Zooming Out + Art Beyond Isolation: A Conversation With Free Range
By Sarai Warner
photo by Sarai Warner
In early September, Sofia Jensen of the indie rock project, Free Range, and I sat down for coffee at a bright yellow shellacked Formica table and talked for an hour. We covered advice from musician friends, how the moments leading up to a gig can drastically change a live show experience and the capacity of songwriting to hold much sadness and future happiness. She shared about the noise app she uses to layer box fans and crickets and rainstorms into soundscapes to fall asleep to, their non-negotiables for close relationships, and her treasured city haunts. Naturally, it was disappointing to discover that my Bluetooth headphones had filtered the audio of the interview to an incomprehensible degree, necessitating a do-over.
The irony of this blunder is that the first singles of Free Range were released with an urgency to spit out something, anything, and the product of this desire came without second tries or hemmed edges. Sofia had been sitting on a slew of originals for a while, and in the winter of 2020 set to the solo task of recording them acoustically to give those who connected with her live shows a place to keep listening. Sloppy first takes were greenlit, editing was minimal, and an unintentional raw quality was produced and leaned into—and they wanted them to live that way.
Empty Bottle saw Free Range play for a friendly Monday night crowd later that September. The slightly daunting gap between the bar counter and the stage began to fill quickly as Sofia’s set began, their voice smoothly and securely carrying the disillusioned lyrics of original “Two Dimensional” into the dim venue. Acoustic guitar tones warmed the space, and the comforting melody almost distracted from lyrics bitten raw with a cyclical doubt: “I’m a broken record trying to go to sleep / I’ve been hallucinating what you mean to me.”
At the time, this was one of the two unpolished recordings that lived in the public Free Range discography, alongside a rendition of Elliot Smith’s “St. Ides Heaven”, exposing a peppery vulnerability not unalike the original track, void of gloss and shine but rich with humanness. Since then Free Range has released tracks “All My Thoughts” and “Want To Know” which will be found on their upcoming debut record, a body of work that will read with drastic sonic difference from the early duo of singles. Post show, we reconvened outside the venue and they walked me through a rundown of how the songs came to be released, recounting the quick decision to put up the modest arrangements.
Sofia reflected, “I’ve been recording now for several years and it’s been a very slow process in a way I’m very grateful for now; I’ve evolved a lot as an artist and as a person and so have my bandmates. But I think I reached a point before I put those two songs out where I really wanted people to know I was making art and had music. I was recording on my own a lot in conjunction with finishing the record and demoing all of these songs right as I was writing them, and then on a whim I made the decision to put one of them out.”
On the new record, Sofia is looking forward to listeners experiencing a polished vogue delivery of her music, the exact opposite of the two restless tracks thrown into the audiosphere: ‘I love how those turned out but I’m also really proud of the record…We want this to be a record that can stand on its own against other modern indie folk records, and I think that it does. We mixed it with an engineer that we love and want to keep working with, a real adult professional engineer. But in terms of the recording, that was just us. My friends and I made this record and it sounds mature even though [we] were doing it on our own.”
Having seen Free Range perform with their full band arrangement, there’s no shortage of certainty that the record will be a marvel with the delighting seamless interplay amongst Sofia’s wistfully layered guitar and vocals, Jack Henry’s eager and expressive drumming, and the awed intentional bass delivery of Bailey Minzenberger. This vivid listener experience keeps when Free Range is only Sofia, but shifts into a closer intimacy through the solo acoustic arrangements, like the feeling of being serenaded by a friend in the sanctuary of your home. The second song of the evening was revealed to be dreamt up with a dear friend of Sofia’s who was in attendance that night, the only co-written song on the record.
Collaboration within her songwriting process is rare and can only be done with the most trusted and most emotionally compatible. She said, “I think I reach out to him when I’m stuck and I don’t know what more I want to say. That’s like the biggest thing, and why [writing with others is] a hard thing to do. There’s a lot unsaid that has to be an agreed upon direction that you’re going in, and the way that he usually writes and I usually write is similar enough that it makes sense to write together but it’s also different enough where he’s contributing something that I wouldn’t be able to think of. It definitely came from me wanting to write more like him and him wanting to write more like me. I’ve had a problem being a little too vague and generic with describing feelings and things that can be placed in any situation, and he’s a very descriptive writer where he zooms in on situations and people.”
The tendency to zoom out and escape is frequently explored in the work of Free Range, even in the artist’s name genesis. It’s a name that calls forth fantasy of an open milieu, unbothered fields, stretching roads. Sofia notes that the meaning of the phrase evolves with them, but that its origin can be found simply: the frustration of being fifteen years old and not wanting to go to school, finding herself in trouble for using class time to make songs instead of assigned work was fuel to seek solace in open air.
The sentiment towards their teachers was incredulity. She explained, “I felt like I had just figured something out, so how do you expect me to ignore this and not spend all of my possible time on it? I had this intense excitement with what songwriting was and trying to be better at it.” A self-titled track will be found on the anticipated record as well, Sofia explained, “I decided to name it after my band after I had written the phrase into the song, it just happened and it felt fitting because it encompasses what the name means to me. It’s a lot about this dreaming of going somewhere else and you don’t really know what this other place is, you just have this urge to leave. I thought of the name ‘Free Range’ and started leaning into those themes that it conjures, like a farm or the countryside—this place in your mind, or a physical place, where you can feel like you’re not constricted by anything. For me initially, it was much less about an actual place I was going to, it was more about my relationship to songwriting. It’s this very free form thing that allows me to go, to get away from my immediate surroundings.”
