Georgia Gets By

Georgia Gets By, Fish Bird Baby Boy EP
Written by Gabriela Tully Claymore

Georgia Nott is known for her work in BROODS, the electronic pop project she started with her brother over a decade ago that has since grown into a global phenomenon. Having amassed over a billion streams to date, BROODS has toured internationally as headliners and opened for pop titans like Taylor Swift, HAIM, Ellie Goulding, Sam Smith, and more. While BROODS remains an important feature of Nott's life, she's been quietly working on a solo project under the moniker Georgia Gets By for years, and is now ready to share it with the world.

On October 6th, Nott will release Fish Bird Baby Boy, her debut EP as Georgia Gets By, via Luminelle. "After years working collaboratively as BROODS, I wanted to start a project that could be wholly about my experiences," she says. Written and recorded on what Nott refers to as "organic instruments," Fish Bird Baby Boy contrasts the rhythmic, BPM-centered music of BROODS, opening up space for listeners to experience Nott's individual talents as a songwriter and lyricist. Georgia Gets By offers us a deepened sense of Nott's inner world, as she sings about past turmoil and the hard-fought personal growth that led to this transformative moment.

"I'm always making music to combat, you know, life," she says. "As I was writing these songs, I was opening old wounds." At the time, she found herself living what she describes as "a nomadic life," moving between Los Angeles, New York, New Zealand, and beyond as she worked out the songs that would define Georgia Gets By. Single "So Free, So Lonely" was composed on a fire escape in Brooklyn, as Nott watched a pigeon move about alone in a bustling city. "I was feeling how lonesome it can be to be independent. You're a bit alien," she says. Accompanied by strings, lap steel, and clarinet, Nott's nylon string guitar ushers listeners into this newfound sensation. "From way up high we look at lovers on the street/ They don't know why they wanna stay, they wanna leave," she sings, the lap steel harmonizing with her.

Nott worked with composer/producer Noah Beresin on Fish Bird Baby Boy, in addition to enlisting friends she'd made throughout her long professional career like Suzy Shinn and Seth Paris, and more, to contribute to the EP's production. "The people you meet in the studio and on tour who you really connect with, you hold on to one another," she says. Those long standing relationships helped her enact her vision, one inspired by artists with uncanny melodic sensibilities, like Adrienne Lenker and Cocteau Twins. Nott shares this quality; the guitar-driven "Easier to Run" has a chorus so explosive it belies any struggle reflected in the lyrics. "Maybe we can find forgiveness/ Maybe we can learn to heal/ But it's easier to run," she sings, a layered vocal harmony giving those lines a sense of universality, as if the listener is singing along with her.

In just five songs, Fish Bird Baby Boy showcases the breadth of Nott's talents as a songwriter as it flits between aesthetic dispositions. Some songs on this EP are best described as indie rock or folk, while its midpoint, "Happiness is an 8 Ball," is a straight-up crunchy rock song, one that conjures the sensation of moshing at a sweaty basement show. The bass-driven, heavy production choices counteract Nott's crystalline voice, so clear and composed against the surrounding chaos as she sings of a deteriorating relationship. "I don't think it's love/ I don't think it's fate," the chorus goes, as the drums crash and a spry electric guitar motif offers a glimmer of hope amidst desperation.

Though Fish Bird Baby Boy boasts lyrics that can be read as anthemic and relatable, the songs on this EP are all grounded in Nott's lived experience. The ballad "Oh Lana" is about the first crush Nott ever had on a girl, back in Catholic school. "Would it be so bad to love you?" she sings longingly over spare percussion and a thick bassline. Those lyrics reflect the fear she carried with her into adulthood that being queer was shameful, a dogmatic belief she internalized as a kid. "I recently came out to my parents, and though we've always been quite close, I still worried about sharing this part of me with them," she says.

The EP's title track further examines this yearning to be fully-actualized, to be the same person in front of an audience as you are in front of the mirror. "I'm just a girl/ Who feels like a fish sometimes," Nott sings. That malleable sense of self doesn't make a personality less stable, though, and as Nott has confronted the challenges of the past few years, she's given herself license to simply "get by." "I'm just accepting that through all these different loves and losses, I need to be resigned to the current," she says. "There are these beautiful moments in this life and there are the devastating moments, but here we go, carrying on."