Astrid Sonne on pop stardom and playing in a church at Big Ears 2025

On Thursday, March 27, the first night of Big Ears 2025, Astrid Sonne stood with her viola, stage right of the pulpit at the First Presbyterian Sanctuary in Knoxville, Tennessee. A life-sized Jesus standing in a field, his top half shadowed by the angle of the light, looked down at her from a gilded portrait on the wall. To her left, bathed in the same awkward church light as Sonne and her audience, sat violinist Magdalena McLean and cellist Emma Barnaby. At 8:15 sharp, they raised their bows and began to play, conjuring soft minor chords that merged and crashed like mid-ocean waves.

Considering the rapturous reception of January 2024’s Great Doubt, the first singer-songwriter album from the Denmark-born, London-based composer and producer, Sonne’s Big Ears set was subdued. She and her stagemates, dressed in staid church garb, played inspired string interludes between tracks, but she made few attempts to work the seated crowd of aging millennials, salt-and-pepper Gen-Xers, and full-on boomers. During most songs, she put down her viola and stepped behind a small mixer on a low stand, triggering and tweaking electronic tracks. Once satisfied, she returned to the mic and sang, accentuating her words with subtle steps and swivels of the hips. Aside from a few moments of mild chafing between the secular crowd and its liturgical trappings — a dropped hymnal here, an echoing cough there — the hour sped by.

Happy incongruences between stage, performer, and crowd, were commonplace this year at Big Ears, an annual gathering of experimental music players and aficionados in the Tennessee capital. Aside from a rock hall, two early-20th-century theaters, and the side room of a Scottish pub, most shows took place in spaces not built for secular music. Churches — the First Presbyterian Sanctuary and Chapel, Church Street United Methodist, St. John’s Cathedral, and The Point — held roughly a third of the festival’s live performances, placing cutting-edge creativity amid religious iconography throughout the weekend (and creating a bottleneck at the irreligious venues on Sunday morning).

Sonne (30), who spent roughly the middle third of her life singing in churches as a part-time job, is no stranger to the altar, but Big Ears was a new experience for her. The day after her Sanctuary set, over a falafel salad at a busy Middle Eastern lunch counter two blocks from Downtown Knoxville’s main drag, she marvelled at the seemingly infinite musical paths ahead, ready to enjoy a rare weekend of concert watching from the crowd.

The FADER: On Tuesday [March 25], you played Pioneer Works, a massive room in Brooklyn. Then, last night, you played in a mid-sized church in Knoxville. How do you change your approach based on where you’re performing?

I try to get familiar with the space. We prepare different outfits for different environments. If it’s a grungy rock space, I dress accordingly. There’s a lot of improvisation in the set, so I perform completely differently [every show]. The first show I played on this tour was in Vancouver at this old porn cinema with high ceilings and loads of red drapes — super-Lynchy vibes — and people were screaming the lyrics, which I’ve never had before. That gave me freedom to move differently than the setting yesterday, where there were no [stage] lights, not much of a separation between the audience and where we were standing, everybody sitting down, and no one singing along. That’s also completely fine — it’s just another type of focus — but it obviously affects the performance. I would’ve found it quite weird going full-on crazy yesterday because it wouldn’t have fit the vibe.

You did some dancing, though.

I was moving a little.

What made you choose a string trio setup for the Great Doubt tour?

I was trying to get away from the table. When you do electronic music, there’s this wall between you and the audience, and I wanted to get rid of it. I tried to play keys, but I’m a terrible keys player. Then I had an epiphany: “I already play [the viola]. I should do more with that. Let’s go all strings.” So I started playing with a violinist from London, and it evolved from there.

Your live mixing last night was interesting. Sometimes, the strings would be playing in unison with the tracks. Tell me about that decision.

It comes from performing on a laptop. The most important thing for me is timing and having a blueprint to where I can use my musicality best — having transitions, building something up and then stopping, fading one thing into another, looping. I’ve got close to 100 mappings on that little mixer, and I can push the buttons to tweak them. There’s also an effects pedal in my rack that you can’t see on stage, so I do the effects for the strings and for the vocals too.

