Ziggy Sixx is a California girl whose interest in female rock and roll and finding her “star power” has landed her slots on music lineups at some of the Sunset Strip’s most famous venues.
She is the product of a musician who learns constantly from her mentors and stays certain of who she is, even as her sound and image keep evolving.
Named Aspen Wood at birth, Ziggy has gone by her stage name almost exclusively since high school and fully adopted it during her gap year before attending USC at Musicians Institute (MI) in Hollywood. She explained that, in all-music environments, presenting a consistent artistic identity matters for making connections.
“At first, I was very teenage singer-songwriter vibes ... I was like, ‘I will never change my name because I am me,’” Ziggy said. “But then I kind of was making music that was bigger, I think, and it felt like I wanted the proportion of my brand to meet the proportion of what I wanted my music to be.”
Her name itself is a mashup of influences. “Ziggy” comes from David Bowie’s theatrical glam persona and Sadie Sink’s character in the movie “Fear Street.” “Sixx” is borrowed from Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx, according to Ziggy, because she also liked that it evoked guitar strings and rock and roll.
Drawn to glamorous vintage clothing and the theatricality of artists like Bowie, she treats every outfit as an extension of her music and larger-than-life persona.
That love of vintage fashion extends beyond the stage and into the way she explores new places. In Los Angeles, she has sought out distinctive pieces from Hollywood shops such as The Way We Wore, while also using Depop to discover and sell clothing.
According to Ziggy, her name and persona switch wasn’t just for aesthetics. It was practical: “Aspen Wood” is bad for search visibility since it pulls up results for lumber and trees.
This wasn’t the first or last time Ziggy had to adapt when something wasn’t working. She grew up in Santa Cruz and Monterey before moving to Burbank at 14, finishing high school at Providence High School. According to Ziggy, music became an outlet after she struggled to make friends in middle school.
That outlet turned into a calling when she discovered Ed Sheeran.
“When I discovered Ed Sheeran was really the turning point for me when I was like 12, and then I got really into rock and roll before I started high school,” Ziggy said. “Then I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be a rock star.’”
By the time she reached high school, Ziggy was already performing at the Whisky A Go Go and other Sunset Strip venues, well before most of her peers had set foot on a stage.
Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip venues are legendary for launching iconic rock, heavy metal and punk bands from the 1960s through the 1980s, a lineage that includes Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses and The Doors.
Her early immersion in Hollywood’s rock scene occasionally led her classmates to make assumptions about what happened behind the doors of the Sunset Strip venues where she performed.
“There were rumors that were spread about my mom and me that we would go out and party and do drugs together, which was really funny because ... what we were doing was I was just going out, playing a show, and having fun and drinking Diet Coke. It was very wholesome,” Ziggy said.
Her mother, Donna, who became her manager and closest teammate, accompanied her and protected her as she navigated spaces filled with older musicians. According to Ziggy, Donna brings a relevant professional background: marketing experience from Silicon Valley during the 1980s tech boom, plus a career as a psychotherapist, a combination Ziggy says shapes both the strategic and emotional sides of their partnership.
What outsiders interpreted as partying was actually the beginning of a career, one built through live performance, preparation and an unusually early commitment to the rock world.
After graduating high school, she carried that momentum into a gap year at Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where she immersed herself further in Los Angeles’ professional music scene. Many of her classmates were older working musicians, some pushing 30, and the experience allowed her to develop her artistic identity, build relationships with collaborators and continue performing independently.
Rather than dressing older to fit in, she said she “masked” her age.
“I have two older siblings, and my middle brother is five years older than me. So I’ve grown up ... surrounded by older people, I guess. And I’ve always kind of been told that I hold myself a little older,” Ziggy said.
She spoke extensively about her main influences when it comes to performance and what she identifies as “star power.”
“There are some artists who are amazing musicians ... who I’ve seen, and I’m just like, ‘Oh, they’re really boring.’ ... You just have to seem like you’re doing something.”
She has seen Stevie Nicks live three times and views her as a formative influence on stage presence.
According to Ziggy, Demi Dimitro of the band Velvet Ears is another major influence, an under-the-radar guitarist known for an unusual octave-based guitar rig with no bassist and two drummers.
“She’s got this crazy guitar rig where she plays in octaves. So there’s no bassist in the band. It’s just her guitar in different octaves, and then there are two drummers ... she’s crazy,” Ziggy said.
Lately, she has been listening to a lot of Michael Jackson because, according to Ziggy, “He’s made such a mark on everyone that I think ... his star power is worth mentioning.”
Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran were also formative — Swift for her crowd-connection skills and Sheeran for his lyricism and authenticity as a songwriter. Although Ziggy’s current sound is nothing like Sheeran’s, she found his example encouraging precisely because he wasn’t a naturally “perfect” singer.
“I wasn’t the best singer at the beginning ... and so it was encouraging for me to see someone who could really make something of themself by being innovative rather than being perfect,” Ziggy said.
She describes teaching herself live arrangement using a loop pedal in imitation of Sheeran’s live looping technique, recording guitar, percussion, beatboxing and harmonies live to build a full sound solo. She credits this period with developing her performance discipline.
“That’s how I kind of started with live arrangement, because I was like, ‘I want to be Ed Sheeran.’ ... It helped me get really good at performing, and tight, and good at practicing,” Ziggy said.
For Ziggy, performance is inseparable from songwriting quality. She’s clear that no amount of stage presence saves a weak song.
