Sophia shares her insight in humanity behind fame.
May 2020
When you have a song written for you before you are even born, take part at Junior Eurovision and perform your own song in the Cypriot presidential house before you finish school, you better live up to the expectation and become a famous artist. But how do you deal with the pressure? Sophia gives us an insight in her background and experiences in the music industry so far.
Sophia Patsalides’ uncle wrote her a song before she was even born, and asked her to sing the song when she was only three or four years old. This was when Sophia and her family realised, she had a talent. They started sharing it with the world straight away. At this age she was playing piano for all her classmates in musical kindergarten daily, and regularly performed as a soloist/vocalist on a TV show.
Source:Trends.com.cy
With Cyprus being a small island, Sophia Patsalides quickly became a familiar name. After her participation on Junior Eurovision, she started releasing her own music and people began to recognising her on the streets; she made a name for herself. The pressure of becoming musically successful as a vocalist and songwriter made her push her limits at a very young age. She sped things up and, only being sixteen years old, went to music University in the UK.
‘In my mind there was an expiration date for the productivity and the energy of a performer even though I’m learning that’s not the case. But I wanted to get out there as early as I could as a person.’
Source:sophiapatsalides
Two years later Sophia reaches a mental breaking point. She is invited to fly to Cyprus to be the opening act for the famous Greek musician Eros Ramazzotti. Sophia still claims this to be one of the highlights of her career, but not because it was her best performance, quite oppositely. It taught her how to accept her flaws, and more importantly to accept and listen to her physical boundaries.
‘I went straight from the Netherlands, from a songwriting camp, to Cyprus to do that performance. I could do it, I really wanted to do it, but my body could not. So that taught me to give myself breaks and that I need them. It gave me a lesson to not push more. Because the spirit is infinite and the energy, but the body is like you need to confine to it. And that’s a hard reality.’
Although going to the UK was challenging at first, she says it was absolutely worth it. It allowed her to meet and work with one of the best London based musicians and producers in the country: Anthony Marshall. Marshall is a serious link in the music industry in the UK, as he has worked with big artists such as Britney Spears and Craig David. Sophia explains how together they have shaped her identity and sound as a newly branded international artist. They needed to change her name to something people would be able to pronounce, something that would reach further than a small island and also still resonated strongly with her roots. This is how Sophia Blu was created.
‘If you wanna look deeper into it: it’s blue, it’s the sea. I was born on an island, young - I feel like it embodies lots of aspects of me as a person, and I wanted to keep my name.’
Over the last few months they created her new EP, which is the ultimate next step in Sophia’s career. To make it even more authentic, Sophia is treating this EP a little differently:
‘I don’t want the EP to just be an EP. I wanna merge like the visuals that I love and everything and make it a project. (…)So, it’s gonna be a nice research project for me as well. (…)It’s definitely a passion project that I wanna do for myself and for art.’
The sound can be summed up as a cheeky combination of‘Pharrell or Timberland type beats, some 2000 Destiny’s Child harmonies and Frank Oceans quirky layers. It has lots of 90’s and 2000 influences, but with a modern twist. (...)To compare it to a current artist it would be something like Normani.’
Photograph byEfthivoulos Studio
The first single from this EP is going to drop this fall. Sophia Blu is an artist to be on the lookout for. You do not want to miss her entrance into the international music industry, so check her releases on her online platforms.
https://www.facebook.com/sophiablu
https://www.instagram.com/sophiablu