I think the first Sydney Ross Mitchell song I heard was “Pornstar,” a song that is so simple and cuts so deep. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s just a small dent in the chasm of her lyrical mind, with each new song she cuts deeper unveiling a new level. Her new EP “Pure Bliss Forever” feels like the perfect glimpse into her mind. We talked about country music, growing up in Texas, and staying motivated.
We're both Texas girls right?
Sydney: Yes, yes. I'm from Lubbock, and my whole family is from Lubbock. My parents were born and raised there. I've been in Texas my whole life, and I've always loved singing. I wanted to move to LA when I was seven years old. I really don't know where it came from because I mean, my parents are wonderful. They're just like the salt of the earth, very conservative kind of just in their inner sensibilities. They were like singing is cool, but it's a hobby. It's kind of a sweet little thing that you can sing a talent. So, I sang in a bunch of funerals randomly. That was kind of how I started singing; whenever one of my distant extended family members died, I would sing at their funeral. I just became the family funeral singer.
Oh, wow.
Sydney: When I was in high school, I started-- I was a huge One Direction fan in high school. Honestly, I owe a lot of my career to One Direction. They did this contest one time about how you could record a cover of "Story of My Life," and if you post it on SoundCloud, then the boys will pick their favorites, and they'll comment and tell you that they love it or whatever. I don't know. And it was not actually the One Direction boys. It was probably an intern. But I was like, "This is my chance." I'm like 14. I'm like, "This is my chance to get their attention." So I went and recorded a cover of "Story of My Life" in my parents' office on GarageBand and posted it. I think the One Direction SoundCloud account did like it or something. But I remember being really proud of it. So I was like, "You know what? I should share this." And I put it on Twitter or something. So I posted about my cover on Twitter, and it actually performed kind of well, so I just got a bunch of people reaching out about it. And then I got really addicted to that feeling of sharing something and letting people-- I don't know. It was such a rush.
That's amazing. That's amazing, too, because I have such a pet peeve when people complain about TikTok right now. And it's great that you have a Twitter origin story.
Sydney: My life in technology is that I very clearly remember life without a phone, and I remember when I saw an iPhone for the first time. I remember when I heard what Instagram was and what Facebook was. So I remember some life before that, but it also has been like such a huge part of my growing up, and my youth, and my life that I understand why people get frustrated about TikTok, but what I want to say to them is, "Okay. So if this was the '50s, I mean, Elvis, for example, "what do you think they had to do to promote their music? First of all, they had to play like crazy. They had to play like crazy, and they had to do radio tours." I think it was Elvis who said in an interview that he hated those radio tours. But that's what they would do: they would drive around the small towns and give an interview, play a new song, and play a show. And there's always going to be an element of doing some things that feel like work because it is.
And now you can do it from bed, so.
Sydney: I understand having nostalgia for the past and looking at the past is better because it's the past. It's just a concept. But, yeah, to be able to reach millions of people without leaving your bed is insane. And there's so many people of many years past who we might know their names today if they had been able to do that, but we don't.
I'm from a small town, too, and I think we had some sort of escapism that we needed in those environments with the internet. And I'm really lucky the way I grew up because I feel like I had a good balance of being kind of isolated but also having so much access to the outside world.
Sydney: That's what it was for me. I was living a different life. I mean, it's honestly embarrassing to admit, and I don't even like to tell people this sometimes because I feel like it makes me sound like a freak. When I was in early high school, I was so obsessed with moving to LA one day that I would follow all the LA influencers, and I would just get on my Instagram and say, "Oh, my God." I was tapped in. Swear to God, I knew where the cool girls ate and where they shopped. I was role-playing in my brain every day that I lived this completely different life, and then I would go to volleyball practice and then go home and go to my brother's football game, and then I would go pack away in my parents' office and record a cover and post it. It was amazing, honestly. I looked back fondly on the time I don't really feel like it robbed me of anything, either. I don't really relate to the idea that it's taking us away from our real life. I was having the time of my life, honestly.
Well, and also, now we would just call that manifesting.
Sydney: When I think about that, sometimes, I think I kind of accidentally manifested my entire life before I even understood what manifesting was because it's crazy to think about, and it sends me on a spiral when I think about it. I mean, my parents, their first time ever in LA, was coming to see me, and I remember they just visited because I played my EP release show. They just visited, and afterward, they were like, "Wow, all your friends are really nice and normal, and honestly, this place isn't so bad." My dad was like, "I'm really starting to understand why you might want to live here." I think about that a lot, that there's really no reason I should be here, and my parents aren't musical. They're not at all. There was really no music in my house growing up. It was just we would listen to music at church and then maybe country radio in the car, and that was it. So, to be honest, the fact that I've even made it here is pretty mind-blowing to me, and I have to believe that I've been putting that energy out there for so long that it just finally caught up.
