Cecile Believe Is Ready to Catch Fire

Under the moniker Mozart’s Sister, she began releasing EPs with the British indie label Merok Records; soon afterward, a then-unknown SOPHIE stumbled upon her music. After their paths crossed at SXSW in 2013, a fertile and long-running creative partnership began, with Believe co-writing (and providing vocals for) a significant portion of SOPHIE’s 2018 debut album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides—a groundbreaking pop masterpiece that became one of the decade’s most acclaimed records and earned a Grammy nomination. (Around the same time, Mozart’s Sister became Cecile Believe, and she moved to Los Angeles, where she began collaborating with a network of pop renegades including Caroline Polachek, Shygirl, and A.G. Cook.)

Then came the pandemic, which prompted Believe to move back to Montreal. Soon after, in January 2021, SOPHIE died following a sudden accident in Athens. One of Tender the Spark’s standout moments is the breathtakingly beautiful “The Pearl”: over a delicate, folksy melody and twinkling acoustic guitars, Believe sings of rebuilding herself creatively after a profound loss. (“You tried to build a boat out of solid gold, but it wouldn’t float / And I am in my rickety vessel, trying to live a life after,” she sings, her voice raw.)

Merely listening to the song feels like intruding on an intimate relationship, and I hesitate to ask whether the song is indeed a tribute to her late friend. “Yeah, it’s about SOPHIE,” Believe says. “It was something I wrote in the weeks after she passed. I was working as a nanny, and there were curfews at night during lockdown, and it was the dead of winter in Montreal—snow up to your knees and pitch dark. I just sat in my apartment and wrote on the acoustic guitar because it was the only tool I had there. I’d never recorded anything like that before, in just one take. There are no overdubs, no click tracks, no headphones, and I thought it was going to be a lot of work to process it and make it sound good, but actually, I barely did anything to it. It had a natural quality to it that I really loved.” It’s also proof that, even without Believe’s extraordinary production work surging around it, her voice still shines.