The Radical and Conversational Euphoria of Free Range
Sofia Jensen talks the Chicago DIY scene, their debut album Practice, finding a unique, distinctive live blueprint, music’s romanticization of sobriety and where the band is heading next.
Photo by Alexa Viscius Music Features Free Range
Because I grew up in a rural Ohio town just far enough from all major cities, I never got to experience any real DIY community. Columbus felt like another country; Cincinnati another universe; Cleveland was, without having access to a car, often unreachable. You read and hear about these stories of the golden age of basement shows and just so desperately want to be a part of it. I got there in college, but COVID came soon after and decimated local music scenes. But when I tap into a band like Free Range, I can immediately feel all of the communal highs I was meant to be a part of 10 years ago.
I first got hip to Free Range’s music back when their debut album, Practice, came out in February 2023. Immediately, I recognized it as great indie-folk with a touch of country inspiration. It’s a combination of genres that exists in no short supply these days. So how does a band break through that noise? Well, if you’re Sofia Jensen, it’s through lyricism that is as familiar and recent as it is devastating and marooned. And the work they do with bassist Bailey Minzenberger and drummer/producer Jack Henry (and pedal steel contributors Nick Levine and Max Subar), it’s complex and lucid. Sure, you can hear Practice and wonder if the world really needs another pedal steel solo. But the answer is always yes, the world does really need another pedal steel solo.
Practice is brimming with some of the most pensive folk music of this generation. Though you can easily say that Jensen, 20, is a torch-bearing lyricist for Zoomers, the songs they write are already timeless. And looking at a track like “All My Thoughts,” you can see just how clearly COVID-19 really affected this new crop of songwriters, as Jensen touches on isolation in a profound way: “I’m drifting through a world without time, without movement, ‘cause it’s been days since we’ve talked and I miss you,” they sing. The work on Practice is a vogue translation of contemporary worries and fears, and Jensen bundles them up in a way that can be felt and understood by anyone of any age. It’s a gift not many songwriters have. But, then again, Jensen is not like many songwriters.
“The beginning of quarantine was a really huge moment of growth and reflection for me,” they say. “‘All My Thoughts’ felt like a song I had been trying to write for a while, and it finally stumbled out during that time. It was also a really dark time for me, though. I totally gave in to all my impulses, staying up all night reading and writing, and that definitely gave way to me entering a bad period with my drinking. It’s hard for me to look at that time objectively—as just being a time when I was starting to feel comfortable with my writing—because I associate it with some pretty dark stuff.” And that’s what “All My Thoughts” is about, too, this portrait of someone sitting in their thoughts for too long and not having anyone around to pull you out of it.
According to Jensen, there were three iterations of Practice. Free Range the band went through a lot of shifts between 2019 and 2023, most notably when their bandmates graduated high school (the song “Want to Know” spawned from that crew of players). There was a lot of recording and scrapping and recording and scrapping. The origins of every finished song are all over the place; a track like “Keep In Time” is from 2019, while much of the tracklist came together in 2021, 2022. “I think [the album] is cohesive, but there are moments where you can see a lot of growth—because these two recordings are sitting next to each other and they’re from totally different periods of making the record,” Jensen says. “On one of them, I’m a sophomore in high school and on one of them I’m out of high school.”
Their songwriting changed a lot over the course of making Practice, many of their favorite tracks are the ones that were written and recorded last: “Growing Away,” “All My Thoughts” and “Traveling Show.” “To me, they draw from a different palette or have stronger ideas or are better, more well-written songs and have a more cohesive vision,” Jensen adds. “When I’m thinking about the record, I’m most proud of those songs, because they feel more telling of what I’m ultimately wanting to make or the direction I was moving in as we finished the record.”
