Singer-songwriter Gordi on turning queer shame into pop magic and working with Troye Sivan

It’s been five years since singer-songwriter Sophie Payten, known by her stage name Gordi, released her sophomore record Our Two Skins. It’s an exceptionally long time by today’s industry expectations.

“I don’t know whether it’s flown, or whether I’ve lived like another nine lives in that time,” she reflects now, calling from Los Angeles, where she splits her time with Melbourne.

For the longest time after dropping the ARIA Music Awards-nominated Our Two Skins in June 2020, the Australian singer-songwriter couldn’t bring herself to put pen back to paper. “I found that the well was just completely dry,” she says.

Her desiccated motivation was understandable. Having begun junior doctor training in 2019, between her first (2017’s Reservoir) and second records, she quit her job to tour throughout 2020. Then, with Covid-19 making an exorbitantly high number of people sick across Australia and the world at large shutting down, her medical experience was needed more than her music. She went back to being a doctor.

“I would get a weekly email saying, ‘This is the hospital you need to go to this week because this whole team’s gone down with Covid’,” Gordi recalls.

Her return to the medical world continued like this for 18 months. She witnessed patients break news of terminal illnesses to heartbroken families over patchy video calls. Going home and writing music felt trivial. “‘Who am I to write a song when this is happening?’” she remembers thinking. “My own feelings felt so dwarfed by what was happening,” she adds, “and even though I was still a human being experiencing a full spectrum of emotions during working in the hospital, I felt that was completely secondary to the genuine life and death suffering I was watching.” Creatively, she was stifled. 

In 2022, with the world creeping back to some semblance of normality, she returned fully to touring and felt ready to get back on the songwriting horse. She locked herself into the Phoenix Central Park performance space in Sydney for ten days, surrounded by instruments and amps, “and I was like, ‘I’m not leaving until I have written something.’” Six months later, she repeated the process. The result is Like Plasticine, her affecting third record, due for release in August. “It’s been an eventful five years, to say the least,” she smiles.

Like Plasticine is both musically and thematically broad, spanning the lowest lows of Gordi’s pandemic experience and the love, strength and resilience she witnessed throughout it. On her previous records, she contrasted dark lyricism with sparse and folksy production; this time around, she wanted the lyrics to be matched with harmonies that captured the emotion she was writing.

On latest single “PVC Divide”, a collaboration with folk singer Anaïs Mitchell, she takes a step back to reflect on the devastation unleashed during the pandemic, over airy strings and pillow-soft piano strokes. “She said that she watched him die on FaceTime,” goes the striking opening lyric. “No, they wouldn’t let her keep the bed sheets.” Scorching indie-rock closer “Automatic” sees Gordi looking back on having to deliver news that a patient’s cancer had returned while their family were trapped in lockdown, “telling him that he wasn’t going to survive – and then going, sitting in my car and just kind of having this huge emotional episode”.

Yet the tender, featherlight dream-pop of “Lunch at Dune”, a collaboration with non-binary, Northern Irish musician Soak, soundtracks Gordi’s rumination on the power of love in surmounting the insurmountable. “Everything is fleeting, except you and I,” she coos in ethereal vocals (she has been in a relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Alex Lahey since 2017). Carly Rae Jepsen-esque sad-banger “Peripheral Lover” sees her navigating the shame that can still creep into queer relationships, before the euphoria of it all finally being out in the open explodes in a sugary burst.

Much of Our Two Skins dealt with Gordi processing her sexuality after falling for Lahey. The experience is handled with more open-armed joy on Like Plasticine – the music video for “Peripheral Lover” sees her set up a queer kissing booth – but she says today that shame is still a common part of her life as a queer woman. “Anyone who’s gone through that same thing of coming out or stripping down their identity and building it back up again would be very familiar with the feeling of shame,” she says. “I find that pride and shame are these two competing forces and fortunately for me, at this point in my life, pride largely wins out. But those [feelings] are always lurking somewhere in my writing.”

That shame is probably dampened somewhat by the increasing time she’s spent working with other LGBTQ+ artists. In addition to creating with Soak after the pair met in Dublin – “the first thing we did was go to the National Leprechaun Museum which is honestly incredible” – Gordi has previously teamed up with the likes of Boygenius star Julien Baker and Australia’s golden boy, Troye Sivan.

Gordi and Sivan first collaborated in 2018 for his sophomore record Bloom, on the song “Postcard”, three years after Sivan tweeted about being a Gordi fan. Four years later, he got back in touch to ask for help in writing “Wait”, a song from his 2022 comedy-drama film Three Months, about a boy’s wait to find out if he has contracted HIV. The following year, “everything just went like absolute turbo” for Sivan, she says affectionately, following the release of “Rush”. “It’s been crazy and beautiful to watch that happen for him.”

She waxes lyrical about working with a man who has slowly become one of Australia’s biggest music exports. “Troye has been such a vibrant energy to work with,” she says. “I’ve worked with so many people in different studios and often the response, if you land on some riff or some vocal thing, people [are] like, ‘Yeah.’ Troye is much more excitable in a really genuine, positive way that brings an excitable energy to the room.”

He’s an expert at his craft, too; one who will frequently perfect a track first time. “I’ll kind of write this song and he just like gets on, rips some vocals, and that’s that’s the vocal for the song.”

So long as there isn’t another pandemic on the horizon, Gordi thinks that her music will always be infused with a little queerness, much like Sivan’s. “I have this joke with my friends where I’ll show them a new song and they’ll say, ‘Is this another song about being gay’?” she laughs. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, probably.’”

“PVC Divide” is streaming now. Like Plasticine is due for release on 8 August.

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.