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Sadie Dupuis (Speedy Ortiz)
1.1k Plays1 year ago
A special interview with Sadie Dupuis.
Dupuis chats about art, labor, music, meaning, poetry and Speedy Ortiz's 'Rabbit Rabbit" record release out this very same day! Features the tracks "Scabs" and "Ranch v Ranch."
“Rabbit rabbit” is a superstitious incantation repeated on the first of each month to bring good fortune—a belief practiced by Sadie Dupuis, the guitarist, singer and songwriter of the Philadelphia rock quartet Speedy Ortiz.
As a child with OCD, she followed arbitrary rituals, a coping mechanism commonly triggered by early trauma, and “rabbit rabbit” was one that stuck. When Dupuis began to parse difficult memories for the first time in her songwriting, it felt like kismet to name her band’s resultant fourth record after an expression of luck and repetition: Rabbit Rabbit. Instead of re-treading old routines, the record finds Speedy Ortiz interrogating conventions, grappling with cycles of violence and destructive power dynamics with singular wit and riffs. Rabbit Rabbit finds Speedy Ortiz at its most potent: melodically fierce, sonically mountainous, scorching the earth and beginning anew.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host Ken Volante. Editor and producer Peter Bauer.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey everybody, this is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast and really honored and pleased to welcome writer, musician, poet, Sadie Dupuis.
Sadie Dupuis' Background and Education
00:00:28
Speaker
Sadie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Ken.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's so nice to have you on the show and come in contact with your music and your writing and read a bunch about a lot of stuff you do sticking up for workers and safety. So I'm deeply intrigued to be able to chat with you. One overlap I saw is
00:00:57
Speaker
over at the University of Massachusetts and the band formation out there in Massachusetts. I'm originally from Pawtucket, Rhode Island and I went to the University of Massachusetts and studied labor studies. But give a little bit of background over there in Massachusetts and UMass and where you come from. Yeah, I'm not from Massachusetts, but I lived there on and off for a while. I grew up in New York and then
00:01:27
Speaker
My mom moved to Connecticut when I was in middle school. And then when I first went to college, I did it in Boston. So I was there for a few years. Um, really loved the city, but did not so much like was not doing so hot in school. So I dropped out for a little bit. Um, moved back to moved a couple of places, but eventually back to New York and finished my undergrad there.
00:01:55
Speaker
And then when I finished college, I'd been working through school, various gigs, but I've been doing some freelance writing and some magazine writing.
Transition from Freelance Writing to Teaching
00:02:07
Speaker
And I spent the maybe year and a half after I finished undergrad attempting to
00:02:13
Speaker
freelance write full-time. It was not very compatible with my mental health to be a full-time freelancer. This is also the years like 2010 and 2011. I'm like, gosh, all the magazine jobs are going away and all the rates per word are getting less and less. I should get out of this immediately. So I applied to, I'd studied poetry in college, ultimately.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I applied to a couple MFA programs, including UMass Amherst, which had an amazing faculty of James Tate and Dara Wire and Peter Gizzy, all of whom I got to study with. And they offered me a teaching fellowship that made my tuition free and offered me a salary. So that's kind of how I was like, oh, I can get I can I can have a more stable life if I
Formation of Speedy Ortiz and Local Music Scene Experience
00:03:05
Speaker
teach writing in college than trying to freelance. So ironically, I've returned to some of that freelance work since the pandemic and gosh, it pays even less than it did 12 years ago. But that's sort of how I wound up at UMass.
00:03:23
Speaker
I had been in bands since I was a little kid and had a band in New York. And then when I moved up there, I put some solo stuff up on Bandcamp, basically as a bid to make local friends. I had a lot of friends in the Boston music scene, but the Western mass one was kind of its own. There's cross pollination, but it was kind of its own thing. Yeah. And that's how I started doing a speedy or tease, just as sort of a bid to make friends, having moved to a new city.
00:03:52
Speaker
And I loved being at UMass and getting to teach there and got to visit for the Juniper Festival a couple months ago, which was really cool.
00:04:03
Speaker
No, I'm glad to hear that. And just the reasoning behind, you know, putting the band and thinking about music, just to meet some folks and connect, right? Like, that's kind of some of the basis for it. I mean, unfortunately, that's still how I approach a lot of art projects. I'm very community and socially minded to the detriment of the bottom line often.
