Little Wise: crowdfunding her own little music empire
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23.08.2018

Little Wise: crowdfunding her own little music empire

littlewise.jpg
Words by Zachary Snowdon Smith

What’s an artist with big dreams but a limited budget to do? Indie-rocker Sophie Klein – known onstage as Little Wise – turned to crowdfunding to produce her first album, raising $8,000 for studio space, mixing, mastering, advertising, music videos, and album artwork.

“I was nervous but hopeful,” Klein says. “It was pretty amazing to see fans come to the table and get behind the work.”

After the success of her 2016 debut Silver Birch, supported by fans on crowdfunding website Pozible and dollar-for-dollar donation matching from Creative Partnerships Australia, Klein is raising her sights.

‘Want It All’, a single from her second album, is launching at Starward Whisky Distillery during Live N Local festival.

“We wanted to put on this show as a treat to our audience,” Klein says. “People can expect a really fun night. Everything there is Melbourne-made, so it’s pretty cool. You’re drinking Melbourne-made whisky and gin to Melbourne-made music. People can expect a really fun night, with lots of flavours and sounds.”

‘Want It All’ was recorded at Aviary Studios in one day and then overdubbed and mixed on the next – the quickest Klein says she’s ever worked in the studio. The song’s refrain, “I want it all, but I don’t want it all,” is a straightforward expression of the self-conflicted mindset of a young person uncertain whether to trade in freedom for responsibility.

“It’s about the sort of existential crisis that’s not uncommon for people in their mid-to-late 20s, when we’re deciding whether we want to settle down or to be free and travel the world,” Klein says. “This song is about that: the indecision. The song is self-aware as well, in that I know I already have it all, in so many ways. I’m so fortunate, and it’s sort of a first-world problem to worry about these things.”

Recording at a fast clip has helped Klein resist the urge to second-guess herself. She describes questioning her own decisions as the biggest challenge of recording, aside from getting the music right on a technical level.

“This record, we’re spending way less time recording than I ever have,” she says. “I think it really brought a cool immediacy to the work, and forced us not to question our decision-making too much. With recording, if you start something and too much time passes before you finish, your creative process has evolved too much from the time you began that song. You feel like you’ve moved beyond it, but you still have to work on finishing it. If you do it in a more condensed time span, there’s no time to get over it.”

Klein is planning a “farewell for now” show for October, to bid audiences goodbye while she works on the album. Due out in early 2019, the album will include singles ‘Want It All’ and ‘100 Degrees’, and will be more cheerful than the sometimes intensely introspective Silver Birch.

“I just hope people are moved in some way,” Klein says. “Music, for me, is all about emotion. When we’re moved by something emotionally,we can connect to others more genuinely. For me, it’s about emotional affect and emotional intent and bringing light to the human experience and making us feel more human.”

Bringing a little humanity to a sometimes Darwinian business is one of Klein’s bigger goals. The #MeToo movement will hopefully make it easier for women in the music industry to cooperate and support one another, she says.

“The very nature of the business is competitive, whether we like it or not,” she explains. “I think, because of the way people have engineered things to pit artists against each other and compete for airtime and performing space and space on festival bills, I used to compare myself more to other people and be envious when other people got more opportunities than me.

“When I started waking up, especially to the sexism that women face in the industry, I changed my perspective. We can make each other stronger and prop each other up, and I can celebrate in my peers’ successes just as they would celebrate mine.”