10 Fascinating Facts About Soak, One of the Coolest Indie-Folk Artists Out There

Though Soak never connected with her birth name, she did connect to the children's book Where the Wild Things Are, which is where she got her first nickname: Max. "When I was growing up I never really liked my name Bridie," she explained to The Line of Best Fit during a May 2019 interview. "Everyone thought it was short for Bridget — Bridget is such a granny name for me. I didn't know any cool Bridie's when I was growing up. I really liked Where The Wild Things Are, and I loved the main character, so I made everyone call me Max for two years of my life."

Eventually, Max became Soak, and she hasn't looked back since. "I've always been trying to get away from the label of my own name and I didn't want to release music that way," she continued. "I was 13 [when I] came up with the whole SOAK thing. I wanted a new identity, because I was about to be so honest with my music and I wasn't in my real life. Doing it through the medium of SOAK felt safer."

While Soak feels that "androgynous" is a label she feels comfortable assigning to herself, she never felt the need to define herself growing up, as Derry provided a community in which she could always simply exist without explanation. "Where I'm from is a very accepting place," she explained to The Line of Best Fit. "Being gay in that environment — I've never suffered any backlash, and was supported so much by my parents and the local community. I was very lucky and privileged to have grown up there."

She grew up post-Troubles, but she still finds that people are surprised by the picture she paints of Derry. " . . . people expect me to be like, 'Bombs are going off all the time and I got shot like five times!'" she continued. "Obviously Derry had its history, but I grew up in the ceasefire [following] that era and my childhood was just lovely. I had all the freedom in the world."

Soak talks about her sexuality candidly and often in the hope of normalizing it, but also because she wants to remind the people around her that not everyone can embrace their sexuality so openly. "When I was younger, I had a complicated relationship with talking about sexuality, probably because I didn't want to be defined by it — and I still don't want to be defined as a gay musician," she explained to Them. "But I also think it's really important. I just talk about it normally, as I would in an everyday conversation."

However, despite having a large big LGBTQ+ community in Derry, gay marriage still isn't legalized in Northern Ireland. "I think I definitely talk a lot about gay life, though, because I have the ability to do that and I'm from a country that still doesn't have gay marriage," she continued. "So when I can I like to make a point of just reminding people that not everyone in the world can marry, or it's more difficult for people. I guess I'm conscious of knowing that things are quite happy in my gay world, but not everyone's gay world. I'm making sure that I'm not too privileged about it."

Around the time Soak was coming into her sexuality, she discovered the long-running Showtime series The L Word, and it was first time she'd ever seen lesbians on television. "I remember when I'd started to fall into 'the gay group' at school and was having my eyes opened wider daily with new discoveries," she told Under the Radar. "I was only becoming comfortable with my own sexuality and learning about the LGBT community when I was introduced to The L Word, a drama series about the complicated lives of LA lesbians. For me, at that moment in my life, just seeing gay people simply Blew. My. F*cking. Mind."

After experiencing such incredible success with her first album, Soak felt burdened by the weight of expectation while working on her second album, Grim Town. "When I stopped touring and started doing the new record, I was devastated by doubt and pressure," she told Vice during a January 2019 interview. "I found it really hard to work under the knowledge that people were expecting something. I think I spent those years of touring in a bubble and avoiding my personal life, so when I got home I ended up massively depressed."

Of course, she was eventually able to channel all that stress and pressure into her album. "I was in a pit of self-doubt in terms of how I worked creatively," she later added. "I didn't trust my own ideas. I'd make one note and then be like, 'No, actually I hate music!' I was feeling really negative, and the album was born out of how I felt at that time. I wanted to make my brain a location because it felt easier to process everything that was going on in that way."

More queer female pop stars are becoming mainstream every year, but largely, those artists tend to be high femme. Luckily, Soak has never felt any pressure to assume a more feminine look. " . . . when I was growing up, there weren't many butch gay people in music that I could look up to," she explained to Them. "I never felt like I was represented. It's been a conscious thing for me going into this record, just to not hide any elements of myself. Like, if I don't want to wear makeup, I'm not gonna wear makeup. And I think it's important that if you're going to represent yourself and part of your community, then you have to try and do that as authentically as you can."