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah, recognizing that sometimes the labor wages are being redirected to somebody else's pocket. So one of the things on the show that I've come in contact with is I do union work and labor organizing.
00:04:55
Speaker
for quite some time. And then as I've started to develop like art or an artistic side, learning lessons about organizing or arts within organizing, not necessarily like in either or, right? Like that organizing an art, you know, being embedded. Do you
Advocacy Through Music and Community Involvement
00:05:17
Speaker
How do you view your work like working with people and organizing in its connection to the art that you create? Yeah.
00:05:31
Speaker
I'll say that not explicitly organizing work, but advocacy work has been pretty cooked into my relationship with playing music since I was young. I made a hopefully long lost to the internet album when I was in high school and wound up giving the money to supplies for families who'd been displaced by Katrina. So that this was like,
00:06:00
Speaker
From the very first album I did, I was always kind of, how can I use it to do something else also? And we've kind of maintained
00:06:12
Speaker
incorporation of projects like that into speedy or tease from the outset. We were pretty early on doing band camp only release and all the money will go to this food bank or go to this street medic team or different things like that. And on tour as well, we've
00:06:34
Speaker
for a long time put out a tip jar and all of the tips for that tour will go to a specific cause or organization. We did one for Islamic Relief Fund a few years ago. We did a whole tour where we, apart from a salary, we paid ourselves weekly. All the profit went to Girls Rock Camp Foundation and we were able to have like camper bands come play with us. So I wouldn't say that is necessarily organizing other than
00:07:02
Speaker
organizing a donation to a place. The first, let's see, we also, starting around 2018 or 2019, started to have different, we've always had different groups come table at our shows when the group is interested or there's volunteers who are down to be there, but we started to more conscientiously work with harm reduction groups so that we could distribute
00:07:29
Speaker
Narcan or test strips or other home reduction materials that are shown and that kind of sprung out of the personal grief of having lost friends to overdose and wanting to make sure that live music could
00:07:44
Speaker
Begin to incorporate the things that save people who use drugs lives just like essential medical supplies that shouldn't be controversial and Need to be normalized in a live music space need to be normalized in every space because people use drugs in all kinds of spaces but that's the one where I work so became important to us to have that this part of our show so
00:08:08
Speaker
I wouldn't say any of that is organizing, that's advocacy stuff, but I was part of
00:08:16
Speaker
So I have a lot of friends who are much deeper involved in labor and other forms of organizing than I am. And one of those friends is Michael Deforge, who's an artist I've collaborated with a lot, one of my best friends. And he was involved in a group, and still is, I think, called Cartoonists Against Amazon. And they were basically trying to keep Amazon out of
00:08:40
Speaker
independent cartooning festivals and other events like that for so many millions of reasons to not work with Amazon and to not have your work associated with Amazon. And so talking to him about that project and feeling very angry and frustrated at the awful things I would see constantly from Amazon and also seeing musicians making Amazon created music videos all the time that there was like this period of time where Amazon would just
00:09:10
Speaker
give you a boatload of money to make a music video, which, like, great to get a boatload of money, but the...
00:09:18
Speaker
The Amazon money is particularly blood-tinted, so a bunch of musicians that I know who are similarly outraged by Amazon's practices and in particular their contracts with ICE and with Customs and Border Patrol and the way that their technology was being used to power deportations and other forms of violent, often deadly policing.
00:09:43
Speaker
signed a thing pledging not to make new exclusive content with Amazon. And then a number of us escalated that a step further and took our catalogs down from Amazon. So that was kind of my first experience in
00:09:56
Speaker
Hey, I have this idea that would hopefully make our workplaces less accidentally violent. None of us want our music to be powering these awful things. Can we do something? That wound up pretty successful. A lot of musicians spoke out against Amazon.
