This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s spring editorial intern Henry Ryeder. Find him on Instagram at @henryryeder. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard Sidney Gish. I was with friends at a bar in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An open mic had slowly devolved into rounds of chatty drinking (as open mics often do), and I was working my way toward the restroom when I fell into full earshot of a nearby speaker. “Every other day I’m wondering, what’s a human being gotta be like, what’s a way to just be competent?” This is the first line of the chorus to Impostor Syndrome off Sidney Gish’s No Dogs Allowed. I’ll be honest, as a musician and songwriter myself, it wasn’t the lyrics that floored me at first. The song’s syrupy melody, set against its simple leading tone chord progression, made me feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time: in awe of a songwriter.
Sidney Gish has an undeniable melodic gift, not dissimilar to Paul McCartney’s, though I doubt Gish would do anything other than eye-roll at a Beatles comparison. Still, Gish’s musical instincts, at least to my own ears, are what truly sets her apart from her contemporaries. We can bicker about the worth of Gish’s cheeky lyrical headiness (Telephone poles get blurred together in gray weather…Til they look like crucifixes) compared to the languid confessionalism of one of her playlist pals such as Alex G (You grabbed my hand, I tore your dress).
Gish’s compositional tendencies are harder to mistake. The chorus to Homecoming Serf, the song whose lyrics I referenced directly above, includes a chromatic chord progression that’s both expertly simple and diabolically perfect, keeping the melody stationary while shifting the listeners’ context of the key, until we inevitably land back home.
I don’t mean to be esoterically technical about a composer’s inclinations. Not only would an article drenched in theoretical language be exclusionary, Gish herself would probably (and correctly) claim that focusing purely on these things would be beside the point. Curiously, in my own experience, no one has screamed to me about the confines of western music theory more than white boys with guitars. There’s a lot of truth to these arguments. All colonialist realities and implications aside, western music theory is a language and, like any language, is no more valid at expression than any other.
Yet as a self-admitted Gish-head, I can’t help but groan at some of the music literati’s take on Gish’s work. Nina Corcoran’s fantastic review of Gish’s second (and most recent) record No Dogs Allowed highlights the musical complexity of Gish’s songwriting, but most interviews and press focus on Gish as a personality. Laura Snapes’s review of Dogs in the Guardian underscores Gish’s penchant for “mordant” charm. Cameron Perry in Fader summated Gish’s lyrical strength as being “very serious about taking nothing very seriously.”
Anecdotally, this has often been the prevailing sentiment among my nice, college-educated indie friends when I bring up Sidney Gish. She’s funny, the feeling goes, but she’s not serious. Never mind the Pitchfork acclaim and Mitski opening spots, Sidney’s act is an entertaining sideshow, a quirky amuse-bouche to the hi-fi, xanax-drenched arena-folk of 2020’s “indie” pop. I know that Gish’s music is defiantly scrappy, and that her approach can feel abrasively DIY. I also know from various interviews and Sidney Gish IG stories that she’s a fan of artists like Frankie Cosmos, Of Montreal, and Japanese Breakfast. I’ll gladly praise these artists’ work. But I think Sidney Gish blows them all out of the water.
Though it’s a travesty, it makes sense that Gish’s music isn’t more widely appreciated. As evinced below, Sidney’s foregone a more typical artist career for one that suits what she wants. In this way, Gish’s songwriting, execution, and live performances all seem invariably intertwined.
who is sidney gish?
Sidney grew up in the sleepy suburban hamlet of Randolph, New Jersey. While her father was a guitar aficionado, obsessed with “different types of wood…he’s one of those people,” Gish’s own musical upbringing would be composition-based. Having learned the recorder in middle school, Sidney was able to translate melodies in her head onto makeshift sheet music in notebooks, attaching notation to individual syllables in lyrics. Her relative pitch abilities allowed her to parse out music easily. Gish implied some synesthetic associations when describing this skill, “If you see the color red, you can’t give the hex code for it, but you know that it’s red — it’s kind of like that…If a car beeps in an F sharp, then I’ll know it’s an F sharp.”
