When she imagined all of the potential “wonderful future[s]” she could never live, Sylvia Plath saw a fig tree. Gia Ford sees a stranger’s house lit from within at nighttime. She doesn’t mourn the lives she could have had, either; instead, she imagines them in song. Ford’s debut album ‘Transparent Things’ is a ponderous art rock tapestry of tragic, sinister and wondrous figures – many of them all three at once.
Growing up surfing Murderpedia between two homes after her parent’s divorce – mum in Cheshire and dad in Sheffield – Gia lived the dichotomy that many of her song’s subjects embody. “Maybe,” she muses, “it’s kids of divorced parents that are into serial killers.” And maybe, in turn, being interested in the perverse led to the bleak pictures painted in her songs: “I’ve always been interested in psychology. I think that’s why outcasts were the focus [of the album] and why I was interested in serial killers as a teenager. What made them that way? The ones that I created characters for: they’re stalkers or murderers or something harrowing.”
Take album standout and single ‘Poolside’. It’s a snappy, shimmering Americana pop track about a pool boy who bumps off his wealthy employers. Or ‘Buzzing on You’, the ‘Murder Ballads’-inspired Roxy Music-adjacent piece about a stalker. “I was thinking of Nick Cave when I was writing that song,” she explains. “It’s my creepiest. There’s this one road with really big houses that you can kind of see into in the winter. There was this woman… she was crying or arguing with someone. And I was like: ‘Oh, I wonder what that’s all about’. If you were a stalker, it would be so easy to piece together that woman’s life and get really obsessed with her.”
“I think people like to feel that they’re good and other people are bad, you know, ‘cause it makes it so much easier to get through life,” she continues. “There’s lots of elements of yourself that you want to escape from all time, and I think [true crime] is a very extreme way of trying to shed light on that.” She pauses and laughs: “I mean, I’m not saying I’m going to turn into a serial killer.”
Simply put, Gia Ford is “always drawn to darkness”. Years of true crime and Wikipedia holes – largely those concerning Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein – will do that to a person. So will a nomadic lifestyle spent on either side of the Pennines. “I went to school in Cheshire but I never really felt like I was from there,” she says. “I always felt like I was observing another world, like I was sort of just drifting through it. My dad would drive me back over to Sheffield every weekend. Maybe it gave me two different perceptions. Maybe,” she adds, “a psychotherapist would have a nice time with me.”
“I’ve got a strange aversion to writing about myself directly – who should be interested in my little worries?”
In the interest of balance, said psychotherapist should also hear about the sunny parts of Gia’s personality, of which there are many. She’s friendly and thoughtful, with empathy at the centre of even her most villainous songs (“we’re all born innocent and susceptible to be changed and made angry or hateful”). She’s also self-effacing, preferring to write about herself only through accidental reflections created while writing about others. “I’ve got a strange aversion to writing about myself directly,” she tells NME. “It feels a bit self-interested. Who should be interested in my little worries?”
As such, her music has always concerned others and indeed, the Other. The shift has come instead in the handling of these subjects. Early songs (which have all since been deleted from her platforms after a split from former label Dirty Hit) carried a bombastic ’70s and ’80s flair, whereas those on ‘Transparent Things’ are more subtle and insidious. If she once penned pieces that evoked explosive public altercations, now her sound imagines what takes place just beyond view in the window from the street.
Though the darkness stays with her in writing, living in Sheffield near both of her separated parents has made Gia more settled – now, she feels nothing like the outcast she sometimes did at school. “I’ve got a little family. I’ve got a girlfriend. I’ve got two cats. But,” she adds, “I think I’m naturally quite nomadic. If I wasn’t attached to anything, I think I’d be jumping around all the time.” After finishing a recent tour with Marika Hackman, Gia was “really happy to be home…but at the same time, I got bluesy about it”. She elaborates: “That’s why the idea of touring is amazing to me because it’s like the best of both worlds: I can have a family life and then go off and have a taste of [adventure] and then come back again.”
For Gia, “back” is her two cats Tofu and Truffle, and her long-term girlfriend Melony Lemon, the brains behind all of Gia’s striking visuals. “I have my own secret visuals, but I’m more into the poetry of it,” Gia tells us. “[Melony] has such great ideas. She’s able to take [a song] out of normality, but not [make it] so editorial that it has no emotions to it. It’s like a movie in that way.”
Indeed, the visuals for ‘Transparent Things’ do have a filmic quality thanks to Melony’s dramatic, often vintage frames, which meet and match Gia’s lyrical paintings, serving to expand and gild them. In theme, tone and visual harmony, Gia Ford and Melony have created their own cinematic universe in which feathers float like snow and broken windows act as mirrors.
Watch and listen to just one of these collaborations and you’ll be unsurprised to hear that a dream of Gia’s is to pen a Bond song. “I think I’d be good at it as well,” she says. Indeed, ‘Falling in Love Again’ already shares qualities with some of her own favourites ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, ‘Skyfall’ and Radiohead’s rejected ‘Spectre’ submission of the same name. With perseverance and a little bit of luck, perhaps this is one potential, wonderful future that could go from the imagined to the real.
Gia Ford’s ‘Transparent Things’ is out now