00:10:19
Speaker
From that, there was a number of musicians on sort of that email thread and part of that campaign and doing various things as part of that campaign. And early in the pandemic, it kind of shifted over to
00:10:35
Speaker
Hey, all the people who worked on this project, what do you think about a musician's union? Many of us are not eligible for the AFM. We're not eligible for SAG-AFTRA. And yet we have absolutely no protections. And there's a million reasons that it would be great to organize and have conversations about how things can change. So that kind of sprung into the United Musicians and Allied Workers, UMA, which is the
00:11:02
Speaker
501c4 so not technically a Union which is why it's no longer the union of musicians and allied workers, but yeah Wow, I Am I Appreciate I appreciate a lot of what you had to say and and and and talk about and You know about
00:11:25
Speaker
The extent of of drugs and just safety issues like you said about around overdose So I really appreciate you talking about that And yeah, of course, I mean everybody, you know Everybody who's listening if they don't know someone who's died of overdose They know someone who knows someone who dies of overdose this touches every family every community every workplace and the way we can
00:11:51
Speaker
keep our friends with us is to provide the public health resources that the harm reduction advocates and organizers have known work for decades. Obviously, I don't love that I
00:12:10
Speaker
I hate that I've lost friends to overdose, but I do value being able to connect with other people who share in this grief and want to prevent others from going through it. The only way that happens is by normalizing conversation around drug use and around overdose prevention.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I think a lot of things sometimes when you talk about safety ideas or safety concerns in general, like human safety, sometimes there can be this kind of
00:12:41
Speaker
flipping attitude or something around this. An example I would give is I did an episode on the station fire in Rhode Island with the 100 folks who were lost in that fire and the horror behind how it happened and negligence and
00:13:01
Speaker
fire safety. So one of the things that completely transformed my thinking on it and just about thinking about things like space and performers and the space that they're in in crowds and just simply not making assumptions that somebody is doing something or that there is a safety exit or somebody has thought things through because there can be some really hazardous situations if things go wrong, which we've seen sometimes.
Wax 9 Records and Poetry Journal Initiatives
00:13:32
Speaker
Tell us about WAX 9 records and also the journal connected with that. I was fascinated to see that there was a journal connected to the label. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So wax nine began as an imprint of car park records who've released most of Speedy Ortiz's discography as well as sad routine. And initially, I floated the idea with the folks at car park because I wanted to put out a record by some friends I want to name because we didn't wind up working with them. They stuck with their old label. But the idea kind of came from wanting to help
00:14:15
Speaker
Friends put out a record who didn't have a label offer The name was my mom's Pen name when she worked for punk magazine. I think it's just such a cool Name that of course I had to steal it for this So the first record we actually wound up doing was for milk belly a really great Chicago band that I've loved forever and they didn't have a
00:14:48
Speaker
I'm trying to say label offer, I'm saying like labor awful. So we did a milk belly record, then we started working with Johanna Warren, a formerly Portland based artist who is kind of nomadic, I don't even know where Johanna lives these days, possibly Wales. A very different sounding artist, just an incredible folk,
00:15:13
Speaker
songwriter, finger picker, singer. Milk Belly's like a kind of post-rock Chicago heavy weirdo, lightning bolt inspired but very breedersy poppy band. And then the most recent artist we've worked with is Space Moth, who is a Bay Area producer.
00:15:34
Speaker
amazing synthesis tape loops also the songs are very catchy and poppy and thoughtful kind of in the vein of broadcast so they're three very different and of course my stuff too very different sounding artists but all people whose work i just really believed in and was excited that car park felt the same way and was willing to work on the records so my role on those is basically just as the anr
00:16:03
Speaker
bring them to car park, hope that they've been interested in putting it out. In those cases, yes. We don't get to do a ton of stuff because that's a small label and the staff is already working as hard as they can. That was kind of where it started, is just this imprint of car park.
00:16:28
Speaker
And I've done a couple releases outside of, without Car Park as well, under that same label, including a couple compilations that were for charity alongside Father Daughter Records, who I admire and love so much.
00:16:44
Speaker
And then when the pandemic started and everybody I knew who does any form of writing was getting laid off and of course every touring musician was laid off by default, I noticed a lot of
00:17:03
Speaker
It always drives me crazy to see poetry websites with very high submission fees and then they don't pay you for your work and whatever I can say about record label deals. Poetry deals are so insane to me as someone familiar with record label contracts.
00:17:25
Speaker
What is considered a very good royalty rate in the world of books, the record label would be canceled if that was a music contract. I don't know why these worlds are so different. This is not to throw shade on any particular publisher, but a pretty standard royalty rate in music is a 50-50 split. It's really not that way. A lot of my friends who publish books have 10% royalties.