Before making Practice, Jensen had never been in a studio before and, admittedly, didn’t know how to sing. They had just started writing songs, and it was all they had and they knew they wanted to make a record out of them. Likewise, Jensen’s voice was changing throughout the process and they were re-recording all of the vocal takes at each interval. It’s exactly what a debut record is supposed to be, this collection of tracks that are, quite literally, an artist’s first real statement in the world. But it’s been a long time since a debut record has showcased such an immense chronology of growth for the musician who wrote them. Jensen’s most formative years are captured in the span of the album’s tracklist, and it ends in the present-day.
But what I think is pretty incredible about Practice is that it was completely produced by Jensen, Henry and Minzenberger themselves. Jensen admits that they didn’t have an adult mentor figure in the studio “teaching them how to make a record.” “The production and the arranging and the sounds that we were able to get, that is what I feel most proud of when I think about it—because that was the thing that we really didn’t know how to do,” they say. “The thing that I really didn’t know how to do was arrange a song and write parts that aren’t just the lyrics and the chords. We were trying to make a record that would be able to actually stand next to records that we loved—that have a lot going on, that are really mature and interesting and that are doing a lot to lift up great songwriting.”
Jensen has already started plotting out LP2, and they nod to it being more subdued and acoustic than Practice was, which juxtaposes heavily with their live sound. There is no intentionality between what Free Range sounds like on a record versus on a stage; the dichotomy is broken up into measures of chemistry and intuition. What we hear on Practice is what Jensen wanted this iteration of the band to sound like, and what we hear live is what happens when the group got into a room and started playing together. Much of the intricacies of Practice are matters of layering, as Jensen and their crew do a lot of coloring and sequencing of little parts, which is translated on the road via them cranking things up a notch to compensate for the trio not being able to always capture the on-record sound as easily.
“I was playing louder and having a grit in my tone throughout the whole set,” Jensen explains. “Bailey has to be playing bass in a way that other bass players aren’t playing, because they’re so melodic and they’re taing up a lot of space—because we’re trying to make sure that there isn’t too much dead space at any given time, unless we really want there to be. And then, also, we realized that, ‘Okay, we’re making this music that is pretty quiet and most people would call it sad, but when we play shows we want to play really loud and play like a rock band.’ I don’t know if that’ll be forever.” The inclusion of Andy, who plays music as Red PK, on the East Coast tour with Ratboys was a game-changer, in that their pedal steel playing allowed Free Range to not go to such high-volume heights. “It means that I can do less and then, what they’re doing is adding a lot but it is done really tenderly,” Jensen continues.
A few months ago, there was online discourse among the music community about whether or not it was cool when bands change up their songs while performing them live. Before that, a similar conversation cropped up when the studio version of Big Thief’s “Vampire Empire” was different from the version they’d been playing at gigs for the last year or two. I think about this in regards to Free Range’s music, especially, how I know that, when I lock in for one of their shows, I know I’m going to get a different experience than I would just playing Practice again on my turntable. It’s a technique that Jensen is conscious of, too, and it’s something they are actively trying to keep alive as Free Range continues to evolve as a band and as a sound.
“Something that I enjoy, no matter what, is that listening to our recordings and seeing us live are two very distinct iterations of the songs. They’re not the same thing at all. And that feels like, to me, more of a reason to come to a show. It gives you more to experience and more to take in that is different and it’s not just the same thing over and over again,” Jensen explains. “Personally, I think there’s something cool about seeing a band that does their record really well live. Seeing Andy Shauf’s band feels like that, where there are really interesting things that they do here and there but, for the most part, the instrumentation is just like the record. But, I think I prefer going to a show knowing that, yes, it’s going to be totally different—because, then, I’m in a place where I’m taking note of everything that’s different. Giving people as much to take in as possible so that they don’t ever get bored with one kind of sound or one kind of thing—I mean, it’s more so I don’t get bored. That’s the real reason. We started playing together and getting ready for shows and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m really sick of these songs. We’ve got to make them interesting again.’”
