Name: Siichaq
Occupation: Singer, songwriter.
Nationality: American
Recent release: Siichaq's new album Catcher is out now.

If you enjoyed this Siichaq interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram, and bandcamp.
 


Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

I had always loved music and pictured myself making it one day—my dad’s a drummer, so I was around it all the time and it felt accessible to me early on.

My dad exposed me to baby Mozart when I was still in my mom’s stomach (he stretched headphones over her stomach, lol), and after I was born he was playing anything from Jack Johnson to 80’s hair metal to big band Jazz on the radio.

But it wasn’t until my already poor mental health took a severe downturn, around age 12, that I wrote a proper song, out of pure desperation. Was it any good? Hell no, not by any stretch of the imagination. It did make me feel better, momentarily, and the desire to keep writing never stopped after that.

By that point, I’d exhausted a lot of options when it came to coping with serious mental illness, and none of them seemed to help even in the slightest. Composing my own music was the first relief I’d felt in years.

I’m glad I started writing so young because it took me a long time to figure out how to fully express myself through lyrics, but I think that now it’s my go-to when I need to process something or cope with any difficulties.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

I’ve loved Nirvana since before I started writing, but it wasn’t until I grew older that I began to appreciate the range of Kurt Cobain’s lyricism. So much of it can seem absurd or repetitive or like total nonsense on the surface, but it feels honest anyway.  

Incesticide, which is my current favorite Nirvana album, has a song called “Sliver” on it, which sonically couldn’t be more different to Catcher.

The lyrics, though, are quite plain, and it’s basically Cobain telling a story about how his parents dropped him off at his grandparents’ and how he was miserable over it.



On my own album, there’s a song called “I Should’ve Brought my Jacket,” and it wasn’t supposed to be on the album at all, actually, but that’s another story.

The style of the lyrics unintentionally mirrors the same plain language of “Sliver,” because it’s just me complaining about forgetting a sweater on one of the days we were recording.



I don’t always prefer that style, but it’s a treat to say exactly what I’m thinking without trying to make it into something more poetic. Sometimes I’m just cold and kicking myself for not bringing a jacket, ya know?

Oppositely, I was obsessed with Pure Heroine by Lorde as an adolescent too, and the writing struck me. Lorde made everything sound so romantic on that album, even experiences that might seem pretty regular.



I’ve done this in my own writing a bunch, like on “World Equestrian Center.”

I wrote WEC after I visited the actual World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida–not too far from my hometown. I saw a sign that said 100 Years of Racing, or something like that, and I thought, Geez. Those horses must be tired. That became the first line of the song.



Obviously, the actual racing became a metaphor and took on a deeper meaning as I kept writing, but I love the idea of taking something that might appear small or random and making it feel greater, more profound.

There’s billions more answers to this question but those are definitely the earliest influences I can think of. I appreciate honesty in lyrics, or absurdity, or whenever I can tell the writer is just being themselves.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

There’s a really wonderful song by Melody’s Echo Chamber called “Some Time Alone, Alone,” and I found it in just the right era in my life.

I was 20 years old, living in Nashville, and hopelessly lonely. I was working up to 11 hours a day, my boyfriend had just broken up with me after two years of dating (and me moving to Nashville for him not even six months prior), and I had a single friend, Yvette.

Safe to say I spent a lot of time in my own head.



The first time I listed to Melody’s Echo Chamber, I heard the lyrics, “Some time alone, alone to wonder, change your mind, and talk / Waiting around while everyone else is moving on and on, and talk / Empty home, it's not the same at all / Draw the line, and I'm losing my mind,” and it was a shock to the system. I hated being alone, but suddenly, it felt necessary.

This ethereal, beautiful voice lamenting, it’s good to be alone, you need time to figure out what you want, I know you don’t feel at home, but you have to get comfortable with yourself. Maybe that isn’t the point of the song at all, but it became what I needed it to be, and I listened obsessively.

I figured out how to be by myself, at least long enough to get through my lease, I started cooking meals for myself, started exercising to cope with anxiety, and I started writing music again after a long dry-spell. I still love this song and listen to it all the time.

[Read our Melody’s Echo Chamber interview]

On the basis of a piece off Catcher, tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

Controversially, I don’t really revise my lyrics. That’s probably not the best practice, but if there’s something missing about the lyrics, I’ll just scrap the whole thing and start again.

I write quickly and it usually all comes out at once, so the lyrics on the album are, besides a couple words here and there, exactly the same as when I first wrote the songs. All I knew when I started writing Catcher was that I wanted it to be honest and a little weird.

The only things that we changed were which songs made the cut–a lot of the demos just didn’t fit lyrically, so they’ve been archived for the b-sides. Ben and Evan, who produced and engineered the record, did a great job at identifying what made sense together and what songs would shape the lyrical universe into something cohesive, so their advice was invaluable.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

The way I write is incredibly unpredictable. Sometimes I start with the first line, that’s probably what happens most of the time. But sometimes it’s a line that ends up in the chorus, sometimes I write something in my notes app that I then chop up to fit the right cadence–I never know where I’m starting. Like I said, I don’t revise my lyrics, so wherever something ends up is where it stays.

