SOPHIE Koh has come a long way from the girl who strolled down the street with a guitar in the video to her happy-go-lucky song Anywhere three years ago.
She's grown up and glamorous, with a new album under her arm -- quite a contrast to the artist unearthed by Triple J when she was working as an optometrist in Darwin.
"Looking back at that video clip and that song, I just feel like I'm so far away from it now," Koh says. "I don't think I would write a song like that very easily now."
Audio: Listen to Sophie's song, In My World
Audio: Also, hear Objects in this Mirror
Instead, she's come up with a sophisticated collection of songs that feature her sweet voice layered over artful instrumentation.
The album title, All Shook Up, reflects its variety -- the project ranges from love songs and a poem she was given by a 16-year-old boy when she left her home in New Zealand to Gan Lan Shu (or Olive Tree), an old Chinese folk song sung in Mandarin.
Koh, who lives in Melbourne, used to listen to her Malaysian parents singing the song with their karaoke machine at home. The equivalent of something like Over the Rainbow, it's about not knowing where your homeland is, an apt choice for a woman who has moved countries several times.
Koh was born in New Zealand and went to school in Singapore until she was 10.
It was at high school that Koh, a classically trained pianist, picked up the guitar after discovering a band called Nirvana.
She studied optometry in Australia, then went to work with remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
But apparently you can't get far with a guitar in Darwin without someone asking you to play a tune.
Soon she was being booked to support artists such as Paul Kelly.
Koh grabbed the opportunity of going to East Timor to work as an optometrist, but again it was her music that drew the attention.
"One day we had a really quiet clinic, so I brought out the guitar and before I knew it, there were these kids who had walked up the mountain -- I asked them to teach me the national anthem," she says.
"I visited lots of villages and these little kids had built their own guitars out of tree trunks. They don't really sound like anything, but they look like guitars. It was incredibly inspiring."
Koh says her secret ambition is to be a tour guide, so returning to the Top End to play the Darwin Festival this month, she's eager to show her bandmates around.
"We're hiring a 12-seater van," she says. "We're just going to all the water holes and stuff . . . showing all these pale Victorians what the sunny tropics are like."
All Shook Up is out now.
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