Sophie Janna toured the world with her duo The Lasses before she dared to share her own songs on the stage. Vulnerable, honest and captivating, Sophie Janna’s songs deal with being a soft human in a concrete world. With those songs, she captured the attention of Lisa Hannigan, who asked her to open for her at a sold-out show in Tivoli for 2000 people. 

 

Sophie's natural singing style and her clear tone reveal that she was born into a family of singers. But she truly found her own voice when she lived in Edinburgh, where traditional ballads are still performed in pubs and living rooms, accompanied sparsely by a guitar, a violin or a softly hummed harmony. Sophie took her love for traditional songs with her to hometown Amsterdam and kept singing them at them at sessions in the Netherlands.

 

In 2013, Sophie met sound engineer and musician Nicholas O'Brien. He invited her to record an album at his studio in Paris, which became Laurels: eleven traditionals about heartbreak and soft dew. For those unfamiliar with the term traditional, these are old songs with stories that have been sung for decades or often even centuries, because their content is universal - human love and loss. To lose yourself in that universal experience helps to put your life in perspective and makes you feel less alone. ​It is that feeling that drives Sophie to create music: the hope that someone else feels less alone by hearing her stories. Her first solo EP with original songs was released on Revanche Records in December 2021 and presented in Paradiso-Noord in May 2022. She's currently working on her new album (working title: Thistle).

​

Other projects

In 2011, Sophie worked with Flemish balfolk group Hot Griselda, lending her voice to their Tinderbox album and performing with them at folk festivals in Belgium, France and The Netherlands. From 2005 to 2010 Sophie also sang with Gilles Rullman (fiddle), Ies Muller (flute), Rob Forkner (bodhrán) and Theo Burghouts (bouzouki) as Bound for the Waves. 

​

Sophie's musical life revolves around Mulligans, an Irish pub in Amsterdam that hosts traditional music sessions every Wednesday and Sunday. At that pub, during one of those sessions, she met with fellow singer Margot Merah. They soon formed a band called The Lasses and started performing all over the Netherlands and Europe, and even went as far as the US, Canada and Japan. Most of Sophie's live gigs today are with The Lasses, but she also loves to keep performing solo.

​

This is the really long biography for Sophie Janna - for the short one, click here. 

​ 

​

​