Sofie Royer – Cowboy Mouth
Sofie Royer is back with a new single on Stones Throw, and the source material here is about as specific as it gets. “Cowboy Mouth” takes its title from the 1971 play co-written by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, which Royer read while in Los Angeles. She made the track with members of NYC group Rebounder, longtime collaborators who have worked with her across previous releases.
The song started to take shape around a very particular image: a box of discarded shoes left on a street, photographed and posted to Instagram by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Royer took it from there. “There was something so decidedly moving yet egregious about all the different pairs”, she says. “I was left wondering who they’d belonged to, who had walked in them; that it prompted my own little silly fantasy of what would play out if I’d tried on a pair, discarded my own and just kept walking”. That combination of literary influence and street-level image is exactly the kind of detail that tends to make her work feel grounded, even when the arrangements tip toward the ornate.
The production pairs string arrangements with synthesizer work, and it sits squarely in the electro-pop territory she has been building toward since her earlier recordings. There is a classically trained sensibility underneath the surface, but it does not announce itself. What I notice is how efficiently the song moves between its ideas without overstating any of them.