Something that sets Jensen’s music apart from their peers, for me, is how much the lyricism reminds me of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. He used to build these poems that were really intimate and told in second-person, but you could read every line and come away thinking that you’ve known the person whom O’Hara is writing about for just as long as he has. When I revisit Practice, I get that same feeling, as if Jensen is looking at their immediate world and taking stock of it as if they’re holding a conversation with someone in the process. It’s not just a re-telling of what’s going on, it’s a living, breathing archival of reflection and reckoning. Jensen’s writing style has always emerged from that place of phrasing, and “I” statements have never interested them too much. The “you” in their songs can be many people—a friend, romantic partner, even a stranger—and it’s a way for Jensen to vocalize conversations in songs that no longer just live in their head.
The “you” helps make sense of regrets, fuck ups, the things that stick with us. “Don’t defend what you’re trying to say through the indirect syntax formulating time,” Jensen sings on “Keep In Time”; “I just wanna look up and see you there, but I’ll never be running up again to find you, asking you to say,” they ponder on “On Occasion”; “I’m thinking I was just hiding out ‘till I found you,” penultimate track “Running Out” goes. Jensen has listened to a lot of Elliott Smith, but they’ve never wanted to be the kind of angry songwriter he was. (“I don’t want to be the writer that’s talking shit about my friends in a song,” they say. “I don’t want it to be an accusatory thing or feel like I’m putting someone on the spot, even if it’s a made-up character in a story.”) There’s a stark amount of compassion, of familiarity, across Practice. It’s harmonious in that way, in how we can all put ourselves in the songs and feel heard.
“I think that you can get a feeling of a song and understand what I’m talking about, but I’m not giving you too many details, definitely not letting you know who I’m talking about,” Jensen explains. “A lot of songs can be viewed from a lot of different ways, and there is something to be said about each way. It’s cool to leave it up to the listener and fill in enough details to make it relatable, to paint a picture in a listener’s mind, but not with so many details that you’re giving them only one way to look at it. Sometimes I’ve written songs where the ‘you’ is just my mom or my dog, and then I’ll go back and I’ll listen to it without thinking about it like that. It still works. I think it’s important to build enough room in a song where you’re not really excluding people based on their experiences.”
“I’ve always loved songs where the writing is about another person, or about two people, or a made-up thing, or a story about someone else,” they continue. “It feels almost like fiction, which is mostly what I read. It made me get to a point where I was doing lyrical writing that is just fragmented fiction. And I think it’s the kind of writing that’s really hard for me to do, so the older songs on Practice are very much not like that. It’s hard to figure out how to write about yourself in a way that doesn’t feel self-absorbed. It’s a tough thing to do and to make it interesting. I think I found, pretty quickly, that a way I like to write about myself is from the perspective of someone else talking about me or to me.”
“Free Range” is, quite possibly, the best song on a record full of great songs. It’s one of Jensen’s oldest tunes, too, which was written when they were in 10th grade. And, like all great self-titled art, “Free Range” is a thesis statement for Jensen, especially. It’s this very stream-of-consciousness, dream-like track that greatly deals with them trying to get away from everything so they can return to themselves. “I’m watching all the pieces spin around and you’re just a sound that I’m taking with me,” Jensen sings. “It’s trailing off in every song, and you’re ringing out too loud, ‘cause when the morning breaks apart the night, I’ll fall asleep in a different kind of light.” For a long time, “Free Range” was the piece that Jensen felt was their absolute strongest, and it was written in just one night.
“I vividly remember staying up too late on a school night,” they say. “I used to do a lot of demoing on my phone on GarageBand. This was before I had any recording equipment, so I did everything on this and it was so much fun. I was writing [‘Free Range’] and the first thing I wrote was the chorus. It was a very personal song to me and I honestly don’t know why I named it ‘Free Range,’ maybe part of it was it was the first ballad I wrote and it felt like a free range, like, ‘Okay, if I have a band, this is the theme song.’ And it was definitely thematically accurate of what I felt Free Range was, where a lot of the songs dealt with the idea of escapism and really wanting to have freedom of mind and have space and not be cooped up and be able to get away from situations that were just repeatedly hurting me. It was very accurate for that time in my life, being in high school and having really weird, messy romantic experiences that weren’t relationships at all. ‘Free Range’ felt like the kind of place in my head that I could escape to, this imagined place that I’ll one day go to.”
