Sydney Sprague: Using Lyrics As An Outlet
In the last few decades within the music world, we have seen the rise of singer-songwriters who all write poetic lyrics, in their own unique style, that act as an entryway into one’s soul and emotions, their dreams and fears, their most vulnerable moments out there for the world to hear. SYDNEY SPRAGUE is just one of those artists, with her cool confidence oozing through each of her songs even when describing events that one could consider to be painful and difficult to get off their chest.
Sydney Sprague has just put out her second record, Somebody In Hell Loves You, three years following the release of her debut album. When sitting down to speak with her, a week following the release of the record, one of the first things discussed is her love of writing such personal lyrics and where it comes from which she establishes as a from needing an outlet as a child. She reflects on this. “I think it just came naturally to me when I started writing songs when I was 11 and I just have a lot of feelings! I was an only child, and I was homeschooled, so I didn’t really have much of an outlet as far as like friends or sports where I could work through stuff, so that’s just where I ended up going.”
Yet despite describing her songwriting as a natural skill, SYDNEY SPRAGUE also admits in the same sentence that it can perhaps lead to some rather awkward moments once some lyrics are out for others to hear. “It’s never a challenge in the moment. When I’m writing I’m not really thinking too much about oversharing but then afterwards when I’m recording the songs and playing them live is when I start to be like, ‘oh, this is everything in my heads, oops.’ It’s a little embarrassing sometimes, like ‘yeah I probably shouldn’t have said that’.
“I work with my partner, my boyfriend, who’s in the band and produces a lot of the songs with me, so I’ll have written something that’s about him and I realise that I’ll have to work on it with him and play with him on stage every night, like, ‘good, glad I did that!’,” She says as she laughs to herself.
Back in January 2020, SPRAGUE released her debut album, maybe i will see you at the end of the world, something that she had been working towards her whole life, yet when hearing the year 2020 we already know where this story is heading. Instead of being able to properly celebrate something so major on her bucket list and look to the future, she instead stepped into a world of uncertainty.
To describe it as a strange time would be an understatement as she puts it. “Leading into lockdown time in January 2020, I had put out my first record which was a long time coming for me, I had been working on it for close to ten years of planning and saving money and writing the songs, so having finally done that felt kind of like ‘well, I did the thing that I’ve been trying to do my whole life so that’s done’, and now we’re in this apocalypse time where we don’t know if things will ever be normal again. Am I ever going to be able to do more? So, I felt like I had accomplished everything I had set out to and any other time I had got just felt like a bonus. It was a weird time.”
Yet she used the time to be productive and spent her time writing songs to distract her from the state of the world. With her songwriting usually focusing on real life experiences, she wanted to move away from the subject on everyone’s minds. “I didn’t really want to write much about COVID or lockdown or the tragedy of it all. Most of my songs are about me and what’s going on at the moment, but at that time I wanted distractions more than anything else, so it felt like I was writing more as like an exercise or as something to do versus, like, wallowing so much. So, it definitely felt a lot more experimental and just trying to have fun with it.”
Then when things, relatively, back to normal, SYDNEY SPRAGUE focused her energy into recording her follow-up record, a project that had been a long time coming and something that she can finally breathe about now that it’s out as she puts it. “I recorded the album last August, so it’s been over a year since I recorded it, so it’s been a long week and, really, I’m happy to have it out. All the content making and music videos and stuff, all the promotional things are like done and I can enjoy it now just being a thing!”
But for SYDNEY SPRAGUE, the one thing that has come out of all this and is, perhaps, the standout moment of her career so far is being described as “the punk-rock Kacey Musgraves”, a comparison that she absolutely adores: “I love it! It’s like the highest compliment that anyone could ever give me, I don’t know if I think it’s accurate necessarily, but I love it. I aspire to it!”
somebody in hell loves you is out now via Rude Records.
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