Feb 13, 2023
By Caleb Campbell
Photography by Alexa Viscius
As Free Range, Chicago singer/songwriter Sofia Jensen crafts gentle indie folk laced with lithe pop melodies. Written in what Jensen calls their “nocturnal year,” their forthcoming debut album, Practice, came together during a series of nighttime songwriting sessions in the darkest moments of the pandemic. Jensen then brought the nascent tracks to producer and collaborator Jack Henry, who worked with Jensen and bassist Bailey Mitzenberger to transform the spectral folk offerings into thriving pastoral gems.
Jensen spent the last year teasing the record with a series of singles, “All My Thoughts,” “Want To Know,” and “Growing Away,” and today they’re back with a final new track, “Forgotten,” premiering with Under the Radar.
“Forgotten” is another piece of warm and sun-lit indie folk, with Jensen, Henry, and Mitzenberger tapping into their effortless chemistry and easygoing grooves. However, beneath the track’s hazy overtones, Jensen offers some deeply relatable shades of melancholy. Lyrically, “Forgotten” sees Jensen tracing a lonesome confessional, reflecting on heartache for a love that simply wasn’t meant to be: “Once you’ve got it it’s not / How it’s supposed to be / To think you fought something / Conceived so naturally / To think I felt something / Believed so beautifully.” Sometimes there’s a lot of power in simple sentiments sung from the heart. This is one of those cases.
“‘Forgotten’ is a song I wrote as an immediate reaction to a romantic situation with a friend not working out. It’s probably the most direct and straightforward song I’ve ever written, which used to scare me to sing it in front of people, but now it feels exciting. We did the music video with Robert Salazar, with whom we’ve now done three videos for this record, and for this song, it made sense to do something pretty straightforward. Having us just sitting in a circle playing our instruments and singing together, matched what I was initially trying to do with the song.”
Check out the song and video below. Forgotten is out everywhere on February 17th via Mick Music.