Allow Us To Reintroduce Randa Leigh.
by Pierce Courchaine
Randa Leigh, one half of the R&B duo SOS, answers her phone in a car somewhere just outside New York City. She’s on the last leg of a cross-country move from Portland, Oregon to her new home in New York City. She seems excited and hardly nervous about moving her entire life. That might just be exhaustion, though. Her band’s latest album dropped in October and she spent the summer as the face of an Ardency Inn campaign. Everything seems to be happening at once.
Leigh and Brian Vincent make up SOS. Their self-titled album, released in October, took roughly two years to make. SOS is a compact nine tracks of Leigh’s seducing voice layered over dark beats. It’s an ominous album examining the difficult realities of intra- and interpersonal relationships. The record enters a surging R&B genre and can stand tall next to like-minded albums from artists like FKA Twigs, Blood Orange and Rhye. Still, SOS has crafted a sound very much their own by borrowing elements from a number of genres, such as hip-hop, calypso, gospel, and soul, which is something Leigh and Vincent spent four years doing.
“I think we’ve gotten to a point where we know what we want and we know how we want to sound,” Leigh says.
It wasn’t always that way. SOS started in 2010 as the result of a budding friendship between Leigh and Vincent at Oregon State University. Both were already musicians working on different projects. Leigh is a classically trained pianist and vocalist and Vincent worked on various hip-hop projects around the area while at school. But it was in poetry, not music, in which the duo first collaborated.
“It took a long time to actually develop into a cohesive sound,” Leigh says.
The group initially started under the name Shadows on Stars and released a self-titled album shortly after. The songs off the group’s first album are catchy indie pop ballads filled with danceable electronica backdrops. There is something carefree about the sound and the messages in the early work. Comparing it to the band’s latest release, it’s hard to believe they are from the same set of musicians.
If there was a moment when their sound changed, it was covering Lykke Li’s “Little Bit” in early 2013. The cover features all of the sound elements the group is known for now: the woozy, dreamy beat, Leigh’s exposed vocals, the gradual build in pace. For almost two years, Leigh and Vincent worked on SOS, even retiring to rural Oregon to write and record at one point.
Together, Leigh and Vincent contribute to all aspects of the band’s music. There are no assigned roles and a lot of the writing is done in the studio, in the moment. Before the release of this year’s album, Leigh and Vincent changed the group’s name to SOS, feeling it was a better reflection of their new sound.
“Our sound changed a lot,” Leigh says. “Shadows on Stars was really whimsical. It just sounded different. The name kind of went with that and then we went down this kind of darker road, sound-wise. We wanted something more basic so the name didn’t give away anything in the music.”
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SOS’s lyrics focus heavily on interpersonal relationships, sex and intimacy. Leigh stresses the importance of reality in her music, too. She’d rather see the world as it is and accept it rather than hide realities with wishful lyrics.
Difficult questions are posed in the music. What is it like to date a depressive? What is it like to see a partner deal with addiction? Leigh presents the situations without answers because the first step is seeing difficulties with clarity. Solving them comes later, if at all.
“People aren’t always ready to think that way,” Leigh says. “Some people would rather talk about pop tarts and candy in a song.”
It sounds like SOS is a downer of a band, but that’s not the case. There is no judgment in the music. Tracks like, “I Like That Ur Nice” and “She Wants” paint imperfect pictures of relationships with love and dysfunctionality. Being imperfect is acceptable; running from it isn’t.
“We try to talk about it in a way that’s encouraging to the audience,” Leigh says. “It’s more about people not feeling lonely in whatever they are experiencing. The more you talk about it, the less lonely the listener is going to be.”
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Leigh laughs easily and often punctuates her sentences with a reflective, “yeah,” as if she’s looking back on the sentence and making sure it sounded the way she wanted it to sound. She loves being out in the wilderness, away from distraction, but both her and Vincent also love Netflix, social media and connectivity. Sprinkled through the album are little excerpts from movies and television. At the end of “Gorgeous” is a sample of Ryan Gosling in the movie “Blue Valentine.” The sample comes from a scene where Gosling’s character is pleading his wife to jet off to a hotel room for the night in an attempt to help their marriage. The clip fits with the overall theme of the album of troubled relationships, but Leigh promises that is an accident.
“As we watched shows, if something sounded really cool to us, we would throw it into a song,” Leigh says. “It didn’t necessarily have to connect to the song at all.”
A particularly existential line from Mad Men appears at the end of “Dead or Alive” about the world being tiny and unprotected. Leigh stresses again that it wasn’t on purpose.
“It’s more of throwing in little tidbits of what our pop culture is like,” she says.
Leigh stops me mid-question and warns she’s approaching the Holland Tunnel. She might lose me when she goes through, she says. For the past few years, her life has been a series of transitions. She has a different band name, a different sound and, now, a different city.
I try to picture where she is and if she can see the lights of New York City just before she plunges into the tunnel and drives the final miles.
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Pierce Courchaine is a contributor for The Riveter and compiles our weekly playlist The Crate Digger. You can follow him on Twitter at @PJCourchaine.
Top photo by Kenny Sweeney, courtesy Crash Avenue.