I was reading an interview you did where you talked about country music and how it influences your songwriting because it's very lyric-based.
Sydney: I was a big country music hater, yeah, because it was that thing of I think everyone hates their hometown and everyone wants to reject what they grew up with. I was like, I'm so cool, and I hate country music. I realized now that that had nothing to do with the music itself. It was just classic teenage rebellion, wanting to go against the grain of what's been normal throughout your life. Now that I've been in LA, I would start listening to country music just for the nostalgia of it all. I sort of started listening to it ironically, and then I was like, "Wait, this is actually so good. Oh, my God. It's so good." I remember thinking of the way that has influenced me. I do have memories of being in the back of my mom's car, and I had a few favorites. When they would come on, I would get really excited. And I wanted to learn the words. So I would sit in the car, and then I would get really excited for the song to come on. I think that I can see now it makes a lot of sense that I'm such a lyric-obsessed person, and that's so important to me.
I want to talk about your new EP. Can you kind of give me the inspiration behind it, kind of how it came together?
Sydney: I think the first EP is kind of interesting because you've been sort of riding it forever. So when I first started kind of running the session circuit about a year ago, when I met my managers, I didn't know that I was making a project. I wasn't really thinking that far ahead. We did some singles, and it was just kind of getting myself acclimated to that world, and I don't really know what happened. I think I just realized one day that these songs made a lot of sense together. I don't think I ever to me, what the project means and what my songs mean usually isn't even-- I'm not even aware of it until after the fact. Not to sound like I have a God complex or anything, but when I'm actually doing the writing, I really do feel like I'm channeling or something. When I sort of started to realize how they fit together, I started to recognize some of those overarching themes. I think it's really about desire, for the most part.
Oh, okay.
Sydney: Probably desire for anything, everything. I'm feeling sort of disillusioned with adult life. I don't know if it comes from being raised religious, but feeling like you're always supposed to be-- like there's something that's meant to complete you or something that's meant to make you whole. And that you can get there, too, if you just do these things. Sometimes, it feels like that's how I felt when I was a kid, too. I was on this hamster wheel, trying to get towards enlightenment or something. It just never came, which made me feel really frustrated and sad. I think I've looked in a lot of different places to try to find that thing, you know, that would make me transcend.
I feel like the best artists can make something universal but specific. It might be your specific experiences, but it's also so universal that it translates to everyone's own thoughts.
Sydney: It's weird how that happens. It's strange how it happens because I used to think that my songs were going to be quite specific. Now, they are. And I was hanging out with someone yesterday, or it was an A&R, I believe. And she was like, "You want to know what really surprises me about your music, and don't take this the wrong way?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." She's like, "A lot of straight guys like your songs."
You're like, "No."
Sydney: I think it's great. I'm happy about it. I think what I told her is that I don't really know what makes me different as a writer. I think it's hard to look at yourself that way. But I do think that part of the project that was really important to me is that I don't think of myself at all as a damsel in distress or this heartbroken victim. It's not a victim thing. It's like I want to take radical responsibility for the situation that I'm in. "The music is not supposed to say, 'Fuck you.' It's supposed to say, 'Fuck me.'" Maybe that's why straight men like it because straight men are always "fighting demons," and it's just like themselves. It's just their own thought.
That's so true. What has been one of the biggest challenges for you in your career?
Sydney: There's been so many different phases. I would say that it really did take me a long time to find the right people. There was just this lack of flow. I felt like there wasn't flow. It just took me time. I think starting is the hardest part. Right before I started using social media more intentionally, I was in a really dark time because I had just made "The Edge," and I loved it. I really thought it was a special song. I wanted it to do good so bad. It's not that how it performs is indicative of how good it is, but I was just like, "I need to know that there's a chance that I can do this as my job." I have this journal entry, and I'm so glad I have it.
I started doing The Artist's Way, which changed my life. "I submitted "The Edge" for release today, and I'm so excited, but honestly, I just feel sad right now because I'm just so scared that no one's going to hear it. And I feel like I'm going to be screaming into the void, and I don't know if I can do this again. I don't know how much longer I can do this." And I wrote, like, "I just really need something good to happen. I really need something good to happen."