At the age of 12, Sidney took up the ukulele in an act of rebellion toward her guitar-wielding father. Sidney’s ukulele proclivities, enmeshed in the twee revolution of the late aughts and early 2010’s, would lead her to post original music on Tumblr. After seeing Frankie Cosmo’s Bandcamp page that included songs from Cosmos’s teenage years, Gish was struck with newfound inspiration. She posted a “dump album” on Bandcamp the next day, and the next several years would prove incredibly prolific for the young artist.
all the majors at the labels
Gish majored in Music Business at Northeastern University, a pragmatic choice that might seem confusing for the unflinchingly self-assured songwriter. Yet Gish has only had good things to say publicly about her academic choice, one that landed her in the college music scene. Early on in her study at Northeastern, Sidney joined the all-female a cappella group “Pitch, Please!” as the troupe’s resident beatboxer. This was concurrent with Gish’s fledgling solo career; her first gig in Somerville, MA was followed by a Pitch, Please! performance in Rhode Island the same day. The immersion in music no doubt had an influence on Gish’s confidence and abilities to self-produce, and her recorded efforts became progressively more cohesive.
It’s worth mentioning that there are moments of brilliance in Gish’s work even before her production style coalesced. the big bang off 2016’s EP dummy parade centers around an overdriven guitar riff catchier than anything I’ve heard out of most New York “shoegaze” bands. The 2014 recording of the college admissions song is a descending bass-line extravaganza complete with an a cappella multitrack of Gish’s vocals. Both of these songs brush up against Gish’s solo-recording limitations (the guitar on big bang is digitally thin, Gish’s vocals peak and distort in college admissions), and both songs show more talent than the vast majority of singer-songwriters I saw during college. “I [visited] NYU and was literally, like, ‘I’m not cool enough to be there’”, Sidney told indie outlet Allston Pudding in 2017. I went to NYU. NYU was not cool enough for Sidney Gish.
Yet Gish’s talent would make mainstream headwind soon enough. The release of Gish’s fantastic effort Ed Buys Houses lent the artist some serious cred in the Boston music scene. Sidney’s subsequent 2017 release, the magnificent No Dogs Allowed, only continued the artist’s seemingly unstoppable career ascent. Interviews and press opportunities arose at a fortuitous moment; the middle of the last decade was likely the last period during which music publications could “break” an artist. Thanks to Nina Corcoran, who’d previously written about Gish in a Boston publication, Dogs received a 7.7 score on Pitchfork. Gish also won a Boston Music Award for Best Album.
In the following two years, Gish seemed happy to balance her final days of college with a sky-rocketing solo career. Interviewed while interning at UMG in 2018, Gish mentioned that for the first time in her life, having a full-time career as a musician seemed like an option. Still, the beatboxing queen with a penchant for the absurd remained pragmatic, “I write all the time, but I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. I just need to go to work tomorrow and that’s it.”
the lyrics that you think of when you’re high
It was around this time that I first started listening to Sidney Gish. Entranced by her melodic abilities on Impostor Syndrome, I offhandedly mentioned Gish to my roommate during a discussion on our favorite music at the moment. My roommate immediately beamed. Intrigued, I asked, “What else has she done that’s good?” Without missing a beat, my roommate replied, “All of it.” Somewhat dubious, I listened to all of No Dogs Allowed. Sam wasn’t kidding. It was all great.
No Dogs Allowed opens with a midcentury sample of a man instructing listeners on parakeets, chopped up with a delicious guitar-based chord progression, and supplemented with an accordion-like midi pad. The album continues with one of Gish’s most famous songs, Sin Triangle. Most people will probably recognize Triangle for its iconic line, “Two faced-b***hes never lie, and therefore I never lie.” When I think of the song, I immediately turn once again to Sidney’s melody. “Got to work on my brain…then…I’m,” those last three words conducting an arpeggio of the I chord over the ii chord to colorful, jazz-standard effect.
The hits continue with Good Magicians, one of the album’s more straight-forward indie-rock songs that opens with an instrumental superior to any guitar licks I’ve heard from Adam Hann or Albert Hammond Jr. (oh no, he didn’t just drag The Strokes, did he!??) Sophisticated Space shows Sidney’s more sample-based instincts, while I’m Filled With Steak and Cannot Dance undeniably sounds a lot like Fluorescent Adolescent by Arctic Monkeys. I’d much rather watch Anthony Fantano’s mustache quiver with dime-store superlatives describing Sidney, so until that happens, the Filled With Steak riff is a Gish original as far as I’m concerned.
