INTERVIEW: Sidney Gish
WTBU DJ Danya Trommer spoke to local favorite and upcoming indie icon Sidney Gish about her evolving creative process, touring with Mitski, and truly doing-it-yourself.
Danya Trommer: You’ve come a really long way from where you’ve first started out. From your oldest song, “It’s Snowy In Here”to everything on No Dogs Allowed. What do you think is the biggest creative difference in your process between when you were creating those songs versus everything on No Dogs Allowed?
Sidney Gish: When I was creating songs really early, like when I was in high school, I didn’t really want to work hard on them because they would turn out less than perfect and they sounded embarrassing in the end. All the takes I was pissed at myself. Like “Oh my god, I’m so bad at this!” was in the back of my head every single time as I was doing every track, which made every recording I did sound dorky, but in a bad way. That’s a bad way to phrase it, but there’s a very extreme self awareness. I was also so focused on making sure it sounded perfect in the end and matched what was in my head when I didn’t know how to mix music yet. I just knew what I wanted it to sound like, and whenever it came out not like that I got so mad at myself. But once I put out an album of what I had finished, I realized some of my friends even liked it even though I didn’t think it was perfect, so then I was like “Now I just have to make an album that’s better than this one,” so I did that five times. Now all I have to do is make an album better than No Dogs Allowed.
DT: That’ll be hard to do; I love No Dogs Allowed.
SG: I’m really happy you think it’s a difficult task [Laughs]. I’m glad you liked it. I just feel like I got to listen to it now and just mix a couple of songs better.
DT: So are you going to redo some of the songs that are on No Dogs Allowed?
SG: No, I want to improve my mixing style for whatever I put out next. I want to focus on making it not sound [as lo-fi]–I really like the lo-fi sound, but I want to make sure it’s intentional when it sounds like that. I want to try at least once to have a full soundscape, or something like that would be really cool.
DT: So you do everything on your own, right?
SG: Yup.
DT: Wow, that’s incredible. So you mix on your own, I was reading you don’t have a publicist–
SG: I have a booking agent, but when I put No Dogs Allowed out, it was just me. Then I started working with a booking agent in the months that came after, because I was meeting with a few people to decide what I should do, and mainly my goal was to go on tour. So I started working right away with a booking agent who I thought would do an awesome job, and he has done an awesome job. Other than that, I have still yet to build the rest of a team around me. I’m fine to just chill out on that for a little bit because I’m still trying to finish school and still trying to be super confident in the music I’m making before I really go balls to the wall–doing things like hiring people, because what if I put out bad albums then and I have to fire them? I want to put out one more and see if it still works and if it does be like, “Cool, now I wanna do it.” I just feel so indecisive right now. I don’t know if I accidentally want to start a failing company. I just want to lay low for a bit and see if I can get better at what I’m doing, see if there’s a clearer trajectory that will reveal itself once I start working a bit more.
DT: Do you like having complete creative control?
SG: I love having complete creative control. I really enjoy producing, I really like writing the instruments and how they interconnect and stuff. I’m totally not perfect at mixing. I really want to get better at mixing; I think it’s such a cool skill to learn. It controls so much of how a song sounds and so I just want to keep learning how to do that better than the last time.
DT: What are some of the drawbacks of working all on your own?
SG: It takes a bit longer and it can be weird to share it when you’re done with it because you’re like, “Wait, did I spend enough time on this? What even is going on with this?” But I think working alone is super portable; I can just do music wherever. I can just be on my laptop and have everything I need. Also, I can goof around a lot more. I can throw something in and just take it out, and no one is going to be mad that I wasted their studio time, nobody is going to think that I’m annoying [Laughs]. Nobody is going to be like, “This fucking annoying girl just spent thirty minutes on a tangent on a guitar chord that she didn’t even like! Why am I working with her?” I love working with other people, for like a common goal, but for something that I really like to think about and go all in and be so obnoxious about, it’s really fun just to work by myself then figure out how to do things that way.
DT: Have you considered getting a backing band?
SG: I considered that for sure. I think if I go on tour for a long time I’d love to bring friends with me instead of winging it mostly alone everywhere I go. I’ve done that a few times and I’d love to do that more in the future. I have yet to actually play with a backing band. I’m just trying to map out the next four months with being in classes. I’m going to keep mixing music and try to get better at it.
