had some highs and lows throughout her quest. Milestone in these couple of years spent abroad, Sophie Coran remembers one particular moment that could have either made or broken her:
“At a certain point, when it was winter in the UK, it was really cold and it was not high traveling season at all, so I did not meet many people. I had so much time to think, so much time to myself. I would wonder a lot, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ To be honest, I was still uncomfortable at times, because I was very aware of the fact that I was on my own. It was just me. It made me feel more settled with myself. It was at that point when I realized certain things. That particular moment of being really uncomfortable really helped my music.”
Listening to her brilliant EP, Better, you could say that going through this was well worth it. Recalling having contacted around 500 blogs at the time she released it, Coran is very grateful for the response that she got.
“I did not know what to expect,” she admits. “I just really believed in my work, I was really proud of what I had done, and I hoped that people would connect to that. I’m excited to do more now.”
Excited to know what ‘more’ meant, I quickly questioned her about her future plans. It turned out that the next step for Sophie Coran is a full-length album. “I am writing material for an album. I am spending much of my time writing. I started recording demos and songs. I also have a few gigs coming up. I want to be consistent, and constantly write. I want to keep making music. My ultimate goal right now is to be able to support myself just doing music.”
Currently in Philadelphia, the hard-working songwriter, musician and singer stays busy, focusing on spreading the word about her music, writing new material, and gigging. You can catch Sophie Coran playing the Hype showcase at Bob and Barbara’s on January 26th.
“I just do my solo, just me and my piano,” she says about performing her songs live. “My songs are really intimate, it is sometimes hard to get people’s attention, but I feel that, if you have something to say, something that you believe in, people will connect to it. I just try to focus on that and on bringing justice to the songs. People seem to respond to that.”
Check out below Sophie Coran’s latest music video for her beautifully written song, “Tell Me”.
“I had written the song two years ago, when I was in London,” she explains. “This song was very important to me. I had something to say, and needed to gather my thoughts about it. I knew that I wanted to make music videos, and I also thought that I needed to do that to show something, to have a visual for my work.”
