Artist	Song
Sophie B. Hawkins	Did We Not Choose Each Other [Live] (3:47)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Swing From Limb To Limb (My Home Is In Your Jungle) (4:15)
Sophie B. Hawkins	As I Lay Me Down (4:08)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Help Me Breathe (5:41)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Saviour Child [Live] (4:29)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Walking On Thin Ice (4:06)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Before I Walk On Fire (4:57)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Mr. Tugboat Hello [Live] (3:00)
Sophie B. Hawkins	I Need Nothing Else (4:14)
Sophie B. Hawkins	California Here I Come (4:37)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Mysteries We Understand [Live] (3:24)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Blue (4:03)
Sophie B. Hawkins	The Darkest Childe (5:53)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover (5:22)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Sometimes I See (4:38)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Feelin' Good (5:28)
Sophie B. Hawkins	Walking In My Blue Jeans (Strange Thing) (3:52)
Sophie B. Hawkins	As I Lay Me Down (Butcher remix) (3:48)

Comment:

"... it's a new dawn, and a new day, and a new life for me."

Who the bleep is Sophie B. Hawkins, and why does she deserve a single-artist mix? The All Music Guide reports she's "a singer-songwriter who often gets overlooked because she's too mainstream for alternative and too unusual for the mainstream" -- and as we can come to expect, that severely understates the case.

Sophie Ballantine Hawkins is, to my mind, one of the absolute hidden treasures of pop music. If I'm being reductive, I'd say she's *the* hidden treasure of pop music. I'm sure you can all flame me with counterexamples, but I'm glad to be far from omniscient about such things. Right now, it's Sophie B. Hawkins who's my personal pop torchbearer.

And by pop I don't mean something like (the amazing) Robert Wyatt's Cuckooland, an album that clearly loves its pop sensibility, but at the same time inhabits the higher depths of weird-for-its-own-sake. No, Sophie B. Hawkins is definitely weird (judging by her live album, she's more than a little manic) but it's not for nothing that AMG compares her to Madonna and Sheryl Crow. It just all goes towards making her music catchier, friendlier, beatsier, ecstatic-er and danceabler. The conclusion I have to reach is that if I'd never heard Sophie B. Hawkins, I'd dismiss her as an untenable fantasy.

I would have added "accessibler" to the list, too, but for a few things. She's bisexual, and her great mass of explicitly homoerotic songs can't do much for the unenlightened crowd. She's also got this silly little thing about artistic integrity, breaking from her major label in a tiff over one instrument choice on one song that, in giving us Wilderness, has got to be one of the most fruitful overreactions in pop music history. You'd never know she was once nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy (in 1992; I didn't either, actually. Who knew?).

So this is Sophie B. Hawkins: supernatural autochthonic pop princess, shit-talking djembe-playing New Yorker painter dear to my heart, *real* sexual liberator of universal love who just wants to take *everybody* higher. Let's take it album by album:

TONGUES AND TAILS (1992; tracks 7, 10, 14): Sophie really threw everything into her debut album, and it's still the most easily appreciated. It's also the source of "Damn I Wish I Were Your Lover", the only one of her songs that people seem to know anything at all about. She sure showed a lot of promise here; who's disappointed that it all went down the drain afterward?

WHALER (1994; tracks 2, 3, 9, 15): A weird, New Agey followup that's somehow also a concept album about water. I fell in love with "As I Lay Me Down" well before I was ever into music as music, bought this album for $5 at a street fair, and it's still my favorite SBH album. Compared to what's to come, it's all Top 40 stuff.

TIMBRE (1999; tracks 4, 13, 17): By far Sophie's darkest album, and the first time you ever hear her claiming that love does *not* solve all (it must have been shocking for the diehards to see a song called "No Connection"!) - which makes her more human, but I don't think anyone was ready for what was to come.

WILDERNESS (2004; tracks 6, 12, 16) and BAD KITTY BOARD MIX (LIVE) (2006; tracks 1, 5, 8, 11): The five-year gap is telling. Sophie has nothing more to prove to anyone, and she's more her own person than she ever was. She's transformed her style into a Van Morrison-esque rock-jazz thing, with some incredible improvised word-spouting, and it turns out her catchiness doesn't suffer one bit. She's said her live album was put out to finally show the world she knows just who she is; how long will it take for the world to catch up?

... Well now, it should be said, I also think this is the closest I've ever come to perfection in a single artist mix. *This* is what an artist of this caliber needs (not her silly solely-first-two-albums-sourced commercial compilation). Listen to it! "Thrill me baby. I need nothing else!"

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