Sophie Flynn has just to released her debut EP to the world even though she has only been making music for two years. At the end of her third year of university, Flynn is busy and seems pushed for time when she sits down to talk. It’s a windy day and as she rushes inside the small side street café straight from a lecture she seems bright and cheerful. She fixes her shoulder length brunette hair in place and takes a seat, she wears summer clothes but with a jacket to keep out the windy chill.

Flynn is a music student at Dartington College of Arts, she has been learning a lot about making music in a short space of time.

Sophie Flynn

“I’ve only been seriously making music for probably about two years. I started teaching myself guitar in first year, and then didn’t really have any confidence until second year; everyone at uni kind of terrified me because they were much more advanced. During second year I started writing much more of my own stuff and then this year I geared everything up, I’m doing it properly now I think for the first time really.”

Although she only got serious with her music at university, Flynn has been singing since she was young.

“I don’t really remember when I started singing. I started getting lessons when I was about 15 but I think I only did it because my sister did it. My sister was three years older than me and I think I just basically copied everything she did. She used to sing when we were younger so I got interested in it, but she doesn’t have any interest in it now because she’s terrified of being on stage.”

Flynn is fortunate to be blessed with a beautiful singing voice that is light and cheerful to listen to and it becomes clear over the duration of the EP where she has taken inspiration from those she admires.

“I love Laura Marling she’s around my age so that always terrifies me, she’s on her third album and she’s 22, I haven’t even started yet and I’m like how did you get that far? I liked the way she did it as well you could tell she hadn’t done it for money. I love Regina Spektor as well, I adore her, I just think she’s amazing. I’m quite obsessed with women in music, people say I don’t really like very many men, I do, I just think I relate more to the women. I think there’s some really great women in music.”

Although Flynn seems to be establishing herself as a fantastic new talent in folk-pop music, it isn’t what she originally intended to do, she made a life changing decision on an impulse.

“I don’t know why I’m studying music because I always do theatre. I just wanted to do theatre and then I suddenly decided that I really didn’t want to. Everyone told me not to do music because I didn’t have music GCSE or A Level, so I just went and did grades outside of school and then just applied everywhere.

I just decided I wanted to do it and surprised everyone a little bit, I wanted to do it and I did it.”

A third of the way through her course, Dartington merged with University College Falmouth and all of the students had to make the move down to Cornwall with it.

“It took me ages to work out how to write a song”

“I did know we were coming but I didn’t really think about it. It was a partial choice; I knew I’d be here (Falmouth) eventually. Stupidly, when I applied to Dartington and they said ‘oh you know you’re only going to be there for a year and then you’ll go to Falmouth’, we were like ‘yeah, yeah that’s fine’ but no one actually looked at Falmouth and that’s like the main portion of our degree. We all just went to Dartington, it was stupid really.”

University has been a learning curve for Flynn in many ways as she adapted to a new way of life and struggled with the egos of her fellow musicians.

“I think when I started a lot of musicians liked to talk a lot about what they did and they’re very kind of … you get a lot of egos. If you don’t have a big ego to start with you’ll get lost very quickly, which I think I did a lot until I went to New York half way through last year. I spent quite a lot of time there and because I didn’t know anybody already I got to build up this new kind of, not personality I was the same person, but you don’t have preconceptions. I think especially when you’re at uni, you start at a point and people find it very hard to see you differently.”

Alongside this, Flynn was developing her song writing skills and quickly discovering that writing the sort of songs that get played on the radio isn’t as easy as she first thought it was.

“It took me ages to work out how to write a song. I think it’s quite strange, when you first start writing songs it’s like you don’t understand how a song ever gets written. You listen to other people’s songs and you’re like I don’t get that, I don’t get how you do it. I’ve written quite a lot of bad songs. I’ve just kept on trying and trying.”

This trial end error process helped Flynn nail the gentle acoustic sound of her debut EP, as she found that some songs come easier than others.

Sophie Flynn

“I used to write a lot with my boyfriend, he’d just play chords and I’d play chords and he’d give me a subject and say sing about this, sing about this, sing about this and one day he was like sing about a paper shredder and the whole song (Paper Shredder) just got made up like that. USI was written while I was in spar I wrote it and I came home and told my boyfriend and then within about ten minutes the whole thing was written. I think it’s really hard though because whenever you feel like you’ve kind of found a way to write a song, it changes, you can’t do it anymore. It depends on the song, and my mood!”

To add finishing touches to the EP, Flynn needed some artwork and for that she looked in the direction of her illustrator boyfriend, Tom Dales, a University College Falmouth graduate who created a lovely handmade finish to the songs with the very hand drawn images and stop motion video for USI.

“He has a huge input, he hand draws everything, he did the logo (the lion) and designed all the website. I like the kind of DIY hand drawn, a lot of stuff now is done on computers, on Photoshop and stuff like that and I think it all looks quite samey. I’m very lucky though obviously, I have somebody who will do all of that for me, which is really nice.”

With her debut EP out and gaining attention from the likes of BBC introducing already Flynn is all set to be the next big female folk musician when she graduates, but she is not out for fame and fortune from her music.

“I want to be a recording artist, that’s the big goal. But if that doesn’t happen I still want to be something in the music industry, I’m really interested in management and A+R and that sort of thing. I’m not looking for a record deal so much, I’m just trying to do it independently, put music out and make money living off music in whatever way I can.”

This all seems a bit vague, but these are long term plans, Flynn know exactly what she is going to be doing when she leaves university in the imminent future.

“I want to move to London. I’m doing an internship with Sony which is based around wherever you live, so it’s four or five people from wherever you live and at the end of that only one of you out of the 50 who is doing it gets a job so I’m thinking my best bet is to be in London. I want to gig a lot and kind of build up a lot of the stuff from the EP we’ve just recorded and get it in magazines. I wanted to do lots of festivals but the way it worked out with the EP being recorded so late in the year was that I’d missed a lot of the deadlines. Because a lot of festivals start in January, some start in October the year before so obviously this didn’t come out till May so I didn’t have a chance. It’ll just be a case of setting up gigs, moving to London and trying to break into the music industry.”

Finally before she rushes off for a rehearsal, Flynn offers some advice for aspiring musicians and songwriters.

“Don’t be intimidated by a lot of people because it doesn’t take as much as you think it will to get to where you see other people are at. It’s just about confidence really, and what you see as people having a lot of confidence and a lot of success is often just them talking about what they do.”

Flynn’s EP is available to download for free from her website and bandcamp page: http://sophieflynn.bandcamp.com/