New Music Friday #7: through losing one voice, Gia Margaret finds another

The non-linear paths we find ourselves on, and the defence of 'sad girl music'

This week, I want to talk about the things we lose and how they define us. And I’m going to focus on one album this time, the only thing I’ve been listening to lately, Gia Margaret - Romantic Piano.

Gia was once put on voice rest by a doctor, which led to the succession of her debut, playfully named Mia Gargaret. This frustrating limitation somehow transformed into a door, leading Gia to a new way of thinking about music. She ‘set the bar low’ for the record and did not expect its profound response.

A friend wrote an article about non-linear recovery recently and said, “linear narratives are built around the idea of a climax or resolution”. But what if there is no recovery? What if becoming ill leads you somewhere else, instead?

Ah, non-linearity. I remember reading about spirals, too. Ideas around spiral ascension inspired Another Sky’s “I Don’t Hate You”. I can’t find the origins, but it goes something like; “the growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral, not a straight line. Each time we come back to the same problems with new understanding.” I’ve always wondered which way the spiral goes; up or down? I’m starting to think it spills outwards, like a galaxy.

In the pandemic, Gia bought a piano. She began playing when she was six, but hadn’t played properly since college. While her debut, ‘There’s Always Glimmer’ heavily featured her voice, a band and chorusey guitars with standard verse-chorus-bridge song structures, for her next work, she veered the wheel someplace new. Releasing an album in the cursed 2020, she told NPR she questioned if she “should take up space”, perhaps offering an unintended insight on why the music is so spacious itself. Instead of quitting, like most musicians did, or tried to, Gia followed the spiral and went through another door.

This week, myself and Jack discovered all our old demos hiding on a bruised, rusty hard-drive. Do you know what I thought listening to them?

“I should have trusted myself”.

I was instantly struck by how the lyrics spoke about the same things I still write about now; conversations I wish I could have, disconnection, a deep longing for connection underneath the anger, lots of fire (always lots of fire). I didn’t realise just how much I’ve referenced the sun since I was a teen, and how much significance it has held through the years for me.

We found lots of jams we did, and individual songs by all of us. Some of the more piano-based songs were mine. I was heavily discouraged by someone outside the band who told me my piano work sounded “too much like sad girl music”, then proceeded to ignore every demo I sent until I stopped making them, feeling completely discouraged. It was a deliberate form of undermining that fell directly in line with what was happening to other women artists I knew.

And it worked.

“you said my music is mellow / maybe I’m just exhausted”

I know we can’t change the past, but listening to those demos again physically hurt, and not in the way I expected.

I’d written off that time of making music as ‘bad’. But years later, with time and perspective, I could hear the songs were actually good.

I felt overwhelmed by an extreme wave of grief. I felt grief for the music that could have happened, for the person who could have been. I let in too many other voices and far too much criticism. I never trusted myself. I was always waiting for someone to say, “this is good enough”.

People rarely did, and if they did, it always held sexist undertones, underhanded sentences like “wow, aren’t the guys just…brilliant? How lucky you are”. Oh, I played piano? “Not as cool as guitar”. Oh, I played that as well? “Not as good as the guys”. This was, and is, a systematic problem - as well as nasty characters, this was from friends, even other women, people I loved, me. And obviously it’s not limited to women, although that’s the experience I can speak from. Prejudice is like a disease - it spreads by multiplying until it’s the dominant idea. Some of us fought back, and a bit of progress has been made -

“I don’t know shit”

But at the time, I let these experiences totally floor me. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like there was no way through. I stopped picking up instruments, stopped showing people the things I made and retreated into the privacy of myself. Sure, I turned up for the band, showed a few songs here and there, forced myself to write for Another Sky, at least. But something inside was missing.

My own solo music, the little ambient project I had, my piano songs - they lay dead in the water.

(sometimes there would be a break in the clouds - the band pushed for Was I Unkind to make it onto Music For Winter)

Slowly, after I finally saw these experiences for what they were - bullying, bitterness, insecurity - I’ve managed to learn how to create again. Part of being an artist is learning that you have to basically shut everyone else out and stop relying on external praise. And this is why -

Someone will always hate it. Someone will always twist your words, decide they know you better than you do and want to get at you for daring to do music in a world where the right to make art is totally stripped from people. So you can’t change for one person’s criticism, because then you’ll put it out and someone else will hate it, and you won’t be able to back it because it wasn’t what you wanted to do.

