Gaslight

Album: released as a single (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • Trishes is Trish Hosein, a Berklee grad of Trinidadian descent who often incorporates spoken word into her songwriting. This is a very personal and emotional song for her. She explains: "'Gaslight' is about one of the most painful and pivotal nights in my life; an experience that shook my sense of self. My music is normally about ideas, politics, and psychology, so creating something so vulnerable was difficult, but also important. Oddly enough, something about that night and that person helped me to become who I am, and the song itself took me on adventures and collaborations that I really treasure."
  • Gaslighting is term that means intentionally driving someone crazy by making them question their own sanity. The term comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight, where Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband manipulates her into going insane. One of his techniques is to tell her that a gaslight is not flickering like she thinks it is, trying to get her not to believe her own eyes. In 2020, The Chicks released an album called Gaslighter with a title track that deals with the technique. Trishes wrote this song three years earlier, but didn't release it until a few months after The Chicks put out their album.
  • Trishes wrote this in Los Angeles "the day after I watched someone I loved at a party with someone else." She explains: "It was recorded with UK producer and bassist Andy Lewis in a small town a few hours outside of London where we used a cello, squeaky doors and one take of lead vocals to create something that I think accurately captures this type of heartache, shame and confusion."
  • This song was released during the coronavirus pandemic, which made creating a video challenging. Trishes got around the quarantine restriction by having four dancers perform in their homes to interpret the song with movement. "It pays homage to the original film in which a man convinces his wife she is crazy by moving objects around their home, and telling her that the lights aren't flickering when they are," she says. "Eventually the woman locks herself in her house thinking she is a danger to herself and others. The isolation takes a toll on her psyche, which the dancers and I related to and channeled into the video, as we were two months into 'safer at home' measures."

    The dancers in the video are:

    Kalbe Isaacson
    Friidom Dunn
    Alyse Rockett
    Adam Lower

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