Right around that time, I had committed to not being a pessimist about TikTok. To be really honest with myself, how are you going to sit here and complain about music not working out for you? Have you tried everything? Have you really put yourself out there in every way that you can? I was like, "Just post one TikTok a day for 30 days and just see what happens. Can you at least commit to that, Sydney?" I was like, "Okay. I know I can do that." And literally, the next day was the first video of The Edge that actually performed. And it wasn't even anything crazy. I think it was, I don't know, 300,000 views or something, but that was the video that my manager saw.
That's like the beauty of TikTok, I think. And I always sound like I should be paid by TikTok to promote TikTok to artists. But I find more music on TikTok than I do most things.
Sydney: I've found so much new music on TikTok. And I think it can be whatever you want it to be. And I think most people who are resentful of TikTok or, oh my gosh, garbage truck, most people who I think are really frustrated with TikTok, at least this was, let me speak for myself, is that I wasn't looking at it for what it really is, which is just a creative platform where you can express yourself in any way that you like. You can post whatever you want. You can.
And it's also like even if the TikTok flops and it reached like a couple of people that it might not normally reach, and now they're like, "Oh, I love this song." That's the thing. It's your community-building.
Sydney: And realizing that everything matters. And I read a metaphor one time. Probably, it was in The Artist's Way of building a career; a creative career is like, "You're making a pearl necklace, okay? And you're stringing the pearls on the pearl necklace. And every pearl is the same size. Every pearl is the same size." You don't go, "This pearl is so much more important than this pearl. This pearl is so much more beautiful and perfect than this pearl, and it's so much more important to this necklace than this pearl." It's not. It's like it's tedious, and you're making the necklace, and it's like posting a TikTok, that's adding a pearl. Playing a writer's round, that's adding a pearl, writing a song, doing a session, sitting, and practicing guitar for an hour. That's a pearl. All of those things are part of building this thing, and they all matter. They're all important.
How do you stay motivated every day to continue adding those pearls on?
Sydney: I try to remember why I did it in the first place. I think that's very important. If you could tell me a year ago that everything that would happen to me this year happened, I would have lost my mind and been like, "You're kidding me. No way." So I've been so excited and happy. It's funny how, as it happens over time, the goalpost really keeps moving. You just keep thinking about any amount of, however relative, big or small, the successes that I've had; they don't make me feel like, "Ah, okay, I can chill." I feel more intense than ever. The desire never goes away. I think that's also something I'm going to have to accept about life, which is that it doesn't go away. That's the whole point. I have little things that I think gratitude is such a big thing, and I recognize how lucky I am to even have made it as far as I have. I have this email. I would go and find these random emails of labels; I would find someone who worked there and try to track down their email, and I would send them these cold emails of my demos. I have this one; it is so funny that I wrote, and I'm saying, "I'm 13 years old, and I want to be a singer. And I promise you that if you hear my demos, you won't be disappointed. I'm a really hard worker, and I want this more than anything, and I know I can do this. So please listen to my demo." It's so corny, so embarrassing, but also really sweet, honestly. And so whenever I'm having a bad day, I like to go read that. And I'm like, "What would she say?" She would be so proud of you right now.
Oh, that's so cute. And I guess my last thing would be, what would be your advice to a girl just kind of starting out with her music career? What's your best piece of advice?
Sydney: My best piece of advice is just to do it first of all. I think what I wish I could tell myself, let me say that, is stop waiting for anybody to help you. You can't wait for someone to swoop in and give you the things that you need, or it's so easy to say, "Oh, if I just had this, if I just had a little more money, or if I just had a better producer, or if I just had these resources, then I could do it. And once this thing happens." And I think a lot of that comes from fear, and just starting is the scariest part. And then I would also say my number one piece of advice is just to learn how-- I want to go. I think that you can achieve this thing of exposure therapy to the idea of putting yourself out there. I know that it's really hard and scary to post things that feel really vulnerable, post your music, and you're afraid that whatever people won't like. It's scary. It's really scary, but it gets easier. And learning to enjoy the art of embarrassing yourself a little bit is my favorite thing in the world. And the more embarrassing something feels for me to post, honestly, the more exciting it is. And oftentimes, more people connect with it because it's embarrassing; the reason it feels embarrassing to you is because it's vulnerable and it's real. So don't be afraid of that feeling. That's actually a really good thing. And learn to embrace the embarrassment. And I promise you it will help so much. That's what really I've learned. I kind of get high off of the feeling of embarrassing. And it's not even embarrassing yourself anymore, but that's what it feels like in the beginning.
Keep up with Sydney on Spotify, Instagram, and TikTok.
Emily Treadgold