00:17:55
Speaker
I have a little more than that. I think I have quote unquote high royalty rates, but it's not anywhere near what is standard for music. So that aside, I just felt resentful of getting a lot of emails when the pandemic started of like,
00:18:10
Speaker
submit your poems for $20 to this online journal and you get absolutely nothing if you have been published. So I went, I got a friend to kind of reconfigure the WAX9 website. So it could be an online journal. We set up a thing so people could choose to donate or to do a submission fee if they wanted, but absolutely not compulsory. Was not being checked against the submissions, obviously.
00:18:40
Speaker
And then the folks we published would get paid for their work. So we had three poets and one illustrator per issue. It's not really an issue. It's like an online thing where you see three things in a row. But yeah, that's kind of how it started.
00:18:56
Speaker
Started pandemic, boy, we were all working on some manic projects, I think. We were publishing once a week for a while, first few months of the pandemic, then it became biweekly, then it became monthly. Right now, it's on a little bit of a vacation just because I've been so busy with other projects.
00:19:15
Speaker
I was the sole reader and editor for this so we got quite a lot of submissions and of course I read them all and want to make sure that the things we were picking were the correct fits for one another that month. So it's on a little bit of a break right now and I'm excited to resume it at some point but that's the story of the Wax Nine Poetry Journal.
Artistic Philosophy and Influences
00:19:36
Speaker
I love that. Anger and other online journals that don't compensate people for their work and charge them to submit.
00:19:42
Speaker
Make sure you check it out. I'll be digging further into it. Gotta ask you, Sadie, a philosophy and art podcast, a couple bigger questions. You've been around art, doing art for quite some time. What is art? Oh my god. These are the questions I'm terrible at. I'm good at micro level, but I don't know.
00:20:10
Speaker
I don't know. I've listened to you talk and I've read some things. I've listened to you talk and read some things. What is art? Anything you want it to be. I think you can make anything you approach artful. Certain forms of art I engage in, I think I approach them with some similarities.
00:20:40
Speaker
I've always, you know, I love consuming media. I love being a fan of different kinds of things. And so in response, I've enjoyed making my own things in response to the things I love or the things that other people I know are making. So I've been, my mom is a painter. So we grew up doing a lot of visual art together.
00:21:05
Speaker
My dad played piano a little bit, so I grew up playing with him and then doing other kinds of music really in my whole childhood. So there's always been this backdrop of that.
00:21:18
Speaker
working on little projects and the excitement over starting those or finishing them or putting them out, having them be in conversation with my friends things or the bigger picture things that I'm inspired by. So what is our compulsion to make a little thing? And sometimes it scales big and you didn't expect it, but that's cool too. That's cool too. I really enjoy that.
00:21:46
Speaker
I got you a poetry collection, Cry, Cry, Perfume, and purchased it at Paul's books and was just wondering, I mean, obviously seeing things you've written and lyrics and such, the lyricism, and you mentioned you studied poetry. What was it like for you to put this volume out, collect it as such as your poetry volume?
00:22:15
Speaker
Yeah, so the first book I published is called Mouth Guard, and that book is basically my new mass MFA thesis with some amount of editing, but most of that editing happened while I was in that graduate program. So this is the first book I've written that was just written to be a
00:22:39
Speaker
a book, not as part of courses, not as part of a schedule, not as part of this sort of tight-knit, but somewhat artificial community of writers.
00:22:53
Speaker
So it feels very different to me because I was writing towards a project, which is my preferred way of writing. With Mouth Guard, I was writing towards that semester's workshop or, you know, the particular writer I was enjoying
00:23:13
Speaker
that month and it was over a longer, not really a longer period of time, just more concentrated. So a lot more revisions, a lot more gearing something towards the reading I knew I had to do that week or the
00:23:27
Speaker
whatever kind of thing like that. This one was written towards a project, but not with all of this audience along the way. I wasn't cry perfume. I wasn't writing to show something to a professor that week. I wasn't writing to show something to my workshop peers that week. I wasn't writing to do a reading that week. I was writing when I could on the road towards this project. And the difference in
00:23:57
Speaker
The difference in my age, I guess, is a big factor.
