Singled Out: Sydney Wright's Seiche

09-27-2018

Austin based music maker Sydney Wright tells us about her single and music video "Seiche", the title track to her forthcoming album. Here is the story:

The title-track to my forthcoming album is 'Seiche'. I started writing it a few years ago in Denton, Texas when I was about to graduate college. I was living with my best cousin Nathan and my good friend Aaron Pugh, the lyricist of the first verse! They were my drummer and guitarist for our band at the time, 'Sol Tax'. I recorded this version with Stefano Vieni and Alex Ponce of Mexico City, surrounded by miles of peaceful pecan trees at Sonic Ranch Recording Studios near El Paso in 2013. It has a slow moody build into the mantra, 'I will be free', where the music explodes into gang vocals and toms and strings like you just B.A.S.E. jumped off the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July during a firework show a thunderstorm.

'Seiche' is about seeing myself and feeling it. It's about blowing off everyone else's label or expectation and becoming self-reliant with my own intuition. That has been a struggle for me because my people are a loving, supportive family in a culture with very strong traditions and belief systems that did not and do not always align with my own. In the music video, I wear a mirror mask to represent other people's reflections projected onto me, and then I smash a mirror and lose the mask to wear my own face instead. In my experience, going into unknown territory or against the grain is uncomfortable, but it's worth it. 'Seiche' is about discovering that.

This single has recently become extra important to me. I feel glad that I named my album after it. Seiche is a French word that means 'to sway back and forth'. Hydrologists use it to describe a surfing wave on top of a lake. They're unnatural under normal conditions, and they're caused by violent, sudden changes in atmospheric pressure or seismic activity. It forces the water to slosh back and forth to regain equilibrium. It seems like I wrote it prophetically in respect to a violent catalyst and unexpected changes I've experienced recovering from a hit and run these past few months. At the end of June, I was hit by a car in a crosswalk whilst riding an electric scooter to yoga. Now I have a broken wrist, titanium plates and screws in my shin bone and ankle, a healing skin graft, and a few broken vertebrae. Thankfully, I'll make a full recovery. Until then, I'll continue to ride the waves and slosh back to homeostasis to transcend this upset.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and see for yourself right here!