SoKo mines her psychic backyard

The two SoKos: first, there’s a dream-pop side where sensory input is reduced to a simple trickle of fragile chords and a voice that sounds as if filtered through layers of gauze, or, the darker singer-songwriter SoKo, who can break it down using only voice and guitar: “I would have met your friends/ We would have had a drink or two/ They would have liked me/ ’Cause sometimes, I’m funny.” SoKo comes with a lot of thorny baggage that she unloads in each song. For fodder, she mines her own psychic backyard. She once told a reporter that she’d lost her father by age 5 and hit the road at age 16, and that she’d spent years in therapy as a result.

Born in France, now living in Los Angeles, SoKo had hit singles around the globe early on in her career — everywhere, it seems, but in America. Belgium, Australia, and Denmark loved her. Finally, SoKo entered the Billboard Hot 100 after a YouTube film short she appeared in went viral. First Kiss also used one of her songs, “We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow,” in the soundtrack.

Stephanie Sokolinski was born in Bordeaux in 1985. She calls acting her first love (Augustine was her big breakout film) and admits that the making of movies gets in the way of making records. She calls herself a white Goth. SoKo has no steady touring band but instead hires musical friends in whatever town she happens to find herself. By the time she plays here, her second full-length, My Dreams Dictate My Reality, should have been released. If the single previewed in January is any indication, this record will be even darker than its predecessor, 2012’s I Thought I Was an Alien. Life does have meaning, SoKo’s songs seem to say, but you gotta figure it out for yourself.