DT: So [you’re thinking] more about short term goals?
SG: Yeah. I’m thinking more about short term goals which is like finish this semester, play the shows I’ve already booked, continue to play the shows correctly without messing up, keep working on Logic on my computer, and just figuring out what I have.
DT: Now, as a student in Boston, your song “Sophisticated Space” really spoke to me–I don’t know if that’s what it’s about. What was your thought process was with making that song?
SG: I was walking through the Museum of Fine Arts, and I was like, [hums riff]. So I made a voice memo of only that part. Then when I put it into Logic, I started doing other stuff around it. The lyrics don’t have a centralized theme; it’s mainly just me being sad and stomping around. The grooviest sad is what I was going for.
DT: I really like that song, but my favorite on the album was “New Year’s Eve.” That song makes me really anxious, not the actual sound of it, but talking about the eleventh hour and stuff like that.
SG: Yeah, the clock ticking down forever and ever. That was my thought process behind “New Year’s Eve”. I’m getting older, the year’s getting older, it’s the eleventh hour, the clock is ticking down, time happens, what the fuck. I really liked that riff, and I had recorded it with an entire arrangement last September and it sounded so bad because I was, again, freaking out like, “This sucks.” The vocal takes came out like I hated myself. I sounded so sad on them, so I was like, “This recording is bad and also I don’t like the way I wrote this now,” so I forgot about it for a while. Then I was like, “Oh, I need one more song on No Dogs Allowed. Should I bring that recording back?” But then I thought that, no, it literally sucks, so I’m just going to do a voice memo instead–also because I wanted to have a voice memo on there to make the other songs look better in comparison. I was freaking out about which one my production was worst on, so I decided to put a voice memo in there like, “This one has the worst production. Now you can put your album out, because you know which one is the worst one.”
DT: Well it was my favorite! Would you call yourself a perfectionist?
SG: Definitely. That’s why I couldn’t get a lot done earlier on in my career. Now that I have something to focus on–being better than the last album–I’m able to advance more and have more of a point to draw on. When I was putting out the first things I ever did, I wanted to make sure they were all perfect and exactly summarized my ideal goal for my entire life, but that doesn’t make any sense [Laughs]. I really like to aim for perfection wherever I see possible. If I think something’s boring, I hate it. Like if I’m arranging something and there’s empty space I always try and fill it. I get so bored listening to things over and over again. I always feel like, “I can’t put this song out, because it’s not as good as it possibly could be.” I can hear where it could be better, and I don’t know how to make it happen.
DT: Do you ever collaborate with people in those moments?
SG: Yeah! Sometimes I’ll ask someone’s opinion if it’s something really, really specific, but mainly I enjoy doing it all myself. I like having that kind of experimental mentality with my own music, because it can’t hurt anyone if I fuck it up. Like if I bring someone else in that makes my music perfectly for me, then if the album does badly because I wrote bad songs, they’re in trouble. I just like knowing the whole sphere of things only affects me so I can have as much fun as I want.
DT: That’s really interesting. That’s a cool mindset to go into this with.
SG: Thinking that way is the way that I enjoy releasing albums, at least for now while I’m still learning how to do all this: how to mix, how to write songs, how to even play guitar properly. A lot of it I feel like I’m faking: faking being a guitar player, faking being an engineer, faking mastering my own music. I’m still learning about the details about how all of it works. I really like to be the only one responsible so I can try out whatever I want. I honestly just don’t want to be hurting anyone. I still want to do it myself while I’m figuring out what I even want to do.
DT: So what is your training with music? How far back have you been playing guitar for?
SG: I’ve been playing chords on guitar since middle school. I only started to really get into learning scales maybe a year or two ago. I really tried to get going on playing guitar, because my main thing was I really loved writing songs and I really liked learning about music theory. I would read about chord progressions on Wikipedia and try to harmonize them. I would play around with harmonizing in Garageband a lot, but I couldn’t really play guitar that well. I really just liked to play ukulele. I played the chords on the ukulele and came up with progressions, but it’s still on the ukulele. I started playing guitar more when I got to college because I thought it was super interesting. I was like, “Electric guitar looks fucking cool! That looks more fun than the ukulele.” I started playing live with electric guitar and then as I started playing more shows, I realized I was not playing guitar properly. I started trying to practice more mindfully and doing scales, and I’m still trying to do that. I’m still trying to focus on different areas to improve on. I used to be focused on improving songwriting structure as much as possible, now [that] I’ve practiced that a lot I’d like to focus on mixing and guitar playing.
