Latest news with #Aria-nominated
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Japan's love hotels, Tom Hanks' daughter, and the double life of Gordi
Happy Saturday! This week André 3000 wore a baby grand piano strapped to his back while holding a garbage bag – 2025 has been full of surprises. Just like this next newsletter, dear readers. It's got your weekend reads sorted with trips, tips and talent. EA Hanks grew up with a very famous father – 'not just the Hollywood Everyman, but America's Dad,' Emine Saner writes, after speaking with the daughter of Tom Hanks about her upcoming memoir. The author has explored the Hollywood side of her childhood, but what she's really trying to make sense of is her late mother's life. 'A lifetime spent on very thin ice': One half of Hanks' early life was spent with her mother, Susan, suffering with addiction and mental health problems, which contributed to an abusive relationship. The other half: EA spent with her father, Tom, on film sets and in a house full of love and structure. She tells Saner about her road trip back into her complicated past – recreating a fraught 1996 journey with Susan nearly 20 years after her death. How long will it take to read: Six minutes. • In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat The French photographer François Prost has been on a '3,000km pilgrimage of passion', driving south from Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, to the island of Shikoku, to document the eye-catching architecture of Japan's love hotels in his new book. But could the hotels be getting too seedy, wonders Oliver Wainwright? Prost's images don't venture inside. They do, however, capture the 'dazzlingly imaginative' range of visions. Traditional teahouses to themed palaces: Dating as far back as the 1600s, 'lovers' teahouses' were traditionally discreet from the outside – then, as Wainwright explains, a postwar economic boom saw them 'blossom into elaborate sexual amusement parks in the 1970s and 80s, with themes ranging from fairytale to sci-fi to medieval cosplay'. For babymaking? Yep, Wainwright reckons a good chunk of the country's population could've been 'conceived on a rotating bed, or inside a fantastical tropical grotto surrounded by model dinosaurs'. How long will it take to read: Three minutes. Further reading: Speaking of dinosaurs … check out Australia's best small museums: celebrating apples, bottles, country music, and – yes – dinosaurs. Sophie Payten has been living a double life. 'In one, she is Gordi, the Aria-nominated singer-songwriter who has worked with Bon Iver and Troye Sivan, and made Chris Martin cry,' writes Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen. In the other, somehow, she has time to be a doctor. Fate: When Payten's second studio album came out, she quit her job to tour and focus on music. But when Covid hit, she was back in the hospital. *** 'I am an intensely emotional person … but in the hospital, you have to really learn how to disassociate in a way, because you're surrounded by suffering, and if you take all that on, you would explode.' – Sophie Payten Silver lining? Her latest album, Like Plasticine, merges both lives. How long will it take to read: Three minutes. Further reading: He's one of Gordi's collaborators, and a favourite of mine … Bon Iver on romance, retirement and his rapturous new record. The Guardian has been reporting on a new space online – the 'womanosphere'. Like its manosphere counterpart (a section of the internet promoting masculinity, misogyny … and the awful list goes on), this online corner is all about pushing anti-feminist ideas on to young women. So, what does it have to do with Blake Lively? Remember Johnny Depp v Amber Heard? Blake Lively's situation is a new level ugly, says Steve Rose, who has looked into how conservative personalities such as Candace Owens and the American right declared war on the actor after she sued her director, co-star and co-producer Justin Baldoni, and he sued her back. Candace Owens' view: 'She has proven herself not to be a kind person,' the US commentator said in January. 'And that's largely due to the fact that she is a modern feminist.' How long will it take to read: Five and a half minutes. More tabs to open: Anna Silman's 'womanosphere' deep dive, and Van Badham on the question of whether the 'womanosphere' will succeed. 'Self-checkouts, drive-throughs, hotdog stands, drug stores, and a bottled water stall at a jazz festival' are all places where Americans have told the Guardian they are being asked to tip, Jem Bartholomew writes. 'Before, tipping was considered generosity,' Garrett Petters, a 29-year-old architect in Dallas, says. 'Now, it's about guilt.' Is US tipping culture here to stay? For some consumers, it's the least they can do for workers during tough times. But others are pushing back. A 33-year-old from Massachusetts: Ellen has been avoiding the 'suggested tip' starting at 25%, and instead selects 'the lowest option, or not tipping at all for workers covered by regular minimum wage laws'. A 62-year-old from Florida: Sandra has increased her tip percentage 'from 15% to 20% or 25% recently' for her local workers who have suffered through Covid, and three major storms. How long will it take to read: Three minutes. Enjoying the Five Great Reads email? Then you'll love our weekly culture and lifestyle newsletter, Saved for Later. Sign up here to catch up on the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture, trends and tips for the weekend. And check out the full list of our local and international newsletters.
