Australian singer-songwriter Gordi has released her new album Like Plasticine, with one track, “Lunch at Dune”, recently moving Coldplay’s Chris Martin to tears.
In an interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Sophie Payten, aka Gordi, recalled meeting Martin alongside other local musicians in Melbourne. When Martin asked if anyone played piano, Gordi stepped up and performed “Lunch at Dune”, a song she had never shared publicly before.
“He was sitting literally one metre from me, looking dead into my eyes, so I just started to freak out midway through the song,” Payten told Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
“I closed my eyes to concentrate and powered through to the end, and when I opened them at the end, he had tears streaming down his face. He said it was beautiful and that he wished he’d written it.
Payten added, “He’s clearly someone who’s searching for that feeling all the time, which I identify with. As an artist, that’s why you do it. You’re searching for that thing that just makes you feel things that you can’t describe.”
Elsewhere in the interview, she areflected on the connection between songwriting and medicine, her other passion:
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
“The thing that binds music and medicine together is this sense of connection and storytelling. In songwriting, it’s this really unfiltered approach of telling a story and trying to connect with someone out in the ether, or someone at a live show. In a medical setting, it’s someone else’s story, but in the same way I’m having to package it up and redeliver it to the patient in a way that makes sense.
“Obviously the stark difference is how you allow your emotions to become a part of that process. With songwriting, the more emotions involved, the better the result. But in medicine, you replace feeling everything so deeply with compassion. As an innately emotional person, I definitely find it challenging to sometimes separate all that out. There are those few moments where something really stays with you.”
Gordi’s Like Plasticine is out now via Mushroom Music.
