Sidney Gish Comes Home to Boston

By Maura Cowan

Photo by Kyra Badger

Sidney Gish greeted me backstage in the Paramount theater, perched alone on a chair in a dressing room that dwarfed her. She carried almost nothing from what I could see– some equipment, a small personal bag, and a laptop connected to a portable microphone. 

With almost 360 degrees of mirrors, harsh fluorescent lighting, and of course, our masks, it would have been easy to feel awkward or removed. But Gish had a warm and unrehearsed energy about her, and as I sank into a seat of my own, we fell naturally into conversation. Sound check had gone off without a hitch, and in the meantime, she told me, she was recording some background harmonies for a friend’s track.

Emerson’s stage was not the first or last campus on Gish’s path: she informed me that a few days prior, she had performed locally at Northeastern, her alma mater, and would be heading on to American University in Washington, D.C..

“I haven’t released any new material in a while, so I’ve mostly been playing events like this, colleges and private shows,” she told me. “I’m thrilled that people want to hear me and see me play, and that once I do have something out, I’ll be able to properly go on tour.”

Though she was born and raised in New Jersey, Gish primarily began to break into the musical  scene when she moved to Boston for school. She distributed her first releases on Bandcamp in 2015, and dropped two subsequent studio albums, Ed Buys Houses and No Dogs Allowed, in the following years. Audiences and critics were drawn to her meandering, stream-of-consciousness lyricism and instrumental range: she has a truly original perspective that has kept fans coming back to her standards again and again. On and off stage, she is a self-contained unit of musical energy, a one-woman band with a loop pedal and an ear for the perfect layered sound.

Since No Dogs Allowed was released in 2017, Gish has been on something of a creative hiatus. This was not helped, she said, by the multi-layered roadblock that was the COVID-19 pandemic. While many artists found that quarantine gave them the time and clarity to create new work, her experience, one of stasis and frustration, is equally common and understandable.

“I'm kind of just doing exactly what I used to do,” she said. “During COVID I got nothing done, I was just really depressed, and now I feel like I'm just kind of imitating who I was two years ago.”

She may, however, be somewhat underselling herself. After all, in the spring of 2020, she graduated from Northeastern with a degree in music business, an accomplishment that is not without weight. Though she may appear to be executing the “music” end of that title more than the “business,” our conversation gave me the impression that she is far more of a strategist than she lets on. 

Photo by Will Ingman

Despite her sometimes fantastical lyrics, there is something of a no-nonsense element to Gish, at least when it comes to herself and her work. She speaks about her musical hiatus as a habit she needs to break, her art as something she wants to just do without fuss.

“I need to get a grip and put out music,” she said with a half-smile. “The last thing I want to do is come across as a complainer, I’m so lucky to have an audience and I’m thrilled that anyone gets anything out of my work. I’d like to just shut up and deliver.”

Unlike most artists in her age and genre, Gish is uninterested in becoming a personality. The traditional pipeline of indie artist fame seems wholly unappealing to her, especially in the present media landscape. She has no desire to be the loudest voice on Twitter, in fact, she has recently been eschewing social media. Instead, she said, she’d like her music to speak for itself… and for her to take a backseat.

“I’ve seen what’s happened with other artists if their music and persona even gets a little bit more popular,” she reflected. “It's really interesting the ways that people will put them on a pedestal so they can knock them right off of it. And I don't think you can ever really avoid that, but I do respect when artists just deliver and then go away.”

But to do that, she remarked, she needs to get back into the pattern of releasing work, and regain comfort with sharing that little bit of her voice. This year, she has plans to drop at least two new singles, with an album in the works to hopefully follow soon.

“I’m going to put out two songs with Sub Pop as part of their Singles Club, which are seven-inch vinyls that they release, so that will be coming up later this year, and I’ve been writing new songs and working on production pretty much forever,” she said.

It can be paralyzing, she noted, working and reworking material and never being quite satisfied with the outcome. Reflecting on her initial releases from when she first came to Boston, she told me that seeing other artists in the local scene got her in the mindset of just dropping whatever she was working on at the time, if only for the sake of experience.

“I was nineteen and twenty when I released my first albums, and I think I let myself put out more material that was a little rougher or that I was unsure about because of my age… I kind of want to get back to that mentality, to feel that pressure I had when I was a student to just release things, because now I’m twenty-five and still playing the songs I wrote back then.”

Clearly, however, those songs from her college days have found their way into the hearts of her fans, and they remain firmly lodged here all these years later. With or without new material, Gish is always going to have a home on stage and a warm welcome from the crowd.

Photo by Julia Norkus