You grew up singing in church, but I’ve read that it took a while for you to get comfortable incorporating your voice into your own music. How did you get your confidence up to perform these songs live?

I guess it’s just the process of doing it more, but it still feels quite fresh. I’ve never been in a band, so singing on the mic and knowing what to do with my body is still something that’s evolving for me. When I look back at the performances we did at the same time last year, I feel way more comfortable now. For a long time, I was like, “I do instrumental music; this is what I do,” but this was a way of pushing myself into new territory. I switch it up and do new things, we do improv sessions between songs, and the way we start the set is always different, so it’s always a new experience.

You’ve been performing the songs from Great Doubt for more than a year now. Has your relationship with any of them changed?

I thought “Give my all” was a big club banger, but I don’t feel like that now. The more I sing it, the more sad I feel about it, for some reason.

That song interpolates a Mariah Carey ballad. As your first pop-leaning album has gotten more acclaim, how do you feel about potential pop stardom?

It’s very weird having people perceive me in that way because I’ve never perceived myself in that way. It’s definitely not a main motivation for me, but I’m very curious.

But I’m also curious about a lot of things: going full noise musician, full dance musician, full pop star. The main thing is to go with what I feel most drawn toward and be curious and positive about it.

Have there been moments where you’ve noticed fans perceiving you differently?

A little bit, but I’m also adapting to that expectation. You said I was moving around last night; I don’t think I would’ve done that before, but because there’s that perception of me, I’ve started to morph into it. It’s such a tricky balance: You want to do something that feels natural and good, but you also want to meet people’s expectations of you. That’s always an interesting intersection to interrogate.

Have you talked about that with your friend ML Buch after seeing her blow up the way she has?

Marie Louise has been making songs for ages, so I would imagine it’s not as surprising to her. We’ve had different trajectories because she’s been wanting to move into being a composer, and I’ve been wanting to move into songwriting. I haven’t had that conversation with her, but it would be interesting. Everything you’re asking has been on my mind, and it’s hard to figure out how I feel about it because I’m in the middle of it. The most important thing for me is, “What’s interesting? Do I feel good with the people I’m playing with? Does it feel natural? Does it feel authentic? Then it makes sense.”

We were talking about songs on Great Doubt that feel different when you play them now. You’ve said you initially thought of “Do you wanna” as funny but that people have interpreted it as serious. Has the meaning of “Do you wanna have a baby? / Do you wanna bring people into this world?” changed for you in the past year?

It’s been on my mind, yeah. When I’m touring in the States, singing “Everything is unreal,” the reality that you’re in — and that we’re in as well — feels so heightened. [That song] and “Do you wanna” fit this reality in a more and more absurd way. I thought [“Do you wanna”] was funny because it’s almost too much. But sometimes you make something that’s on the edge, and it really hits. Some people find it sad, some people find it funny, and I love that people have their own experiences of it.

Has the meaning of “Everything is unreal” also changed for you from touring behind Great Doubt for so long? Does life feel more or less real to you now than it did when you released the album?

I’ve gotten way more into a routine. Last year, I could play four dates and completely crash, but I feel way more stable now. I also had a lot of housing issues last year, and that was really tricky on top of playing and traveling all the time. I’ve got really good support at home now, so I feel a lot more chill than I have in a long time.

As the touring tapers off, are you starting to think about new music again?

When this North America tour ends in one-and-a-half weeks, I’m going back in the studio. I have a show with Fine Glindvad and our project Coined. We’ve written four songs, but we have to prepare 45 minutes, so we need to write some music. We work well under pressure, so I think that’s gonna be great. I’ve been doing some stuff with Loraine James that’ll be cool to finish off too. She’s so good. There’ve been a lot of distractions, a lot to get used to, and it’s been really good going all in while I’ve had the opportunity, but I’m looking forward to getting back in the zone and writing again.