St. Vincent just released a new album, and one song that pays tribute to the late SOPHIE has proven incredibly polarizing.
“Sweetest Fruit,” the eighth track (of 10) on the album All Born Screaming, opens with the lyrics, “My SOPHIE climbed the roof / To get a better view of the Moon / Moon / My God, then one wrong step / Took her down to the depths / But for a minute, what a view / What a view.” SOPHIE, the pioneering electronic music producer, died in January 2021 after accidentally slipping and falling from the balcony of an apartment where she was staying in Greece. According to a statement from her family, she had climbed up to watch the full moon. So St. Vincent’s tribute is a rather literal retelling of the circumstances of SOPHIE’s death, though she also told Rolling Stone that she “was a fan of SOPHIE’s from afar but we never met.”
“As artists, you can feel a camaraderie with artists if you like their work, even if you don’t know them,” she told the magazine. “And I like this idea that we’re all fighting the same fight, we’re all part of the same army, so when you see somebody go down, it’s very heartbreaking.” Later in the song, St. Vincent also pays tribute to Daniel Sotomayor, the first openly gay political cartoonist. Like SOPHIE, Sotomayor was a queer artist who died before his time — he passed at the age of 33 due to AIDS-related complications after seroconverting at 30.
The singer first spoke to her intentions with “Sweetest Fruit” in an interview with The Guardian. “The internet twists things, and I don’t want it to be seen like I’m trying to capitalize on somebody’s death,” she said, adding that the song is about “people trying for transcendence, and at least they were taking a big swing or trying for something beautiful.”
However, some have argued that St. Vincent’s tribute to the producer doesn’t quite translate. Musician Jackie Extreme posted a screencap of the lyrics to X with an emoji-heavy request to St. Vincent to “take this down please.”
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