I love my band. I love that we get in a room, seem to ‘go somewhere else’ and none of us understand what comes out the other side. I love that each time, it’s totally unexpected. What will we sound like by our fifth album? I don’t know, and that’s exciting. I wouldn’t trade being in a band for the world.

I’m only contemplating how it felt to lose my individual solo project, something I once thought was an integral part of my identity.

What did a dear friend say to me recently? “The death of the paths not followed”. We can always grieve the road not taken. Maybe I’d have done all those piano songs and not been content either, maybe, at that time, everyone was simply over-saturated with the deluge of ‘subdued anti-punk’ as James Blake put it, or I simply wouldn’t have done it justice back then. But in those demos, above all else, I can hear intention.

You only learn all of this through years of experience. Growing up means realising you do know. You really do. Your vision, your intuition is enough. Something written in “Human Stuff” this week has also really stayed with me:

“So maybe Doing The Thing… whatever it is… is less about trying to manage other people’s feelings or opinions about it, and is more about learning we can trust ourselves to hold the discomfort of not having control over any of that.”

But it’s okay. Songs wait for you.

The bright side is that all the songs are still there. All the work you do over the years isn’t for nothing. It’s still you, you know? Nothing is ever truly lost, and definitely not songs. Think about Molly Drake! She kept them all to herself! Songs were just…old friends.

Full disclosure…because taking responsibility for things you could have done differently is crucial to growth…throughout the years, there have been lovely voices, and people saying lovely, lovely things. And it’s up to me to focus on them. I didn’t focus on them, or believe them because of my own issues, but I do remember and treasure them now. Like songs, those memories wait for when you’re ready to listen to them. They thankfully don’t go away.

So, non-linearity, circling back to the very first stuff you made. How do you change your journey when the unexpected happens?

Gia Margaret - Romantic Piano

Album: classical / ambient / experimental

I can’t really say where the memories fade
But some are burnt into my brain
I can’t really say what they meant to me
But now I’ll never be the same

are some of the only words sung midway through this album.

“The pandemic happened and I, like so many of us, was just at a loss for words. I didn’t know how I felt about anything, so making more instrumental music felt like the right thing for me to do, rather than force my way through words”, Gia told Stereogum.

Maybe Gia also realised she was onto something with her sophomore album and its traverse into the unknown. In both her second release and this new album, the piano becomes a voice in itself. The melodies are singing. The (mostly) absence of words mean that as you listen, you can project your own thoughts and imagination onto the music.

Even writing this, look how much I’ve dived into my own experiences and thought about myself. It perhaps reads a little arrogantly, but really serves as the hallmark of brilliant music from Gia. As a musician, if you can get people to reminisce about their lives and soundtrack thought itself, you’ve done your job.

The standout track for me is Cicadas, and it was one of the first written for the project. ‘Romantic Piano’ was first conceptualised back in college for Gia, and placed to the side. Many of the songs are just around two minutes in length, like beautiful sketches. It doesn’t feel like these compositions are for any reason other than extracting sweeping, ephemeral thoughts from the mind and transforming them into notes.

“But now I’ll never be the same” - our decision, and indecision, informs where we go, what we lose, and this album looks back at what was left behind in the process. It sounds like ghosts of the paths not taken, or a million imagined lives. Our bodies change and fail us in unexpected ways, opening new doors without us realising.

“Even still, I get messages from people saying that the music healed them or got them through a really hard time, and I walk around feeling like garbage every day”, Gia said.

I feel like these thoughts are common with women composers and artists, and I feel like I’ve read them in all my favourite artist’s interviews. Subdued music comes from a place of restraint and contemplation. It comes from a need to speak just as much as punk music does.

In the same breath, that dude who criticised me would often chastise me for being too loud, then wonder why the music wasn’t. What people who criticise ‘sad girl music’ don’t understand is that women are sad for a reason.

‘Should I take up space?’, Gia asked.

Yes. Unequivocally yes.

Oh, one last thing I’d like to share. I’ve also found myself listening to Ethel Cain’s ambient playlist on repeat:

Sad girl music for life. 🌸