“As long as I’ve been conscious, it’s always been about music for me.”

This is what Los Angeles-based alt-pop musician Sophia James says about her love for music, about a life that has never existed without it. “The musical journey has been the life journey, I guess,” she continued. “There is no separation.”

Whether this declaration is destiny or chance, one will never know, as James grew up in a family of professional musicians. With a drummer father and a mother who was a singer, James succumbed to that gravitational pull from birth.

“I used to follow my mom around the house, harmonizing with her—not necessarily well or anything, but I was very receptive to what I was hearing and being like, ‘Oh my God, I got it. I want to follow that,’” she recalled.

From there, James followed what seems to be a traditional path for children who love music (or maybe “traditional” in just my own personal experience): classical piano lessons, musical theater, and private songwriting. Though she quickly realized a love for the compositional side of music, it wasn’t until college at the University of California, Los Angeles that James gained the confidence from a songwriting course to share what she’s written.

“My adulthood has been this really colorful journey of making a career out of [songwriting] and trying to make it work and loving every moment of it,” she said, “especially when I can be in that creative space and in the recording studio.”

As a jazz major—a track of study that James admitted sometimes receives mixed reactions—James learned how jazz in particular makes it way into every genre of music. Despite this, she’s been trying to steer her own music away from falling victim to art-school syndrome. Instead, she’s chasing after music that evokes feeling, not mental burnout.

“Across the past few years, I’ve been veering away from jazz structure and trying to not be so heady in my music,” she said. “I’m not trying to put a bunch of chords in there for the sake of it being musically sophisticated. I’m after a feeling. Jazz originally was all feeling and no head.”

Though earlier releases mirror this jazz influence—“You can take the girl out of jazz school, but you can’t take the jazz school out of the girl,” James joked.—her latest EP sonically genre-jumps.

This, however, is exactly what James wants to accomplish: “I guess my goal in life is just to follow wherever my musical passion leads me and sort of synthesize as much as I can into something new,” she said. “That passion has taken me through many different doors. Sometimes that leads me to pop, sometimes that leads me to folk, sometimes it’s jazz, sometimes it’s alternative rock, sometimes it’s shoegaze… the doors keep multiplying every time I step through another one. So I’m trying to collect them all and just make one giant doorway.”

Sleepwalking at 65 MPH —a title that comes from James’s own recounting that “Trying to make sense of the world during my mid-20s has felt like sprinting on foot down the highway with no control.”— is her most recent release, a collection that combines 90’s vibes with lyricism that reflects modern-day struggles. From the yacht rocky “Ryan” to the Alanis Morissette-inspired “Finish What You Started” to the harmony-heavy “It’s Up To You,” Sleepwalking at 65 MPH captures the avalanche of feelings that comes with living through your 20s.

Perhaps most striking in the line-up, though, is “Gun in the Garden,” a grungy and gritty track that laments the current political climate. It stands out from the rest of the EP, but in a good way, almost forcing the listener to pay attention to its meaning. “I just realized my entire life I’ve been, especially in the States, just so anxious and paranoid about getting shot anywhere from school to the grocery store to the movie theater,” James began. “That was the news cycle we were inundated with growing up. I remember Sandy Hook and Parkland [shootings] so clearly. There were so many school shootings in particular that affected our generation (Gen Z) very drastically and at such a large scale. So it’s always something that’s been very much in the back of my mind.”

She continued, “I had never written a political song before or a song that looks at the world around me and documents it, so I wanted to do something there. So [producer Alex Bilowitz] made this beat, I started playing some guitar chords, and then tried to make this stream-of-consciousness-esque song to convey the dizzying anxiety and paranoia that comes with living in the US right now.”

James recognizes, though, that music is subjective. And with the release of Sleepwalking at 65 MPH, she knows that, logistically, it won’t be for everyone with an air of maturity that even world-renowned artists lack. “I have such strong opinions about what music I like and what music I don’t like,” she said. “I don’t want [the EP]  to be an exception to anyone’s taste. But I hope it inspires people to go seek out more music and just fall in love with music a little more.”

In an era where logic and detachment seem to take precedence over the messier business of the heart, Sleepwalking at 65 MPH is a welcome burst of drama—in the best possible sense. It’s tangible proof that James isn’t afraid to feel, even if what she feels is ugly.

And with winter approaching, she’s preparing to retreat into her own kind of hibernation, trading the spotlight and go-go-go mentality for the solitude of the creative process until the next project takes shape: “I’m going to be doing a little bit of traveling and a lot of writing and just observing and feeling and writing it down and turning it into music and spending time with people I fuck with. I think I’m just going to maybe crawl back into my creative hole a little bit. I’m going to figure it out. I’ll think of something.”

Photo courtesy of Emily Entz | Interviewed on November 3, 2026