Sydney Ross Mitchell has always lived in a place that’s anchored by songwriting, long before she ever became aware of her own talents as a musician. 

“To say where [I began as a songwriter] is hard. To say where it started, I feel like it was just kind of always there,” she says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “I’ve always loved singing. I always loved singing with people. I love listening to music in the car.”

From childhood choirs to teenage notebooks, music became more than a hobby from an early age. As she found herself faced with life’s unexpected turns, where personal history and newly shaped identity seemed to conflict, music became refuge. “It was a space where I could say things that I maybe didn’t feel comfortable saying in real life,” she explains. “It kind of gave me a little bit of a shield to really speak very honestly. It was a safe space for me to process whatever I was thinking about at the time.”

That instinct to use music as both armor and confession runs straight through her latest EP, Cynthia, out now via Disruptor Records. And while there’s a through line of storytelling on the record, one of self-discovery, coming-of-age growth, and coming to terms with identity, Mitchell didn’t set out to make a “concept record.” In fact, she avoids that approach entirely. “I never go into something, ever deciding what it’s going to be about,” she says. “I love to sort of let it reveal itself to me.”

For her, cohesion isn’t planned, it’s discovered in the artistic process. She lets the music speak to her, letting it reveal itself to her. “I was just kind of writing,” she recalls of the creation of Cynthia. “And then there sort of comes a moment where I understand what I’ve been talking about this whole time. I maybe just didn’t understand it at first.” 

That willingness to trust instinct over intention gives her work a rare emotional clarity. “If you just try to follow what feels intuitive and what feels instinctual to you,” she says, “your songs sort of become a time capsule of what you were going through at that time.” Which ultimately gives way to Cynthia’s heart: a reflection of Mitchell’s upbringing, which entailed growing up in a house full of brothers in a West Texas town where the three pillars of life were faith, family, and football, to her time in her early 20s spent in Los Angeles. With that drastic contrast of life experience comes themes of desire, guilt, self-indulgence, and grace: the perfect recipe for an exhibition of vulnerability, even if that vulnerability didn’t come easily for Mitchell at first. 

“It used to petrify me,” she admits. Early on, she found herself celebrating success and hiding it at the same time. “I was like, ‘Oh, shoot. I cannot show this to my parents.’”

But a pattern emerged. “The things that I felt kind of embarrassed to share were the things that were successful, because they were vulnerable and they were honest.” That realization reshaped her relationship to fear. “The thing that you feel afraid to say is a thing you’re supposed to say,” she says. “That’s the thing you need to say.”

Now, discomfort has become a compass. “If I feel a little, ‘Oh, can I say that?’ that almost serves as a good guiding light to me.”

That emotional honesty is especially present in songs that wrestle with home, belonging, and belief. Writing “Queen of Homecoming” forced Mitchell to confront feelings she hadn’t fully acknowledged. “I have this fantasy that I’m going to go home, and everyone I went to high school with is going to be so excited to see me,” she says. “And sometimes I get there and I feel like a black sheep. That’s something that maybe still bothers me a little bit, and that’s okay. I can admit it.”

Her relationship with faith required even deeper excavation. “As a child, I had a lot of anxiety about religion,” she explains. “It made me think about dying all the time, which I didn’t like.” For years, that fear blurred into guilt. “It felt like a dirty thing to admit that you had this anxious relationship with your belief.” Through writing, that tension softened. “It helped me realize that my issue was not with my relationship with God,” she says. “It was with this anxiety.”

The process became an act of self-forgiveness. “I feel like I have forgiven myself a lot and forgiven myself for having that struggle.” Now, she describes a sense of peace she didn’t have before. “I feel much more peaceful about the whole thing now, more than I ever did.”

That emotional reckoning feeds directly into what she hopes listeners find in her work.

“A big through line is just self acceptance and grace for yourself,” she says. “An indulgence in your emotions.”

Mitchell doesn’t let her music deal in fantasy. “It’s all rooted in my experience,” she says. But she does believe in emotional range. “An acknowledgement of the incredible spectrum that we all have inside of us, of good and bad.”

That balance between softness and accountability, faith and doubt, hometown memory and self-made identity, is what gives Cynthia its quiet power. Nothing feels manufactured. Nothing feels hidden. Instead, Mitchell lets the work speak for itself.

“It’s such a really beautiful experience,” she says, reflecting on her work. “When you realize what it is, and have that moment of, ‘Oh, it was this the whole time.’”

For listeners, that honesty is what lingers. For Mitchell, it’s simply the result of staying open long enough for the truth to arrive.

More information on Sydney Ross Mitchell here.