Wit and Whimsy: The Art of Sidney Gish
When I saw Sidney Gish this past summer, she was performing three back-to-back shows by the Boston Harbor, right outside the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). All three shows were completely packed. The pit audience danced under strings of fairy lights, and people spilled out of it to fill the wooden steps of the museum. Prior to Gish’s show, most audience members had been exploring the new exhibits at the ICA, making sure they were getting their full dose of arts and culture for the evening.
It makes perfect sense that Gish would perform at a Boston art museum. Originally from New Jersey, but moving to study Music Business at Northeastern University, Gish has made Boston her home base and launching pad. She has been writing and playing music since she was a child, she released her first album, Ed Buys Houses, in 2016. Her second album, No Dogs Allowed, followed in 2017, garnering praise and winning Album Of The Year at the 2018 Boston Music Awards. Gish then opened for Mitski on tour in 2018, balancing her music career with her life as a student, before graduating from Northeastern in 2020. An indie rock artist, Gish cites Of Montreal, Regina Spektor, Kate Bush, Fiona Apple, and Sleater-Kinney as influences that helped shape her alternative singer-songwriter sound with distinctive echoes of feminist punk.
When Gish came on stage outside of the ICA it was quite unceremoniously. In black shorts and a yellow tank top, she was dressed more casually than most of the fans in the audience. From Gish’s first moment up on stage, it was clear that she is completely authentic. Gish is a solo performer, just her and her guitar. As an artist, she has a booking agent and a lawyer, but besides that she’s all self-sufficient. When she performs, she uses live looping so she can be in control of her sound. She knows her performances and live versions of songs are inevitably going to be different because they don’t have the same instrumental builds, so she never shies away from changing her tone, notes, or even the words of her music. She belts or rasps or yells a word that she only lightly sings on the same song’s recorded version, or she changes up the syllable emphasis of a lyric entirely. The lyric “lost deep inside the MFA” in her song “Sophisticated Space” transformed easily into “lost deep inside the ICA” at this summer concert, to fit the scene. As the singer grows older, she changes what her grade-level is in the lyric “15th grade prom” in “Presumably Dead Arm” to reflect the “grade” she’d actually be in now.
Looking around at the crowd surrounding me, it was evident that every song Gish played was well known by the audience. Gish’s discography includes two albums, three singles, and one album of live versions of eight songs (with more released only on Bandcamp). Not so extensive that it would be impossible to master, but substantial enough that I was surprised by the number of people singing along or nodding their heads without pause. Gish’s fan base is small, with about 336,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, but they are fiercely dedicated.
Sidney Gish is pithy, she is clever, and most of all, she is frank. She describes her music as having a “hodgepodge” of content. It’s all about relating her own experiences, and in doing so Gish encapsulates what it’s like to be young, out of high school, and feel like you essentially have no idea what’s going on. In all her songs but particularly “It’s Afternoon, I’m Feeling Sick” and “Imposter Syndrome,” Gish puts words to the college experience as she sings about handling classes, going out, and questioning her own intelligence and creativity. She counts down months and wonders about how healthy her calorie intake is. She rattles off pop culture references to Banksy and popular Facebook meme pages. She constantly voices thoughts that plague her internal monologue: “Every other day I’m wondering, what’s a human being gotta be like?”
In one of my favorite songs, “Presumably Dead Arm,” Gish examines her own feelings for someone, caught somewhere in between claiming: “honey you are nothing to me but alcohol and dopamine” and telling them: “I want to know your passwords without changing them in preferences/and all the childhood streets and deceased pets that they’re referencing.” But, even contained in one song, Gish never gets mired in writing exclusively about hookups or relationships. She uses her feelings for one situation to think about how she understands herself and the rest of her world:
“I'm in love with strangers who I’ve never even seen
In love with weird cut bangs and sweaters swaying kind of awkwardly
And I’m in love with fresh air friends from overheated houses
Till I Uber up a giant park and dump my body in my dorm bed”
Gish zooms in and out of particular situations and specifics to voice her feelings about general concepts. She toys with words, fashioning new thoughts about her life out of nonsensical alphabet soup. In “Persephone,” she remembers a time that she pronounced the Greek goddess’ name as “purse-a-phone,” and then hopes that the Greek gods don’t see her “butchering names and not believing.” Within her lyricism, Gish walks a tightrope between lightness and a deep honesty about how she feels, understanding a kind of beauty in the very simple and very eccentric aspects of life. She is admirable for her brilliance; the way she crafts phrases to comment on the absurdity of moving through the world is nothing short of remarkable. At the same time, she manages to be so undeniably real. She makes fun of herself on stage, she covers the Talking Heads just because she feels like it, she apologizes when she feels awkward, and she wears a black hair tie on the same wrist I keep mine on. Her collection of public Spotify playlists looks like the familiar chaos that I see in my own or in my friends’ profiles—memes as playlist covers and random but carefully chosen titles (I particularly recommend “eleventh hour,” “blogging anthems,” and “melancholy vax autumn”).
Gish draws her strength all from herself, giving voice to what it feels like to navigate a weird, tiring, and honestly absurd world. Her independence and willingness to be so open in her self-expression truly resonates in all of the art she makes. I’m looking forward to the next time I get to see my life reflected in her quick-witted lyrics and lively melodies, and until then I’m perfectly content listening to No Dogs Allowed on repeat.
Edited by Caroline Waldmann, editor of Music You Need To Know
Cover art by Louise Gagnon