LOS ANGELES, CA- There was something about Sorana’s story that I couldn’t quite get out of my head.
Here is a young woman from Transylvania who somehow carved out a niche for herself in the hypercompetitive world of K-pop songwriting. Not Seoul. Not Los Angeles. Transylvania.
On paper, there is something wonderfully improbable about that trajectory. But the more I spoke with Sorana, the more I began to think that I was looking at her story backwards. Maybe the interesting question wasn’t how someone from Transylvania found her way into K-pop. Maybe it was why K-pop proved to be such a natural home for the way her mind works.
“I’ve always been […] I don’t like to follow rules and I like to do my own thing and I want everything to be new every time,” she told me.
That, as it turns out, is a pretty useful disposition to have when you write songs for a living.
Sorana explained that her entry into K-pop wasn’t necessarily the product of some grand plan. As opportunities to pitch songs within American pop became more difficult, Korean labels increasingly looked toward American and international songwriting circles for material. Sorana had been hearing about those opportunities as far back as 2018.
More importantly, she heard that they wanted creativity.
So she started sending them what she affectionately calls her “weird thoughts” and “weird ideas.”
They liked them.
One song became another. Placements accumulated. Trips to Korea followed. Her credits eventually came to include songs for artists including ITZY, ILLIT and KATSEYE.
“I think you just need one and then you get two and then you get three,” she said. “And then you go to Korea for a trip and then it just expands from there.”
There is an appealing simplicity to the way she tells it. But careers rarely snowball accidentally. Someone has to keep making the snow.
When I asked Sorana what she considered her greatest strength as a songwriter, I wondered whether she would say melody or lyrics. Her answer was much more revealing.
“My specialty is being unique.”
She later refined that description somewhat, calling herself a “concept person,” although others apparently regard her as particularly strong with melody. She writes toplines. She develops concepts. She gives producers direction. In practice, the boundaries seem less important to her than the idea itself.
That became one of the recurring themes of our conversation. Sorana seems almost instinctively suspicious of the expected choice.
In songwriting sessions, she told me, people naturally gravitate toward places they already recognize. A melody resolves in the familiar direction. A section follows the structure everyone knows. Sorana’s impulse is often to go the other way.
“I usually like to go somewhere where it’s unexpected,” she explained. “Because I think that’s what people remember.”
Sometimes that means convincing everyone else in the room to follow her there.
“Let’s do this crazy melody, let’s do this weird concept,” she recalled telling collaborators, “cause then it will stay in people’s minds more.”
That made me reconsider another assumption I had brought into our conversation.
I had initially wondered whether K-pop’s reputation for frenetic arrangements, sudden transitions and multiple musical ideas packed into a few minutes was itself what appealed to Sorana. But she pushed back on that premise. Once those devices become recognizable conventions, she explained, they stop being unconventional. Seven melodies and three pre-choruses can become just as formulaic as the American pop structures they once seemed to disrupt.
For Sorana, breaking rules only matters while there are actually rules being broken.
That philosophy also helps explain something else about her songwriting that fascinated me: she talks about pop music simultaneously as an emotional experience and an engineering problem.
Sorana grew up speaking Romanian and developed a perspective on English that she believes affects the way she writes. When listening to English-language music, certain words and phrases jump forward while others recede into the sound. That experience taught her to think carefully about where the words she wants people to remember should live within a song.
“It’s like a very big blend of math and feeling when you write a song,” she said.
The initial creation comes from feeling. Then the architecture takes over.
A chorus might need to rise melodically, fall or remain level. Dynamics matter. Repetition matters. The placement of a particular phrase matters. Sorana thinks about where the listener’s ear will naturally land and strategically puts something there worth remembering.
The more she explained it, the less “math and feeling” sounded contradictory.
Perhaps that is pop songwriting in its purest form. You feel something first and then spend the rest of the session figuring out how to make somebody else feel it too.
For years, Sorana has applied that instinct to other artists.
And she has been extraordinarily successful doing it.
Her songwriting career has generated billions of streams, with credits spanning artists including The Chainsmokers, Charli XCX, Doechii, Jennie, KATSEYE, Ava Max and Little Mix. Yet one of the most interesting things she told me was that songwriting was never supposed to be the destination.
“The goal has always been, has always been to be my own artist,” she said.
There is a wonderfully practical relationship between those two halves of her career. The songwriter is now financing the artist.
