Key Change: Tatiana Maslany on "Faceshopping" by Sophie

[instrumental music] You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This is Key Change, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that changed their lives, and my guest today is the actor Tatiana Maslany. One of the things I find so compelling about Tatiana and her career is that the roles that she plays often contain multitudes, literally. She played over 10 different characters, clones, but with distinct personalities, in the TV show Orphan Black. And in the Marvel universe, she played She-Hulk, who also had the very different alter ego of Jennifer Walters, a lawyer. And right now she's starring in the show Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on Apple TV. When Tatiana prepares for her roles, and the roles within the roles, she often uses music to inspire and motivate her. And so today I got to talk to Tatiana about a song that's been really important to her and her process, and that song is...

Face Shopping by SOPHIE.

If you're not aware of SOPHIE's music, she was an incredible, groundbreaking electronic artist from the UK. She was trans, and she passed away far too young in 2021. But even in a short time, she made a big impact. In addition to her own music, she also produced tracks for Charli XCX and Madonna and more. In 2018, she released her breakthrough Grammy-nominated album, Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, which dealt a lot with her trans identity, and that's the album that has the song Face Shopping. Okay. Here's my conversation about it with Tatiana Maslany. When did you first hear this song?

So I'm terrible with dates, but it was years ago when it came out. My brother, Daniel, who is, like, most influential in my life in terms of music, he played it for me and my brother Michael when we were in, uh, Kelowna, BC, which is in Canada. We were there 'cause Michael, my youngest brother, was at the time, he's an animator, and he was working out of Kelowna, and so Daniel and I were just visiting him. We were just, like, siblings finding each other across the country.

Nice.

Yeah. And we were driving back from dinner or something, and he played it in, like, the little Honda Civic that we were driving, and the feeling I had was, "Oh, there I am." Like, "That's me."

What was it like for the three of you in terms of music? Like, would you listen to music together? Did you experience that stuff together? Did you have your own separate tastes?

We had very separate tastes, but we also would play around. Daniel was, like, always making music on the computer, and then we had, like, two microphones, and Mikey was, like, a toddler for a lot of it, but we would, like, make him freestyle or whatever. [laughs] You know, so we have a lot of recordings of us just playing around with music, and Daniel legit was making music, and then we would, like, get on it and sort of just be goofy. But that was, like, a big thing for us.

Had you been familiar with SOPHIE before that? Did you know the music at, in any kind of way?

Yeah, a little bit of, like, her first EP, like, BIPP and stuff like that, and I was always, like, very drawn to it, but there was something