Though a lot of conversations around Practice have been defined by Jensen’s sobriety, none of the songs on the album were written when they were sober. In fact, it wasn’t until several months after Practice was finished that they reached that place of clarity. The songs, instead, detail the problems that pushed Jensen down a road of substance abuse, with an undercurrent theme of what it might mean for them to, someday, get sober. They tell me that LP2 will more explicitly document their sobriety and it makes sense, as the work of Free Range is an ongoing time capsule of Jensen’s life, and what the post-COVID and post-Practice world has been like for them is the natural next step.
The way Jensen’s songwriting goes in this regard is pretty striking. They write about memory, about forgetting, about losing parts of themself under the thumb of drinking—rather than just blaming every ounce of pain or mistake on alcohol. It’s refreshing, at least to me, to see using portrayed in this way, as if it’s another way of putting relationships in focus. Writing about loss like that opens the door for Jensen to consider other parts of their life similarly, too. “I think I’m quite cautious with how I write about something like addiction, because I never want it to seem like I’m blaming all my problems and all my behavior on this thing that’s out of my control,” they say. “Addiction plays a huge part in how people act and think, but it doesn’t mean you can point to it every time you fuck up. It doesn’t mean you can get away with hurting people. I want to write about it in a way that shows why a character is acting a certain way, and what’s going through their head—maybe how they’re acting is a result of addiction or a relationship [that] ended badly or a chemical imbalance or all three, but all while focusing on the person.”
Rock ‘n’ roll’s romanticization of substance abuse and struggles with addiction has become a detrimental part of culture, and an attitude that alienates people making art and trying to heal. Learning about the stories of figures like Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons and better understanding the brutality of their lives and their endings was monumental for Jensen, who got swept up in the zeitgeist’s portrayal of using and how it’s linked to good art. “I think a big reason that I started drinking was because of that kind of stuff, because of movies that I was watching and because I was like, ‘Well, this is what artists do and this is how you get great writing.’ And then it was just my luck that I happen to have bad brain chemistry,” they say. “But it’s super romanticized in the music community and the songwriting community and the general indie rock and art world. I don’t know if I have a hope or a goal with writing about it. I’m very young and haven’t been sober for that long, and I didn’t even use for that long. But it’s a thing where it’s like, ‘Okay, I can’t not write about it, because it’s most of what I think about all the time. So, it’s definitely going to find its way into my music.”
Last September, Free Range came by Columbus on their tour with Ratboys. The crowd loved them and, honestly, how could they not? Jensen and their band add a spectacular sort of grandeur to their live sets, one that is rooted in a precision that is not showboaty yet it distinctively exemplifies just how good each player is. You can see it in Jensen’s guitar playing, in Henry’s drumming. They’re in a groove and letting the framework take them to a gentle conclusion that, beforehand, is cosmic in its own complexity. After Free Range’s set, before Jensen, Henry and co. made their way back to the patio space where merch was being sold, I’d heard rumblings from audience members whose first takeaway was not the goodness of the music, but the awe around the band’s collective youth. The response was “Wow, that was incredible,” followed by “They’re so young, too.”
This isn’t an abnormal thing, either. It’s exhausted territory in indie rock, especially for non-men. Most of the big, gravitational pop stars start out when they’re teenagers; Conor Oberst wrote the first Bright Eyes LP when he was 18. Young artists are always being lauded in this way, where you can’t fully tell if the praise is a product of unexpected age or by actual creative merit or some greyed middle ground. I remember the vibes being similar when Horsegirl broke out with Versions of Modern Performance in 2022. When I caught them opening for The Breeders this past fall, a concert-goer near me pondered, at the end of Horsegirl’s set, how a group of musicians so young could possibly be on a bill with a band like that, with these living, unimpeachable legends. If I was the confrontational type, I probably would have chimed in and mentioned that Horsegirl has also opened for Wilco, Pavement and Yo La Tengo, that they are very much the real deal and then some.