Poetry, Collaborations, and Artistic Connections
00:24:01
Speaker
I mean, I finished Mouth Guard. I guess I started that program when I was 23, and I was not by any stretch a professional musician. I'd always played in bands since I was a little kid. I was self-conscious when I entered the program about being like a music poet, so I kind of tried to keep it out. And it was only when I finished the program that I was
00:24:22
Speaker
in the position where I could even try to do music as a full-time thing. So I didn't have awareness of a lot of the labor concerns that Yuma has been discussing and working on. I didn't have awareness of
00:24:38
Speaker
all of the ways that music work as gratifying as it can be can also just be incredibly unhealthy for the artists who are engaging in it. I didn't have an understanding of the intersections between tech and art and how artists can be so frequently exploited at the hands of tech's bottom line. So those all kind of went into this book in a way that
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah, I, um...
00:25:22
Speaker
I, uh, one of my first episodes I had done was, uh, with a poet, uh, Bunkang Twan, who I met at the university of Massachusetts. He teaches at, uh, union college, very influential on me. And it was one of the first episodes, um, that I did might've been my first poet, uh, that, that I, that I had on, uh, yeah, it was wonderful. And I've loved going into, um,
00:25:45
Speaker
poetry and having having those types of conversations about one of the things I wanted to I wanted to ask you one things I want to mention that I just dropped a note on it was had to do with the father daughter records and my gosh I
00:26:00
Speaker
Ran into a few bands on that label. I listened to Whitney Ballen on that label. Just really incredible. And I was surprised to hear you say it. I had congregated around that label. So yeah, really amazing stuff coming out there.
00:26:20
Speaker
Yeah. A funny story about father-daughter records is that Jesse, who runs the label, and I have been in touch for like 10 years for various things.
00:26:34
Speaker
We worked together with Wax 9 and Father Daughter on co-releasing a tribute to Adam Schlesinger after he passed, and it was a fundraiser for MusiCare's health fund for musicians impacted by COVID. Adam Schlesinger passed away from COVID early on in the pandemic, which is
00:26:54
Speaker
very tragic. We were able to get a lot of his friends and fans to contribute covers to this compilation. And I think it charted fairly. I can't remember the numbers now because I'm terrible at that all the time. But I think it sold well enough that we were able to make a sizable donation in his name. We were able to work with his estate to get pictures and things like that together so that fans of his amazing music could
00:27:25
Speaker
just be part of this like celebration of his life. It was really a cool project and Jesse and I got close working on it and now Jesse's my manager. My goodness. Yeah, sometimes it all works out. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. I've had some bad managers and Jesse is my one. Let's talk about- All the father-daughter records things so that- Oh my goodness. The lack of income being generated by Speedy Ortiz doesn't matter.
00:27:52
Speaker
No, it was, I really got into this album and it was, I think she's wonderful Whitney Ball and it was, you're a shooting star on a sinking ship. Cool. And very Pacific Northwest, feels a little bit like Twin Peaks. There's a vibe about it, I just adore.
00:28:19
Speaker
So, uh, I wanted to mention to the listeners just quickly, um, I'm not sure if this annoys you that you were on the New Yorker, that an illustration was on, of you was on in the New Yorker, but. Why would that annoy me? That was so cool. I don't know. Like, I don't know. I don't know you, but sometimes it's like, Oh, I'm glad you said it's so cool because I would think it's so cool too. But sometimes people are like, uh, you know, Who would be annoyed that they got illustrated for the cover of the New Yorker?
00:28:46
Speaker
I don't, well, maybe it's the people I hang out with. Maybe I got some sort of fundamental problem that we can't get into. Unless the New Yorker was on strike and it ran. Yeah, right, it was at the wrong time. It was at the wrong time. Yeah, you need control to schedule release and they released it your week when they were walking. Yeah, I mean, they certainly do things like that. Oh gosh. Oh gosh. Publications sure do.
00:29:11
Speaker
There is a playbook, there is a playbook. So everybody, Sadie Dupuis was on the cover of New Yorker, and there was this article called, how did Sadie Dupuis end up on the cover of the New Yorker?
Recording New Album and Influences
00:29:25
Speaker
And one of the things I discovered in going to that was through, Nicole Rifkin is the illustrator who had done that, and that you had a connection, a delicious neighbor of yours.
