Between the Bible, strip clubs, and Oscar Wilde: the expansive world of Sydney Ross Mitchell
“Release days feel a bit like birthdays to me,” Texas singer Sydney Ross Mitchell says. “There is always a little bit of sadness that comes with it.”
She is clearly in a reflective mood as we sit over Zoom, located in different worlds, in many ways, as my day is drawing to a close over dark and gloomy skies, while hers is only just beginning. But between the time gulf of the UK and America, one thing remains the same: this is the eve of the release of Mitchell’s latest EP, Cynthia, and she’s just slightly anxious about it.
The obvious first question to ask, therefore, is why exactly she feels this way. “I’ve decided that it has something to do with this thing that has lived in concept for so long now coming to live in the real world,” she replies. “When something comes from idea to reality, it becomes inherently smaller, just by nature. And there’s something a bit sad about that. I kind of have to mourn that it’s not just in my mind anymore, which is funny because, of course, it’s so exciting for everyone to hear it. It is just a different kind of relationship”.
Naturally, I am in no place to reassure the singer-songwriter on this front. I have never penned a tune in my life, nor would I frankly like to attempt to, but I have written plenty about them. In this regard, I can fairly confidently tell Mitchell that her eight precious gems that make up Cynthia will be heralded in the most tender care by the listener as she did while making them.
The sense of searing honesty is something which has become more than pertinent within Mitchell’s musical brand over the course of her career so far, with the sheer power of those lyrical reflections alone making her one of Far Out’s 26 artists to watch out for in 2026. But in the here and now, on the cusp of this new EP, those depths feel resoundingly fresher and unguarded than they ever have been.
“It feels a bit more nerve-racking this time around,” Mitchell admits. “I’ve gotten quite good, I would say, at not paying much mind to putting things out in the world. It’s a muscle that you can exercise. But I would say that this one, for some reason, I’m a bit more nervous to see what people think, just because I feel like the lyrical and emotional content of the project is very vulnerable.”
That much was clear from the moment she announced the existence of the EP on her social media last year, open like a book in terms of the instantly vivid portraits it created. In a handwritten letter, Mitchell told of a woman named Cynthia who approached her in a strip club bathroom on Sunset Boulevard, and thus inspired not just the namesake but the entire thought process for the project.
But that deeply textural muse was only really the springboard for an all-encompassing foreshadowing of everything that was to come on Cynthia, in what the singer described as tackling “womanhood, faith inherited, desire, the ache of self-recognition, and what I know will be a lifelong pursuit of reconciling who I am becoming with who I have always been”. If nothing else, it’s clear that we have a lot of ground to cover.
These pillarstones of Mitchell’s life have always “reared their head” in her writing, as she puts it herself, but the EP felt like the true moment of everything coming to the fore, no matter how massive it initially was. She ponders: “It’s a really huge thing to try to talk about… It’s like trying to talk about your whole life. How do you tell somebody about your whole life in three minutes in a song, or in 30 minutes in an album or an EP, you know? How do you do that?”
Using the muse of the title track ‘Cynthia’, the events of which the singer insists “really did happen”, it was evidently a catalyst for so much more. Mitchell adds: “I realised that this moment was a great microcosm of the whole big experience, which I think when you’re trying to write about something so big and all-encompassing, sometimes the best thing to do is just write about really small moments, because it’s too hard to try to talk about the whole thing. I just kind of zeroed in on the little things and hoped that people would understand.”
Between songs such as ‘Kisses on Ice’, ‘Queen of Homecoming’, and ‘May the Landing Come Softly’, there are many shifts, both sonic and lyrical, to represent the shape and persona that Mitchell takes up in the world now. Some of it she describes as being akin to a “Disney princess”, while other parts are purely figurative or an “acknowledgement that I cannot tie it [the EP] up in a perfect little bow”.
The Bible verse “Blessed are the meek” rang true as a constant to Mitchell throughout her childhood, she tells me, with all its inferences of perfect untouched solitude, quietness, and now being allowed to make any sort of scene. “I think a lot of this project was just extremely cathartic for me,” she muses, “of allowing myself for the first time to just say the thing, and ask the question, returning this sort of dignity to myself, that you’re allowed to say that if you want to, you’re allowed to ask these questions.”
Yet through it all, there is an air of something quite unsuspecting that runs through the heart of these eight tracks: the slight notion of the untruth. But this is something Mitchell embraces wholeheartedly, not because it poses as some form of veneer, but because to her, that is the true genesis of creativity. It’s no wonder that she had been reading Oscar Wilde.
Citing the essay The Decay of Lying and the quote “sometimes we rob situations of their reality by making them too true,” Mitchell said this notion was instrumental in allowing her to free herself into a space where not every lyric had to be strictly literal. “What mattered was that the emotion was communicated. And I think that was the first time I let myself do that. It felt really good to tell a story in a way that I don’t think I had before, which also really bled into ‘Queen of Homecoming’.”
She laughs as she confesses, “You know, I say ‘I can’t even smoke/ I miss my boyfriend’. I don’t smoke and I don’t have a boyfriend, but I felt that that was the energy I wanted to communicate of being in your hometown and feeling like all of your autonomy and the identity of who you are, this identity that you’ve created in your own life, you have to sort of abandon it in order to go home and be the person that your hometown is asking you to be in order to be accepted.”
It’s a long-winding road back to this point in time, but as Mitchell puts it, “I have Oscar Wilde to thank a little bit for inspiring some of those lyrics, and kind of just giving me quite a bit of liberty.” Yet even though that was seemingly the drawing board, the singer possesses the ability, through all her motions of faith, family, and womanhood, to take things into her own league.
As the time ticks down on our interview, I want to ask Mitchell if, in the hypothetical situation that we were to repeat this conversation a year from now, what she would be proudest to achieve in that time.
“I’m not even necessarily searching for any sort of accolade – I try to really detach from that as much as I can,” she admits. “I’m really proud of, honestly, who I made this project with. So many of the people who are a part of this project with me have made some of the music that inspired me to want to be a musician as a teenager, and it’s incredibly humbling, and I often have to remind myself that that is really such a cool thing and so meaningful.”
Adding, “After everything, if I flop or if I return to total obscurity, that would be something that would always bring me a lot of comfort and pride for the rest of my life.” Of course, Mitchell is joking, but you can see the throughlines of how she has evolved in every step of the journey.
She recalls the Bible verse “Blessed are the meek” as something she grew up around, and even though her quiet demeanour may have you believe it, it’s clear that the heart of this woman possesses a roaring power that will only allow her to soar.
