It was big news back in June when Tucson alt-folk singer-songwriter Sophia Rankin announced that her band had a name.
It was no longer the Sophia Rankin Band, a group that included her longtime drummer/little brother Connor Rankin, bass player Eli Leki-Albano and lead guitarist Noah Weig-Pickering.
From that moment on, it was Sophia Rankin & The Sound.
The band, which has been playing shows around town including at St. Philip’s Plaza, Fini’s Landing and MotoSonora Brewing Company since last summer, will release its first CD — Rankin’s third — on Aug. 20.
But fans can get a sneak peek of “Too Close to the Riptide” when the band plays a CD release show at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 18, at the Club Congress Plaza downtown.
“I am so happy with this album,” Rankin said. “I am very proud of it.”
The album is Rankin’s first truly collaborative project in a career that she launched at the Tucson Folk Festival when she was 15. She has released a pair of albums — her debut “Reverie” in 2016 and the pop album “Solace” in 2018 — of songs she penned on her own, many of them drawing from her teen experience.
Since “Solace,” Rankin has become a regular on Tucson stages, including the Tucson Folk Festival, Dusk Music Festival and the Fourth Avenue Street Fair, even as she attended the University of Arizona to study music integrated studies, which covers everything from the business of music to performing.
Rankin graduated from the UA in May 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was settling in and sidelined her performance career.
She actually has the pandemic to thank for her band, truth be told.
During the 2020 shutdown, as venues remained shuttered and artists took to the internet to connect with their fans, Rankin and brother Connor played a series of porch concerts that they streamed online. Leki-Albano had just moved to the neighborhood from South Carolina and heard the pair playing on one of his first nights in town.
He told the sister and brother duo that he liked their sound and Rankin joked that if he played bass, he could surely jump in and join the fun.
Turns out he did play and he told her that he missed it.
“Eli was such a perfect fit,” Rankin said. “He’s a wicked-good bass player and he’s got incredible stage energy.”
As the state’s COVID numbers started to look promising late last summer, Rankin started dreaming aloud of returning to live concerts. But that meant they needed a lead guitar, so she reached out to Weig-Pickering, whom she had met when she interned at Jeff Haskell Recording Studio at the UA, and invited him to audition.
“He was perfect; he fit our style,” she said.
With the band in place, they started playing gigs around town under the name Sophia Rankin Band.
The name was a place holder as they worked on “Riptide.” Rankin had written the songs over the past couple years, but once she had the band in place, she turned to them to help flesh out the sound.
They infused jazz horns in the poppy toe-tapper “Tainted Blue” and helped Rankin bring an edgy, rocking vibe to “Metal and Wine.” There’s bluesy guitar riffs on the soulful “The Fray,” which Rankin sings with a voice that has flashes of Sarah McLachlan circa “Surfacing,” and there’s delicious pure pop abandon on “You Got the Love,” where Rankin sings about love that pulls her “too close to the riptide” — hence the album’s title.
The album explores pop, folk, rock and blues, but Rankin prefers to put it all under the alternative folk umbrella.
“I want to keep the singer-songwriter part of it because no matter what kind of sounds we experiment with, everything is telling a story,” she explained. “I love the umbrella term of alternative folk, which means we are trying out all these different things but this is our roots.”
“Riptide” is Rankin’s coming of age album, showcasing a maturity to her songwriting especially on the sobering pandemic-inspired songs “The People I Have Known” and “Mourning Song.” The songs were inspired by the deaths of two of Rankin’s friends in 2020 — one of them who died from COVID and the other who committed suicide. The songs build on one another, something that Rankin had never done before.
“I was sitting there and trying to process how two people so young were taken away for reasons we couldn’t justify because they were so young,” she recalled. “It helped me to move through that grief. Look at the year we had to deal with. Seeing the toll it took on other people I knew that writing ‘Mourning Song’ was the last puzzle piece of that album. It was more of a story that people could listen to, they could put themselves in and they could work through that grief with me.”
The band recorded the album in Nocturnal Theory frontman Dominic Rischard’s home studio — a soundproof guest room at Rischard’s Oro Valley home — from November to April.
When they finished, the band “kind of looked at each other and we were like, ‘This is our album. We created the sound for it today,’” Rankin said. “We all looked at each other and said, ‘Oh yeah, Sophia Rankin & The Sound.’”
Rankin is hoping that she and The Sound will be able to tour regionally to support “Riptide” as the pandemic subsides.