“My songwriting is funding my artist project,” she explained.
But calling songwriting her “day job” almost undersells what it has become to her. Sorana is prolific because she genuinely loves being in the studio. She considers it a safe space. Writing across different genres has allowed her to explore ideas she could never possibly keep for herself, and she believes the process has made her a better artist.
There is also something deeper there.
Near the end of our conversation, Sorana told me she never actually intended to become a songwriter. She fell into it. Yet in doing so, she found something she hadn’t necessarily experienced growing up: a creative community.
“We’re all like weird, nerds, emotional creative nerds,” she said of the songwriters and producers around her. “These are my people.”
I found myself returning to that statement after our conversation.
Because perhaps that is the thread connecting more of Sorana’s story than it initially appears.
She grew up in Cluj, Transylvania, in a place where the life she imagined for herself didn’t seem particularly realistic to the people around her. She remembers friends questioning her plans to become a singer and move to America. She remembers being told she wasn’t good enough. But Sorana apparently possessed the kind of self-belief that can sound irrational right up until the moment it stops being irrational.
“I was like, I’m fucking the best,” she recalled.
Eventually, she left Romania. Eventually, she made it to America. Eventually, the woman whose “weird ideas” needed explaining found an international songwriting community where weird ideas could become an asset.
And now she is turning all of that accumulated experience back toward herself.
Her forthcoming debut album, Electronic Therapy, feels like the natural culmination of that process.
Sorana describes it as an electronic record dealing with obsession, anxiety, overstimulation, mental health and her own evolution since coming to America. But it is also part of a much larger visual and conceptual undertaking.
She has designed clothing for the project. She has been training for hours a day with a choreographer after deciding she wanted to become the kind of pop performer who dances. She plans a video for each of the album’s ten songs. She wants the visuals, music, fashion and character to exist within one coherent world.
That ambition became clearer to me after attending her HARD DRIVE Party at Music Plaza in Koreatown, where Sorana pulled back the curtain on her creative process, playing demos and unreleased material from the hard drive itself. It felt appropriate for an artist whose career has largely been built inside studios to invite people into the unfinished parts of the process.
Not long afterward, she took the opposite approach at Subculture at Catch One. There, she performed eight songs from the still-unreleased album, accompanied by dancers and choreography, giving an audience an early glimpse of what all those pieces look like when assembled.
The world she is building around Electronic Therapy is maximalist, electronic and deliberately strange. But underneath all of that spectacle is an unexpectedly straightforward idea.
“The story is that no matter where you’re from, you can change your reality and you can have the life you want.”
Sorana is careful not to reduce that idea to manifestation. Believing something will happen is not enough. Her version requires work, failure, anxiety, rejection and the willingness to keep moving through periods when the reality you want bears little resemblance to the reality you currently occupy.
That makes Electronic Therapy feel autobiographical in a way that goes beyond its lyrics.
A girl grows up in Transylvania dreaming about becoming a pop star. She leaves home. She gets rejected. She keeps writing. She discovers that the strange ideas in her head have value. She writes songs for other people. Those songs become successful enough to give her the financial and creative freedom to build something of her own.
And then, after spending years learning the mathematics of making other people’s music memorable, she decides to break the equation.
Toward the end of our interview, I asked Sorana a question I wasn’t sure she could answer: What kind of song hasn’t she figured out how to write yet?
She struggled with it.
Not because there was a particular genre she felt incapable of writing, but because genre itself seemed too small an answer.
“What I’ve always strived for as a writer and an artist is to find something unique that nobody else has ever done,” she said.
Then she wondered aloud about something even more ambitious.
“I don’t think there’s been a new genre for a while,” she said. “How is a genre created, right? Like how can you make a new one?”
I joked that perhaps a genre begins when enough people start referring to something as “the Sorana style.”
But thinking about it now, I’m not sure she needs one.
I began our conversation wondering how a young woman from Transylvania carved out a niche for herself in K-pop.
By the end, I realized the niche might be the least interesting part.
Sorana seems to have spent much of her life searching for places where she fits, only to discover that her greatest creative strength emerges when she doesn’t.
Maybe that’s the Sorana style.
Follow Sorana on Facebook, TikTok, X, and Instagram.
*********************
Sorana on K-Pop, Songwriting and Finding Her Own Sound