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How Gordi went from doctor to musician, and back again: ‘In the hospital, you have to learn how to disassociate'
Sophie Payten has lived two lives. In one, she is Gordi, the Aria-nominated singer-songwriter who has worked with Bon Iver and Troye Sivan, and made Chris Martin cry (more on that later). In the other, she is a medical doctor. 'In the early years of my career, I tried to really not talk about medicine in my music life, because they felt so separate,' the 32-year-old says. 'The pandemic really merged them together in a way that I didn't ask for or anticipate.' We meet midweek at Heartbreaker, a Melbourne dive bar close to Payten's heart – 'I'm a huge advocate for a late-night pizza slice,' she grins. But the time we're talking about is far removed from the hustle and bustle surrounding us. In early 2020, Payten had just completed her first year as a junior doctor and quit to focus on music. But when touring ground to a halt, she was whisked back to hospital wards for the next 18 months. 'I didn't write anything during that period … I had no space for creativity,' she recalls. 'I am an intensely emotional person … but in the hospital, you have to really learn how to disassociate in a way, because you're surrounded by suffering, and if you take all that on, you would explode.' It was a while before Payten started writing her third album, Like Plasticine, the title inspired by the medical exam performed to certify death: 'I was really struck by the way that people appear after they've just passed away, and how their skin has this waxy appearance … That made me think of plasticine and how we change into all these shapes in our lives.' A 'very nice friendship' with a patient inspired the ethereal Anaïs Mitchell duet PVC Divide, which opens with a powerful, harrowing lyric: 'She said that she watched him die on FaceTime.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The patient was recovering from a brain tumour and preparing to go home – but then it aggressively returned. Payten sat with him while he video-called his daughter to say he wouldn't survive. 'That was just indescribable, to witness someone contemplating that,' she says. 'I'd never been motivated before to take my experiences from the hospital into my songwriting, but I was so profoundly affected by that.' After lockdowns ended, Payten booked herself into a studio for two intensive 10-day writing sessions, six months apart. 'It was a funny sensation, because I had always felt like songwriting was this impulse that I couldn't control, or like a tap that I couldn't turn off, and suddenly it was off,' she says. 'It was – not to harp on the water metaphor – more like fishing things out of a well.' Payten's partner, fellow singer-songwriter Alex Lahey, accompanied her to the studio on the first day, resulting in the album's latest single, Cutting Room Floor. 'It's truly a positive, inspiring force in my life, to be that close to another songwriter,' Payten says. 'It's like having two brains instead of one.' Plasticine's first two singles, Peripheral Lover and Alien Cowboy, are sonically worlds apart. The first is a glittering synth-pop anthem that Payten was initially unsure about. 'I was terrified of that song for so long … I just wasn't sure if I was ready to embrace that kind of deep pop,' she says. 'I got to a place where I was like, 'I'm just going to get out of the way of this thing and [let it] be what it wants to be.' The latter is all distortion and experimentation, as Payten ponders a speculative queer utopia. On the album, fuzzy iPhone recordings sit alongside polished pop, with one thing holding it all together. 'The reason I love making music, and the reason that I think some people relate to my music, is simply because of the emotion of the thing – I wanted to preserve some of the rawness of those emotions,' Payten says. 'In some moments, you feel so close to the origin of the actual song, and [in] some of them you feel like you stand back and are looking at them from afar.' The album's eclecticism reflects Payten's own diverse taste; her influences include Tegan and Sara, Broken Social Scene, Carly Rae Jepsen, Lomelda, Hurray for the Riff Raff and Caroline Polachek. That range makes Payten's music widely accessible, too – it has featured on soundtracks including The Walking Dead, To All the Boys and, in a full-circle moment, Grey's Anatomy. 'When I was a teenager, I absolutely feasted on Grey's Anatomy and the One Tree Hill soundtrack,' she says. These days Payten lives between Melbourne and Los Angeles, but tirelessly advocates for the Australian music scene as a member of the Music Australia Council, and with Over Our Dead Body, a live music initiative she co-runs with Lahey. 'The issues that the music industry is facing … are very big cultural, economic, social issues,' she says, listing the discoverability and charting of Australian music, and dwindling gig attendance numbers, as some. 'Sometimes it feels like Whac-a-Mole.' As for the moment she shared with Chris Martin? The story goes that Coldplay wanted to meet local artists during the band's Australia tour last year, and Payten went along. Martin singled her out, inviting her to play a song on the piano. She performed her song Lunch at Dune, and when she opened her eyes, he was crying. Her video retelling the story went gangbusters online – but sadly, there's no footage of the actual moment. 'The only viral moment I'd had previously was a video I'd posted of someone brushing their cat in a park,' Payten laughs. '[I was] pleased that this moment actually was so attached to the song, because I just want people to listen, at the end of the day.' Like Plasticine by Gordi is out 8 August (Mushroom Music) Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death. What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it? Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion 1998. Believe by Cher, Together Again by Janet Jackson, Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, Wide Open Spaces by the Chicks, Truly Madly Deeply by Savage Garden. What's the song you wish you wrote? I Know a Place by Muna. What is the song you have listened to the most times this year? Marvin Descending by Christine and the Queens. What is your go-to karaoke song? Sorry by Justin Bieber. What's a song you can never listen to again? Shortnin' Bread (the Wiggles version). What is the first song/album you bought? Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park. What song do you want played at your funeral? This Year's Love by David Gray. What is the best song to have sex to? Thinkin Bout You by Frank Ocean.