“Number one is having great songs. I think that’s the most important thing for any artist, because no one’s going to pay attention if they don’t like the song, even if you are a great performer,” Ziggy said.
The performance part always came more naturally to Ziggy.
“If you don’t have that trait, it makes it really hard to be a performer in general, even if you are a great musician, because if you’re scared of the audience, you’re not connecting with them,” Ziggy said.
Singing, on the other hand, is something she has had to work on a lot. She trains the two skills separately, then brings them together for a show.
“I have to plan out both things completely differently and then sort of combine it. It’s kind of like learning to play an instrument; you have to train the different parts of your hands to play it right,” Ziggy said.
According to Ziggy, improvisation is minimal by design, mostly confined to stage banter, and under-preparation is what leads to a bad show.
“If I don’t have time to plan ahead of time, that’s when the trouble sort of happens, just because I’m not prepared. And that’s the worst feeling,” Ziggy said.
She credits the independence of college life, more than the music industry itself, with forcing her to get organized, admitting her time management used to be poor.
That preparation was put to the test at SPARK!, a USC Visions and Voices student showcase, which she described as similar to a Pride festival-style lineup of short student sets for an audience of a couple thousand people.
According to Ziggy, that show required “probably the most prep of ever, for any show ever, because [she] knew this is a really big opportunity to be in front of probably multiple thousands of people.”
She’s candid that her current fanbase skews toward older men, which she finds a little unexpected given that her music and image are aimed at a younger crowd. She’s actively trying to reach younger, more alternative listeners and is pushing her sound toward more danceable material, something she road-tested at SPARK! with a Janet Jackson cover and choreographed sections.
At the Thornton School, she is a popular music major with a singer-songwriter emphasis. She describes a clear structural split in the program: The first two years are foundational and highly regimented, while the back two years shift toward developing individual artistry.
“The first year, I feel like you learn how to learn music. And then the second year was learning how to take that knowledge and turn it into professional playing, to the point where the average person wouldn’t even be able to tell what you’re doing, but they know that they like it,” Ziggy said.
According to Ziggy, she never read music growing up, and “going into different time signatures and different modes of music and having to memorize that and also be able to just be handed music and play and sing it, it’s like learning a different language and also math at the same time,” Ziggy said.
A signature required Thornton class, Popular Music Performance, builds a repertoire spanning early recorded pop, blues and soul through 2010s pop, taught by industry veteran music directors like Greg Phillinganes, Kevin Randolph and Sean Holt, who worked directly with the artists whose songs students perform.
“I remember one time we were playing a Stevie Wonder song, and Greg Phillinganes was like, ‘Nah, that’s not how you play it. This is how I played it on the recording,’” Ziggy said.
She says this training, including the required songwriting classes, reshaped her instincts and taught her to write quickly without overthinking it, prioritizing rhythm and percussion over melody or flashy guitar parts.
She also spoke to a difficult adjustment period coming from a self-directed gap year, where she learned alongside phenomenal but differently trained musicians, into a program where everyone starts “leveled” regardless of prior experience.
That environment, she said, ultimately taught her and her peers to rehearse, communicate and collaborate at a distinctly professional level.
“USC Thornton’s Pop students stand out from other local musicians because of their professionalism and shared musical vocabulary,” Ziggy said.
She describes her music as “anthemic rock with pop structure,” rock songs built on pop songwriting frameworks rather than diary-style confessional lyrics.
“I like to describe my music as anthemic ... because there are more moods than they are telling personal stories, and all my songs are rock songs that follow a pop structure,” Ziggy said.
She said she tries to avoid autobiographical songwriting like Taylor Swift’s, despite loving her work, and prefers to filter personal experience through something else.
“I do tell personal stories, but they’re more through the lens of something else, I guess ... that was just never a kind of songwriting that felt cool to me personally, for my own writing,” Ziggy said.
The most recent song she put out, “Sleep Drink Die,” is, however, an exception to that distance, drawing directly from the loss of her oldest brother, Campbell, at 26 after a decade-long struggle with opioid addiction.
The song began as an expression of Ziggy’s own hopelessness about her future, career and relationships, but after his death, she came to understand it through the lens of her grief.
According to Ziggy, “He [Campbell] could just play a piano. He never took a lesson or anything in his life, and he just had an innate ability. And he was a rapper.”
Performing the song now offers Ziggy a sense of catharsis, transforming private pain into a shared acknowledgment that everyone sometimes wants to give up. Continuing her education and music has also become a way of honoring a brother who believed deeply in where they could take her.
According to Ziggy, as women continue carving out space in contemporary rock, she hopes to help propel the genre forward by embodying the fearlessness she admires in her idols and her own confidence.
That ambition is rooted in a quality that has guided Ziggy through each phase of her life: a strong understanding of who she is.
Whether entering professional music spaces at a young age, blending pop instincts with her love of rock, or transforming herself from a teenage singer-songwriter into Ziggy Sixx, she has repeatedly trusted her own sense of direction.
She shared a story about how what began as a hair dye mishap became a defining part of her image. While trying to color her bleach-blonde hair, she mistook a box labeled “powder” for white dye, only to discover it was powder blue.
Though the result initially shocked her, she quickly embraced it. The blue complemented the retro-futuristic sound and aesthetic she was developing, transforming an accident into the signature look that helped solidify her new artistic brand.
Even as she has adapted her name, image, hair (which was blonde at the time of the interview) and sound, she has not abandoned her identity. Instead, she has found larger and more expressive ways to communicate it.