Then there’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. This was one of the first moments on the record that I felt both jealous and seen, in the way that only a great songwriter can do to another songwriter. “Where the side…walk…ends” Sidney launches across the scale as she pulls a classic iv minor chord change to resolve back to I, before pulling some great little chord changes to end the phrase, “We could be good friends.” That’s something I would’ve written, I remembering thinking, I wish I wrote that!
The following two songs, Mouth Log and I Eat Salads Now, were never my favorites, but certainly catch Sidney at her most personally revealing. “I’m a businessman, I don’t waste my time on any shit,” Sidney says on Salads, perhaps a tad less facetious than I assumed upon my past listens. Rat of the City is another great, simple chord progression, rounded out by great guitar licks and harmonies.
Yet it’s the next three tunes that really make Dogs a masterpiece. Not but for You, Bunny is a DIY pop sleight-of-hand, juxtaposing perfect falsetto melodies and harmonies against Nile Rodgers-esque guitar strums, a Tom-Tom Club like beat, and a groovy (albeit distinctly Gish-style) bass-line. While not her base’s favorite, Bunny is the closest song Gish has to a crossover hit, and with good reason.
Next up is Persephone. While it’s hard for me to choose a favorite Gish tune, Persephone would be my contender if forced to choose. Set against a simple, heartbreaking melody and guitar progression, Persephone isn’t just a beautiful song, it’s one of the most quietly tragic in Gish’s discography. Chock-full of references to mispronunciations and misunderstandings of college-level buzzwords, I’ve always felt that Persephone is about a young poet realizing that words don’t mean actually mean much. Persephone is followed by Impostor Syndrome, and the wonderful voice memo New Recording 180 (New Year’s Eve).
please don’t visit me
I started religiously listening to this album in the summer of 2019. It was a pretty wrought moment in my life in terms of self-image. The social isolation of my childhood was confronted headfirst by the realities of adulthood. On top of this, I was in a band, we had a (tiny) scene, and I was presented with all the clichés that come with being a masc-presenting white guy playing guitar in New York City (some of them appealing at first, all of them hollow.) I was also working a tidy little job in a tidy little office that was apparently going to afford me a tidy little career, something I eventually rejected.
It was in this context that I found Sidney Gish’s refrain on Impostor Syndrome especially painful…what’s a human being gotta be like? What’s a way to just be competent? I have a strong memory of bawling my eyes out listening to Persephone while driving my mom’s car home in early July. Sure, I was hungover and hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before, but the feelings were still real. During this phrase, I don’t think I caught Sidney’s line in Mouth Log about thriving in environments in which she tries “to make straight white boys cry.” I can reflexively reject some of those descriptors, but I’ve got to hand it to Sidney Gish: she’s aware of her abilities.
A couple years and an acute phase of a global pandemic later, my roommate and I went to see Sidney Gish perform at Baby’s Alright in Brooklyn. Gish hadn’t put out any original music since Dogs, and had been relatively quiet through that interim. In 2022, Gish started touring again, opening for massive “hypnotic pop” act TV Girl (Sidney could write the string riff to Lovers Rock in her sleep, but I digress.) All these years later, despite all the acclaim, Sidney still insists on performing without a backing band. “I like still having executive control over the performance, even if it’s not great,” Gish told Billboard in 2018. “Even if the drums are coming out of a guitar amp, like who cares? I’m here to have fun.”
The performance at Baby’s was eventful. Technical difficulties delayed Sidney coming on stage, and when she did, I could sense her anxiety. Gish has been open about her nervousness surrounding performing at large venues, and her trepidation was palpable. Sidney’s adamance conerning her setup also played a role: all eyes were inevitably on Sidney and she alone from the beginning to the end of her set. Yet I can’t help but imagine that Sidney’s nerves were also part of the show. At least at Baby’s, the attendees were there to see Sidney. And when looping issues prevented Sidney from being fully present, the 200-plus audience stepped in, singing every word to Presumably Dead Arm like a sincere version of We Are The World.
