I’m sure many of you will recall The Lasses, an Amsterdam-based folk duo comprised of Sophie Janna and Margot Merah. It took a while before Sophie herself was ready to share her own songs, but in 2021 she released her debut EP Wide World (out now), from which we premiered the title track and Starlight.
Today, we have the pleasure of sharing a beautiful new animated video by visual artist Alemşah Fırat (more about Alemşah below) for Janna’s latest single, Thistle.
Sophie tells us:
Thistle is a song about hope in times of climate change. In our concrete cities, there is barely any space for nature. Thistle is a plea to the flowers to find their way back despite humans messing up. With ever-increasing anxiety about the rising temperatures, Sophie Janna sings about finding peace in nature’s resilience. The inspiration for the song came from spending time at her parent’s house when she had just become a mother herself. It was May, and the wayside was full of flowers. Janna was wondering whether all those flowers would still be there when her baby would be old enough to learn their names – as she herself had learnt the names from her own mother as they walked along the road.
Visual artist Alemşah Fırat translated Janna’s song into a magical realistic narrative in which she draws from her own experience with city life in Izmir, Turkey, and the time she was looking after a baby magpie, dreaming and worrying about the world in which it was growing up.
Alemşah Fırat is a visual artist and 2D animation director from Izmir, Turkey, with degrees from Farnham and Brussels. She specializes in oil-on-glass films that explore collective consciousness through the dreamy nature of the medium. Building on her experience with oil-on-glass, in her recent collaborations with music artists, she incorporates digital tools to create dancing paintings. Fırat is motivated by the belief that art can compensate for the lack of ritual practice in the modern world to approach what lies beyond physical reality.
https://www.alemsahfirat.com/
Sophie‘s first EP of original songs, Wide World, was released on Revanche Records in 2021. Janna is currently working on a full-length album.
https://www.sophiejanna.nl/