Underneath the moniker Mozart’s Sister, she started releasing EPs with the British indie label Merok Information; quickly afterward, a then-unknown SOPHIE stumbled upon her music. After their paths crossed at SXSW in 2013, a fertile and long-running inventive partnership started, with Imagine co-writing (and offering vocals for) a good portion of SOPHIE’s 2018 debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides—a groundbreaking pop masterpiece that grew to become one of many decade’s most acclaimed data and earned a Grammy nomination. (Across the identical time, Mozart’s Sister grew to become Cecile Imagine, and she or he moved to Los Angeles, the place she started collaborating with a community of pop renegades together with Caroline Polachek, Shygirl, and A.G. Cook dinner.)
Then got here the pandemic, which prompted Imagine to maneuver again to Montreal. Quickly after, in January 2021, SOPHIE died following a sudden accident in Athens. Certainly one of Tender the Spark’s standout moments is the breathtakingly lovely “The Pearl”: over a fragile, folksy melody and twinkling acoustic guitars, Imagine sings of rebuilding herself creatively after a profound loss. (“You tried to construct a ship out of strong gold, nevertheless it wouldn’t float / And I’m in my rickety vessel, making an attempt to stay a life after,” she sings, her voice uncooked.)
Merely listening to the track appears like intruding on an intimate relationship, and I hesitate to ask whether or not the track is certainly a tribute to her late buddy. “Yeah, it’s about SOPHIE,” Imagine says. “It was one thing I wrote within the weeks after she handed. I used to be working as a nanny, and there have been curfews at evening throughout lockdown, and it was the lifeless of winter in Montreal—snow as much as your knees and pitch darkish. I simply sat in my residence and wrote on the acoustic guitar as a result of it was the one device I had there. I’d by no means recorded something like that earlier than, in only one take. There aren’t any overdubs, no click on tracks, no headphones, and I assumed it was going to be loads of work to course of it and make it sound good, however truly, I barely did something to it. It had a pure high quality to it that I actually cherished.” It’s additionally proof that, even with out Imagine’s extraordinary manufacturing work swirling round it, her voice and playful lyricism shine.