Revealing the thematics of her current songwriting, Sofia observed, “I’m not writing as explicitly about this idea of leaving the city right now [as found in the record] and that’s a thing I was metaphorically popping into everything. Now it’s ultimately about my relationships to people. Even if it’s not explicit, something that drives a lot of my songwriting is that I’m sober and I write about that in different ways. There’s a progression of songs in the time before I got sober and the time after. I started writing about struggling with being an addict before I told anybody and it’s weird to think about how long ago that was.”
They touched on the convenience of poetics, working through what is painful to balance the difficultly of revisiting wounds openly in conversation with others. It’s a funny thing because you might seem totally fine and then you get on stage and sing something totally depressing and it’s like ‘What’s up, what’s your deal, what are you not telling me?’ Everyone has dark things in their life and to expect that people don’t is unrealistic. It wouldn’t be possible to walk around talking about it all the time and [we] figure out ways to work through it on our own. That’s always been songwriting for me, where I don’t always have to get super vulnerable in every conversation or with my friends in a way that might be uncomfortable. It can be this unspoken thing and if I want to talk about it I can but I’m choosing to talk about it through my songs. I can go up [on stage] and say it and come off and it doesn’t have to be further discussed, which is nice.”
Sofia’s admiration and interest in storytelling as a means for making sense of the world and her surroundings crosses into several mediums. She likes watching movies (her favorites include Good Will Hunting and Before Sunrise), is always reading “too many books at once”, and has a steady ritual of journaling. They enjoy the variety of each form as “those things are to tune in as much as possible to your own experiences and your life, and I like balancing that with reading where you’re reading about other people’s experiences exclusively and it brings you out of yourself a little bit. It’s an escape in a way that TV is an escape where you can focus on other people’s lives for twenty-five minutes.”
By sharing this thought process she revealed an intense yet curious philosophy of how to interpret the world through what we tell each other indirectly. Reading not only requires intentionality—if you skip it you won’t understand it or be rewarded in time with the click of plot puzzle pieces—it asks one to walk into unfamiliarity with open arms to greet a tale told by someone who took the time to share it. Sofia reminded me that in a fast paced surface level world, to have something based on slow understanding and empathizing with something someone has written is a special feeling and tool for growth. Songwriting is no different, and engaging with Free Range’s music makes room for the echoes of the self to meet the quiet revelations and secrets of a brilliant musician told in just the way they want, no more and no less, over an animated but serene brook of bass, guitar, drums and the occasional steel pedal. In a comforting way, it is another form of communal effort.
While on the topic of storytelling, I asked what Sofia would see if in twenty years they were to look back on a movie chronicling their life, and they again spoke earnestly about the accessibility of engaging with art but this time in their own bubble of reality. “The most interesting thing in my life is the role that I play in the local community here. I have my foot in a few different circles of the scene, a bit divided by age groups.” Sofia is nineteen, and gave some insight to the experience of running around in the free-wheeling Chicago teen rock scene, mentioning that the scene’s feature in The Chicago Reader a few months prior which followed bands Horsegirl, Lifeguard, Dwaal Troupe, and Friko building their youthfully bright indie punk sludgy circus brought happiness to see the ingenuity of their friends recognized. “People my age have a really strong scene, it’s felt so special for so long but it’s also been so normalized for me, it’s just my friends! I think my friends are the most talented people ever and it’s crazy that these people are really close together making my favorite music and art.” Communing at twice-monthly Record Club, poring over each edition of music zine Hallogallo (“It felt cool because it was someone within our friend group saying ‘[our scene] is sick, I feel like someone should know about this”), playing in each other’s bands, is lifeblood for fostering an inclusive cast of like minded youth sharing collaborative space and reveling in the appreciation and joy of what was possible to make. Sofia mentioned it was intense and maybe off-putting for those who don’t feel as strongly about creativity, but ultimately they are the biggest advocate for art without isolation. It’s only obvious to Sofia that her beloved community would have “the sense to bring people together. People shouldn’t be independently doing art. It’s so much easier, fun and rewarding when you’re in a group. That’s not to say that [we] all have to be working on one painting or everyone is in the same band, but if you feel like you have these people that are in it with you, that you want to play shows with, [want to] buy their records, show up for them…That’s huge. I talk about ‘our community’ but every single time an event happens with us, the meaning of ‘our community’ grows, because someone else finds out about it, someone else starts to care.”
They painted a picture and explained, “There’s this stereotypical artist that’s isolated and lonely and always depressed in their room all night, [an addict] with a huge library of work. It has this mystique to it but for me it’s really just sad. There have been moments where I’ve been drawn to that idea, but art doesn’t have to be so lonely. It’s a really discouraging hard thing to do in our world and to try and do it alone—you’re gonna fail, and you’re not gonna have fun with it. trying to rewrite what it means to be an artist, not doing it all on your own is something that I really care about. I care about people lifting each other up and having these spaces to really be themselves and do something that’s seen as important to all of us.” •
Watch Free Range’s music video for “All My Thoughts” here, to their new song ‘Want To Know’ here and grab tickets for their December 9th set opening for Elizabeth Moen’s album release show at Empty Bottle here.