I think it’s fun though, like putting a puzzle together, cause the shapes are already there, I just have to make them fit. When I wrote “A Couple Bad People,” I started with the first line, “I got a brand new job, but it doesn’t make me any money,”.



From there, I wrote the verses, but I got stuck on the chorus lyrics and had to play through it over and over before deciding that it was actually okay to simply say how I felt about the things I addressed in the verses–I’m happier this way.

Then there are songs like “Cannibal,” and I started with the title for that one, actually. I had just watched a fascinating video essay about cannibalism, and I was telling somebody about it, and they were, rightfully, disgusted.

They couldn’t understand why I’d watch something so gross in the first place.



Now, hopefully everyone who hears the song knows it’s not truly about eating other people, but the visceral reaction that we have to the concept of cannibalism was inspiring. I thought about emotional cannibalism, the ways that people have become emotional parasites in my life, how abusive men have eaten away at my and other women’s interior beings. The rest of the song came from those notions.

Point of all that is, lyrics start wherever they want and I just arrange them on the page.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

I am constantly contradicting myself, which does shine through in the music, inevitably. But I think that Catcher, despite the occasional contradictions, develops a frightfully vivid photograph of my interior world at the time of writing the album.

The picture only gets clearer the more you listen–I was feeling heinously lonely, exhausted, self-hating, world-hating, and downright terrified. Geez, I must be fun at parties, huh?

I had no intention of sticking to a handful of themes for this album though, it was all by chance. Or perhaps it’s a testament to the sheer strength of my emotions at the time. But either way, the individual songs have the same thematic underpinning. I think that when someone hears a line like, “No one really tells you how hard it is to like yourself / I think I’m fine when I’m alone but I hate who I am when I’m with someone else,” from 22 Trips, next to, “My person impression is lousy / I’m sorry to those who bear witness” from "Human Impression," they can really start to see the consistent emotional world that the record lives in.

With that said, I don’t mind albums with inconsistent or even contradictory lyrics. People are complicated and feelings are rarely consistent, so I like when that gets explored across a whole body of work.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing song lyrics or poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

In a lot of ways, I think creativity can seep into every crack and corner of life. I know it’ll sound pretentious to say, but I try to view life as an artform all on its own. Clothes, hair styles, jewelry, makeup, tattoos, gestures, word choice, decorating my room … there’s art in all of that, it all expresses something.

Though mundane, you get to create yourself every day, and that requires thought, inward exploration, and execution. I don’t normally feel that way though, not about every-day chores. Washing dishes and changing out the air filter are painfully bland to me because I can’t figure out how to make it meaningful.

In general, repetitive, mundane tasks are difficult to cope with. They make me feel like I’m trapped in a loop, and once you learn how to do them, there’s really no growth in ability, and they require no thought. Those are the things that drum up the sensation of being in auto-pilot, which is the most grating way to exist for me.

Writing lyrics is an entirely different experience, because it takes consideration, growth, emotional investment, and passion. It feels novel every time it happens, because there’s no guarantee it’ll happen again. Writing gives me the space to evaluate my thoughts and feelings, and to express those things in a manner of my choosing.

I’d love to say that art comes so naturally that everything I do is rich with creative energy, but it’s not the case. When I make a cup of coffee, I’m fighting to keep my eyes open and trying to remember everything I’m supposed to do the rest of the day.

I should probably work on that.

Do you have things that you are really passionate about but rarely get to talk about?

I’m interested in a lot of things! But I don’t know much about any of them, so I’m always nervous to bring them up. I get that way with music too, it seems like everyone knows more about it than me.

Something I really enjoy learning about but don’t often mention is art and art history. A couple of years ago I started learning about Goya and more specifically, the Pinturas Negras, the Black Paintings. It’s a collection of 14 paintings by Goya that he did on the walls of his home in the last few years of his life. They were not named by him, and neither was the collection as a whole, so the titles were assigned to his work posthumously.

The paintings are freaky, to put it lightly, all rife with dark imagery and symbolism. They’re super famous, it’s not like a niche or little-known group of paintings, but many people seem to dislike them. I think they’re fantastic though, and the history leading up to their creation is fascinating.

Goya witnessed unimaginable horrors during the warfare in Spain, he was targeted by the Spanish government for his progressive beliefs, he lost his hearing due to illness, and eventually fled to France because of the oppression in his home country.

The Black Paintings are explicitly political and Goya never intended for them to be viewed by the public, at least not during his lifetime. The wallpaper on which the 14 images were painted had to be very carefully peeled from the walls of his residence in order to get the paintings out and into a museum. Some of them sustained damage, so there are bits and pieces missing from the original work.

The social/governmental/religious commentary in this collection, much like Goya’s other work in Los Capriochos, is searing and brilliant. Sure, they don’t inspire overly positive feelings within the people who view them, but they’re historically and politically invaluable. I have a print of The Dog in my room back home, and I had the privilege of seeing the entire collection at the Prado museum in Spain.

A few other visual artists that I love are Antoni Tapies, Hilma af Klint, Käthe Kollwitz, and then on the more current side, Jack Boucher, Lewis Rossingol, Laura Benson, Kosuke Ajiro, and Anu Jakobson. Don’t quiz me about any of these people, all I know is I see their work and I like it … but as I said, I only know a little bit about a lot of things.