DULUTH — I was standing at Bent Paddle Brewing on Saturday night, watching Sophie Hiroko play a set of her original songs, when Kaylee Matuszak walked up to me.
"Here's a local angle for you," said Matuszak, who is both a musician herself and a park ranger at the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center. "She discovered a shipwreck and it's named after her."
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Somehow that hadn't come up during my earlier conversation with Hiroko, but then, we had a lot of ground to cover. Hiroko is so new on the scene, not much has been written about her.
"This will be my debut single," Hiroko told me about the track she planned to lay down on Monday at Soft Cult Studio in Minneapolis. "That's exciting."
Even before recording her first single, the recent University of Minnesota Duluth graduate is already a mover and shaker on the local music scene. She's curated a couple of shows, including a June DIY event featuring an all-femme lineup.
"I've been super motivated to create these spaces for women and for queer people and femme-identifying people," Hiroko told me.
"Mainstream, or more accessible, bills just are so filled with the same kind of music, and it's usually white men playing jam music," she continued. "No hate! I love that. (In the right) time and place, it's beautiful, it's fun. But it's also kind of frustrating for there to not be lineups dedicated to people who deserve the time and space and energy and attendance."
As if to prove that she doesn't hate on jam bands, Hiroko had an aptly named new group, the Jambronies, open for her at Bent Paddle Brewing on Saturday.
"I feel like mixing the scene is important," said Hiroko. "Clearly, Duluth loves funky jam music, so I think it's important to integrate ... different music with that."
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Hiroko's own songs reflect the influence of the artists she names as two of her biggest influences: Liz Phair and Fiona Apple. She identifies her sound as "tender bubble grunge."
To elaborate, she said, "My guitar has a little bit of distortion to it, but the lyrics are all really tender and heartfelt. There are definitely elements of activism in my lyrics, but also lots of personal themes, surrounding death and grief and big heart feelings. I'm a Pisces."
On Saturday, Hiroko played with bassist Ned Netzel and drummer Tommy Kishida, a rhythm section adding texture to her strummed electric. (Kishida is moving out of town, Hiroko explained regretfully from the stage. She's in the process of finding a new local drummer to work with.)
In true '90s fashion, Hiroko writes songs that wrestle with their own accessibility: a hooky chorus or lilting vocal run yields to a thorny verse, Hiroko's voice weaving through the chord changes and often lingering on extended notes. The songs can feel urgently confessional, but they unfold on their own terms instead of begging for the listener's attention.
"I started writing songs when I was in high school, but I didn't really take it that seriously until after I graduated college, had more time on my hands, felt more creative," said Hiroko, who grew up on Park Point (hence the shipwreck discovery) and attended Duluth East.
During songs on Saturday, Hiroko's face reflected the often uncomfortable themes of her lyrics: among them abuse, patriarchy, the complexities of friendship and the fragility of life. (One of her songs is simply titled "Death.")
"My lyrics are," she told me, "deep cuts into how I feel going through the emotions of day to day, or going through trials and tribulations of life."
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Hiroko performs under a stage name, but it's also her real name.
"Hiroko is my middle name," the musician explained, "which is my grandma's name, who's from Japan. I have some mixed cultural identity. I'm 25% Japanese; my dad's from Japan. Also ... my great-grandpa was Ojibwe."
While her background "inspires me to create space" for diverse artists, said Hiroko, "I don't consider myself a person of color. I definitely benefit from white privilege, and it's kind of a weird place to be trying to figure out how to identify, but I definitely notice that there are very few musicians of color in Duluth."
Hiroko is also a member of a new band making waves on Duluth's indie scene: an "intersectional feminist riot grrrl punk band," as she describes it. C U Next Tuesday had the honor of being the last band to play Wussow's on New Year's Eve.
"My experience with the Duluth music scene has been very white, male, cis(gender), het(erosexual) dominated," said Hiroko. "Up until the time I got behind the microphone and realized that the scene is so much more inclusive and diverse than I really realized, which has been hugely inspiring for me."
When Hiroko started writing songs, in high school, "it felt really overwhelming to me. I feel like I could tell that I had talent, and that kind of scared me." After ending a limiting personal relationship and gaining more experience, "I feel so much more comfortable in who I am as a person, and more comfortable with being vulnerable."
As for Sophie's Wreck, after being documented by divers it disappeared under the lake's shifting sands. Back in 2008, diver Jay Hanson told the News Tribune that the ship's identity "might always be a mystery."
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The Trust Project