DT: Would you say your acapella training has helped at all with creating music? How does vocal training translate to instruments?
SG: It has helped a lot. In high school I was really active in choir. I really enjoyed the music theory aspects of singing, like voice reading and sight reading; I was very much deep into music theory. When I got into my acapella group, a lot of times we learned stuff by ear. I was beatboxing for them, too–I wasn’t singing most of the time. What my acapella group helped more with was what it’s like to go play a gig, even if it’s just ten girls getting on a train together to go to a college that’s outside Boston. That schedule of, “Ok, do we have any gigs this weekend?” is something that, once I quit acapella, I applied to my own music because it was already built into my life. It also helped me a lot with group leadership. I went from “pretty bad” at group leadership to “kind of decent” at group leadership, especially when trying to music direct everyone. I was already super into music theory, but I realized just yelling about that all the time doesn’t do anything.
DT: Does No Dogs Allowed have a central theme?
SG: The central theme is probably me rushing to finish it. I had parts of it written that I really wanted to have in there, like some certain riffs. A few of the songs, I just needed more songs so I made them right away, like “Not But For You, Bunny.” Some I put in so they could have worse production than the others, like “New Year’s Eve.” Some I put in since they sounded really groovy–then I was freaking out about what vocal effect to use–like “Sophisticated Space.” It’s just a series of decisions that all kind of piled on top of each other.
DT: So I was reading an interview with you that came out right before you went on tour with Mitski this summer. One of the questions was, “What are you looking forward to most?” and you said going to all these different places and seeing where people live. I was wondering, did that end up being your favorite part of tour and what was your favorite place you went to?
SG: When I say see the different places that people live, I mean the day-to-day differences. LIke when you go to Arizona, all the roofs are flat, there’s desert everywhere, there’s fucking mountains–I don’t see mountains here! Like the basic things of daily life that they don’t think about when they live there, then when you go there it’s like–
DT: “This is so cool.”
SG: Yeah! Then when I get back to Boston, I can now see this in a different way, like looking at the variety of stuff. Especially nature. Visiting Burlington, Vermont was very fun. Walking around town, there’s such a vibe. Visiting Portland, Maine, it was foggy, I saw a lobster. Also, scenic drives up the Atlantic ocean were very cool. I made sure to take a lot of scenic roads when I was out with Mitski because I was driving alone and didn’t really have a daily schedule other than get to the venue.
DT: Oh, you guys were separate from each other? I have no clue how touring works.
SG: Yeah, Mitski has her touring party and her van and that’s very set. In some cases, there’ll be an extra seat and if it’s a long journey, I could totally ride in the van. Like when I toured with Petal, that’s what I did. But with Mitski, she has her touring party already, and since it was in the Northeast, I was like, “No, I can totally drive.” I don’t need everyone to make room for me to sit there when I have a car in New Jersey and I can go on this tour just driving. I mapped out who I was going to stay with and what all the routes were. Overall it was really fun–it was like a choose-your-own adventure game. In the future, I’d love to bring other people with me and assemble a proper touring party, but for something so last minute after my internship, going alone was awesome, I got to learn so much.
DT: So what was your favorite place that you went to?
SG: I had a bunch of fun times in various places.
DT: So you toured with Mitski, that’s really incredible. She’s huge right now. Did you get connections from that tour? Are you guys friends now? [Laughs]
SG: Mitski was very nice. She’s very busy. She has this whole empire–you build an empire when you’re that big of an indie artist. She has ramen spoons, she’s a fucking boss. That’s not how I want to phrase my opinion on Mitski forever: Mitski is a very dedicated and hardworking musician. I admire what she does. She was very busy on tour, but when we did speak to each other she was so nice and very supportive and overall a great person to go on one of my first tours with.
DT: So you have a show coming up that is like the craziest bill I have ever seen. You, Jeff Rosenstock, Tiger’s Jaw. How did that happen?
SG: My booking agent actually just sent that over to me. He also books Jeff Rosenstock. The booking process is still a mystery to me. I was booking my own shows before I started working with an agency, but having this strategy surrounding them has been very helpful.