All these roadblocks withstanding, Sidney was (and is evidently always) a delight to see live. Her voice and playing cuts through with much more visceral power than she displays in her recordings. And if the recent clips of her live are any indication, Gish has been able to reconcile her preferences for intimate live performances with the undeniably wide appeal of her musical abilities.
socially adjusted friends
Right before the show at Baby’s, I got a drink from the bar. We were there relatively early, so I couldn’t help but notice the only other person close by: a middle-aged woman with a wavy bob and unmistakable eyes. I had my suspicions, but was unsure until the bartender screwed up our checks, accidentally handing me the woman’s tab. I looked at the bottom of the check to see the name…Gish! I tried to be as normal as possible when I approached Ms. Gish, correcting our check error and telling her how much respect I had for her daughter’s work. In the most understated manner possible, Ms. Gish started explaining her pleasant surprise at her daughter’s trajectory. “She was always in her room making these songs, we never knew what she was doing in there!”, Ms. Gish told me.
After Sidney’s set, I waited a while before I clocked her surreptitiously leaving with her mother and a friend. I hopped out of Baby’s to catch them, and sheepishly exclaimed “Sidney!” as I caught my breath outside. I blurted out some nonsense about a new chord Sidney added during Impostor Syndrome, to which Sidney effusively nodded her head. “The rest of the acts are really good!”, Sidney told me, clearly wanting to leave. Sidney, if you ever read this, I’m sorry for foiling your escape from Baby’s Alright. Sidney’s mother then recognized me, explaining to Sidney, “This is the young man I met at the bar” In response to this, Sidney smiled and shook her head, maybe in embarrassment, maybe in pure awkward relish. In any case, the reaction was trademark Sidney Gish.
bubble bath of entropy
In early 2023, Sidney finally released a pair of new songs through SubPop. The singles Filming School and MFSOTSOTR are admittedly not my favorites, but it was great to hear something new from Sidney. Yet I can’t help but feel a little selfish in my yearning for new Gish material. If Sidney’s made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that she has no interest in a life and career that’s not her own. “I can’t predict the future at all,” Sidney told Northeastern Global News in 2018. “But I can predict that if I try to please anyone else but myself, I’m never going to do anything.”
While I credit Nina Corcoran with making Gish’s music more accessible, a fleeting passage in her review of Dogs doesn’t feel very Gish-core. “The next step, as everyone from Frankie Cosmos to Car Seat Headrest can tell you, is widespread acclaim and a record deal.” No disrespect to Corcoran or those artists, but the industry doesn’t exactly favor people like Sidney Gish. Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, a boy with a guitar and a band, has always had the privilege of looking the part. Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos, the daughter of ultra-famous movie stars Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, has presumably always had a bit of financial leeway. A creatively uncompromising Jersey devil, Sidney Gish has never had the privilege of projecting predictability, the one quality that the music industry truly values.
Sidney records her music all by herself, performs it all by herself, and chooses to write and release at her own pleasure. She’s not the only popular indie artist that does this, but she is among one of the few that’s both culturally relevant and at least publicly elusive. It’s as if the world knows it wants more Sidney Gish, but like a petulant and emotionally immature child, can’t acknowledge that it likes Sidney Gish.
A recent post on the Gishheads Subreddit titled, “Why did she stop releasing music?” includes a comment that reads, “A lot has happened in the past few years, so it could be any number of things.” It’s true. In writing this piece, it struck me that all throughout the tumult of the last several years, Sidney’s music has been playing both through my headphones and in my head, punctuating the surreal state of things with prodigious absurdism. I do want more music from Sidney Gish, but regardless of the future, I can’t call my relationship to her existing music anything short of a privilege.
If one of our generation’s most talented songwriters feels trepidatious in pursuing a career in the arts, it should read as a reflection on the world we’ve created just as much as it does Sidney’s own desires. Sidney may not ever release another full album, but she may release one tomorrow. She may not ever tour with a full band (in a perfect world, TV Girl would open for her), but then again she may tour with one this summer. She’s made it clear that she wants nothing less than a life on her own terms, and it doesn’t take a Marxist to realize that that won’t always overlap with the whims marketplace (though it somehow often does.)
In an interview with the Boston Globe in 2017, Gish jokingly referenced her own aversion to conventional artist career timelines. “I’m going to book a show in 2097 and just wait until then. It will be a very hot-ticket show, though; I’ll be amping it up for a long time.” I’ll be there, Sidney.
Are you a fan of Sidney Gish’s music? What’s your favorite song? Leave a comment below!
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