Free Range are the real deal, too. And, while many folks and interviewers have made an obvious point out of Jensen’s age in write-ups as a siren for why their work might be considered remarkable, Jensen doesn’t interact with that conversation much outside of that bubble—because their peers in Chicago aren’t just teenagers they came up with; it’s an ecosystem of people who care about each other and the art they’re making. “Most of my friends in music here—I have a crew of people that are my age. I don’t even know people that are younger,” they say. “But most of my friends that I spend the most time with are at least 26, 27. And I have plenty of friends that are in their 30s. It couldn’t be more accessible, it’s definitely just the most welcoming community I’ve ever been a part of.” Jensen does sometimes remember that they’re 20, though. That was especially true recently when a friend of theirs put together a Gillian Welch tribune show in town, and Jensen picked “Look At Miss Ohio”—a song that came out on Soul Journey back in 2003, the year they were born.
Before Jensen started cultivating a community of artists outside of their age group, they first got really immersed in the zine culture of Chicago—a local arts movement spearheaded by Hallogallo and Mother Night that centers youth creatives and bands like Lifeguard, Horsegirl and Friko—and the importance of a place like Quimby’s Bookstore or the convergence of DIY art and all-ages venues. According to Jensen, the Chicago music community is welcoming in a lot of ways, nearly across the board, but there are still venues they’ve never been to because of the city-wide age laws. “The thing that they were trying to do the most was open up a space for young people,” they explain. “It definitely came out of frustration—because all of us were in bands in high school and Lifeguard, they were in middle school when they started—from realizing that a lot of venues don’t let kids play. And we can’t go to all of these shows that we want to go to at 21+ venues. It was really hard on all of us, especially because we felt like we had so much to say, musically, and wanted to be a part of this thing and wanted to be done with school. There was this whole community that was so exciting that we couldn’t break into, just because of our age.”
Being a part of a unit of like-minded peers in that way was, first and foremost, a way for Jensen and their friends to respond to the restrictions placed on the youth arts scene in Chicago—an endeavor that became even harder during COVID, which virtually wiped out the flourishing DIY scene that existed there previously. But making an impact through zines and collaging has helped put national attention back on Chicago’s music community, and that type of togetherness helped open up Jensen’s taste in a world they didn’t come from. “Everyone cares about it so much, and it wasn’t about getting famous or making money,” they explain. “We weren’t trying to become a huge thing, weren’t trying to make a zine that got famous. It was about the art and finding stuff that we loved so much and then being like, ‘I want my friends to know about this’ and ‘I want whoever cares to read this to know about this new band that I found last week.’ That was so inspiring to me.” Similarly, some of Jensen’s friends have been putting on a recurring concert series called Cosmic Country where, every few months, a bunch of folks get together and sing country covers and folk songs. It’s the type of thing that can be found all across Chicago, where communities are invited to come to events, dress up and go all out together. When I listen to Free Range, I hear a similar sense of camaraderie, of kinship.
I think what keeps drawing me to Jensen’s work, however, is their faithful commitment to letting go. Practice, like its title suggests, bears no succinct explanation for all of our faults. There are no immediate answers, only conversations, emotions, reflections, who we are and who we might become. None of the songs feel rushed; Jensen offers delicacy that is taken care of in the hands of Minzenberger and Henry. There’s a real sense of trust running throughout; a desire to take risks that are subtle and fragmented and, if you aren’t paying attention, you just might miss. Lines like “I feel more awake when I can remember, maybe I’m growing away for the better, feeling like I wasn’t empty, never thought I’d see the day where I’d forget me” just don’t exist on first outings. Practice is such an assured and confident project that I often forget that it’s a debut album. But what cannot be forgotten is that few bands are set up for a more promising next turn than Free Range who, before we know it, will return to us again with a new set of breathtaking songs. And we ought to all be present and seated when that day comes.
Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.