When listening to Sophia records, you wouldn’t imagine Robin Proper-Sheppard as an entertaining, self-deprecating man who likes to play with the attention he gets when he’s on stage or a camera points at him. The music he writes is heartfelt, sad and very personal, but in between the songs he jokes and tells stories about himself taking everything too seriously. Yet as soon as he starts strumming one of his songs, he immerses into his own world. We wait for him in a café close to Lido, where he plays his show in Berlin. After an extensive sound check (his tour features a string quartet) we watch him run over the street through light rain with his acoustic guitar. After a short chat the San-Diego-born but now London-based songwriter sits down in front of the window and heads into “So Slow” with blinking lights and cars driving by behind him. For “Something” from the recent Sophia album “There Are No Goodbyes”, we move in the back of the café. Robin needs two restarts, “because somebody giggled”, he jokes. In the end his own mobile phone rings, but he continues and bears it with a grin.

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