Sophie Hutchings and the art of feeling

Jumping onto the evening call with fresh vivacity, she draws on a decade-and-a-half of artistic learnings with self-deprecation and effusive honesty. “I'm such an outgoing person, but I am quite shy when it comes to music,” she says. “I've had to push that side out of me. I think I've learned that with your audience, allowing them to know who you are has been just a real learning curve for me.”

Releasing her ninth studio album this month, the glowingly intimate become the sky, she turned her attention from the richly layered wildness of 2023’s A World Outside to try and encapsulate the quiet essence of home. “You know that feeling when you haven't been in your own city for so long and you've been in these foreign places and then as you're landing you get this sensory overload?” she asks. “Everything becomes so heightened. That feeling and the sentimental value of being in a place of what is familiar and comforting.”

Growing up as the youngest child of four, Hutchings describes her upbringing as being surrounded by a lot of noise. Her dad was a jazz musician while her older brothers favoured indie rock. But it was the classical soundtracks to her formative Disney movies which captured her imagination. “I loved all those Walt Disney films that just took you into these fantasy worlds. And there's a part of that that I feel with the realm of music that I'm in even as an adult,” she says. “It's this form of escapism where you can really sink your emotions into something, but it doesn't have to demand you to think about things. It just demands you to feel things.”

Although she took piano lessons, she found sight reading difficult and struggled with the formal grading process, eventually dropping out of her tuition. “That really had a huge impact in my early career. I was really insecure about it,” she says. “If it wasn't for the teacher that I had who really encouraged my ear, I may have lost my confidence.”

After school, Hutchings went to work in publishing, only playing piano for her friends who were in bands and needed a little extra flair on their recordings. “I was always surrounded by musicians, but it didn't appeal to me. I think being exposed to a lot of musicians, there's a lot of egos and I was like, that's just not me,” she laughs. “I didn't have any understanding of the neoclassical realm at all. I was writing music like that, but I didn't know any bands or anything like that.”

One day a couple of family friends who worked as sound engineers suggested she document some of her own compositions. Those recordings became her debut album, Becalmed. Released on a small Australian independent label in 2010, it became one of the early highlights of the growing neoclassical genre. “I kind of miss those naive days. My first album was just like, ‘Throw it all on the table and see what happens.’ Now I've just got such a producer head on, so finicky about every little thing that I miss the naivety of those days,” she laughs.

The success of her debut caught the attention of Decca affiliate 1631 Recordings, who began releasing Hutchings’ music as the appetite for neoclassical piano grew. “I was around in the early days. I've been one of those stalwarts who have been completely respected and admired by the musical world, but as far as gaining a massive audience, as opposed to someone like Ólafur Arnalds, that hasn't happened,” she says. “Now, with the world of streaming, it's all exploded.”

It was Arnalds who introduced her to his team at Mercury KX, who went on to sign Hutchings at the start of 2020. “Ólafur was a fan of my music and he wrote to me when he was coming out to Australia - and he was doing a pretty small show back then - and said, ‘I've been following your music for years. Do you want to come to my show? We should catch up,’” she smiles. “We ended up staying friends.”

Whether it was signing to the genre-defining London-based label, or the sudden swell of people working from home, Hutchings saw a huge growth in her audience as the pandemic set in. “I was overwhelmed by the amount of letters sent via my website,” she says. “Music, it's always a universal language, but at that time I think it proves something more. It was a real anchor to people and I was getting people telling me their life stories. I was trying to respond to everybody. I was just getting exhausted.”

A World Outside is a rich tapestry of adventuring soundscapes which followed her journey into the depths of Australia’s outback. “I've always been a traveler. I missed that during covid,” she says. “I was reading a lot on our Australian history. I read this book called The Songlines and it's about this ancient language. I just thought, what better way to discover our history than to go into the heart and soul of this ancient land?”

In what’s become something of a personal tradition, her new album become the sky is a quiet response to its predecessor, detailing the calming comfort of returning home. “I call them the sleepy sister albums,” she laughs. “I love to really return to something extremely intimate and sparse. So whenever I do a more sonically layered album like A World Outside, I just pull straight back and do a felt piano album.”

Recorded at the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s studios in Sydney Harbour’s arts precinct, the setting helped to reinforce the magic of her hometown. Originally booked as a recording session for an EP, Hutchings found herself with an album’s worth of ideas. “I'm highly organized when I'm in the studio and I think that was a real savior with become the sky because we recorded an album in two-and-a-half days, which was ridiculous,” she laughs. “I did it all in straight takes, I was just so focused. I went in with everything super organized because I was determined to get all my demos down.”

Despite working in such a grand room, it was important to Hutchings that the recordings respect the intimacy of the songs. “We did all these mic placements all around the piano that gave it this kind of warm hug,” she says. “Just looking out onto the harbor with the Harbor Bridge, feeling like I never realized I was going to do this for my career and here I am in my home city looking at one of the most beautiful icons. That had something to do with the theme as well, of finding the sentimental value of place.”

Just as home as a tangible place was important in the recording of become the sky, so too was the feeling which comes from it. “I really wanted it to be a musical companion for people,” she says. “We've got such busy brains with our lives these days, I want this album to be something where people can just view life in slow motion. I want people to enter into a space where they can switch off and just feel everything slowing down.”