FM4 Soundpark is a web platform, community, and radio show for and with Austrian musicians. Each month, FM4’s team recommends a particular artist to amplify. In January, the honor goes to: Sodl.
Here’s the scene: You’re 16 years old and you’re listening to the FM4 morning show. There’s a call: ‘Please come here, best, new, most talented singer-songwriters of the year.’ You and your mom show up to the FM4 studios to you sing and play guitar live on the radio for the first time. Hello, Sodl!
This all happened about four years ago, but Sodl is still just as excited about every new chance or opportunity that she never anticipated. Amazed and also a little breathless, always laughing, Sodl sits down in the FM4 studio. She is actually a rather reserved person in her private life, as we know from some people, but then she explains she behaves differently towards different people and in different situations. This is not to be understood as adaptation; it is what one could call empathy.
Sodl doesn’t really have stage fright, instead she prefers to explode up there on stage – without any coffee. I’m so fired up, she says, and the collected energy is then released in the music. There is a very enchanting, almost childlike joy when Sodl talks about memories from last year, when people stood in front of her in tears after a concert because they were just so happy.
For people who, having heard of Sodl and her music for the first time, want to get an idea of what she brings to the table, you can place her songs between those of The Last Dinner Party, Big Thief, Janis Joplin or Alice Phoebe Lou. Not because the cross-references make up Sodl’s music, but because she either likes to listen to it all herself or thinks it’s very cool – and then sprinkles it around in her own songs.
Getting started: “I Am A Woman” and “Sage Cigarettes” by Sodl made themselves at home in the FM4 charts upon their release. Now there’s “Mary, The Anarchist” and all you really want to do is clap your hands over your head. Rock’n’roll that confirms a gut feeling you’ve had for a long time: Happiness is the moment before. FM4 has big, good, joint plans with Sodl and with you, because she’s playing at the FM4 birthday party in Vienna’s Ottakringer brewery on January 25th and is so happy that we both almost fall off our chairs. Sodl will then release her first album in March, and she promises us only the best, namely: “I’ll unleash a lot of mysterious creatures on you!”
Translated from the German original by Arianna Alfreds.