00:29:41
Speaker
Not a neighbor, just a buddy and mutual appreciator. A buddy and a mutual appreciator. But the strange thing regarding the podcast is I had an illustrator, Chloe Nicholas, and I love her stuff based in Baltimore. And she was so great. I said, I'd like you to co-host an episode. I said, can you pick some like
00:30:00
Speaker
cool illustrators, and she picked Nicole. So I'm hoping very soon we have Nicole Rifkin on something rather than nothing as well. But okay, you're on The New Yorker. What the heck was that experience like? Yeah. Nicole
00:30:18
Speaker
I don't even know how we know each other. I think basically Nicole has been in the orbit of a lot of exploding and sound bands, which is a New York based label that we did our first EP with. It was their first vinyl pressing, was the Sports EP by Speed Your Teeth. Great label. I love so many bands on that label as do many people and Nicole was one of them. And Nicole started illustrating a lot of posters and record covers and things like that for the
00:30:47
Speaker
the bands that I know and love. So I think we just became friends through that.
00:30:54
Speaker
finding out that Nicole liked my band's music and she'd illustrated me or the band a couple of times just for fun and posted it. Sometimes when someone illustrates you, it's pretty hit or miss. I've had some atrocious ones where I'm like, oh God, this is what I, the body dysmorphia through illustration. An interpretation of me. It's an interpretation.
00:31:18
Speaker
My Nicole's are always incredibly gorgeous and their sense of color and style is just incredible. We just have been friends through. I admire their work and vice versa. Nicole was like, can you model for something I'm doing and send a reference picture? In this room, I lay down on the ground and put my
00:31:42
Speaker
phone tripod up and tried to get some pictures and that was basically it and I only knew pretty close to when it published that it was, I don't even think I knew it was for the New Yorker that that's what it would be and that it would be the cover and Nicole definitely threw all these different little Easter eggs in that I didn't know about. The books I'm reading are all things that I love.
00:32:07
Speaker
Imogen Vinnie and Dan Ozzie are in there, and I think the thing I'm holding is supposed to be a physical version of Wax 9, which doesn't exist, but it should. Wow. My dog is illustrated on the back of it, and if you go deep into the... Nicole loves doing little Easter eggs. It's very cool as someone who likes to spot them, but a bunch of former Brooklyn DIY spaces are in the fine text, so yeah, that was cool.
00:32:35
Speaker
Great is great cover. You look great. Great illustration. Um, I, uh, jaw dropping Nicole's stuff. Uh, I first saw jaw dropping. Um, so yeah, really, really love that Nicole Rifkin and, uh, congratulations. What a, when you were mentioned some of the details that were in there or seen it for the first time as I was presented. So this sounds so fascinating to be able to have that experience of being like, Oh my gosh, take a look at that. And, uh,
00:33:04
Speaker
I'm glad, I'm glad for you, that's awesome. It's funny, there was a, I'm forgetting who wrote this now and I feel terrible. There's a pitchfork article after the cover came out and the headline is basically like, how did Sadie Dupuis end up on the cover of The New Yorker? And then it's both Nicole and I were interviewed basically saying exactly what I just said to you, which is that you admired Sugar's work and became friends through that. And someone sent me that, someone made like a Reddit thread where they posted this article and was like,
00:33:34
Speaker
This article doesn't need to exist, they're just friends.
00:33:40
Speaker
You got some quotes in there. You got some good quotes, right? No, no, it was a cool article. I thought it was, you know, I think the point of it was like, how do musicians and artists know one another and inspire one another? But yeah, the points were in there about a music illustration, you know, as they just kind of like made you think of some of that crossover. Yeah, so much crossover. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um,
00:34:09
Speaker
I wanted to chat with you, Sadie, about Speedy Ortiz and release coming out on your label. Tell us about that album. What's going on with that?
00:34:27
Speaker
What's going on with it? The first album I've made in the pandemic, let's see, we recorded it in March of last year and I had done all the writing and pre-production for it somewhere between the summer and the winter before that. None of us had really traveled or much less been on a flight
00:34:57
Speaker
until we went out to Joshua Tree to record it. We worked at Rancho de la Luna, which is a studio I've long appreciated for a ton of things that were recorded there. Mark Lanigan is one huge one. His records mean so much to me.
00:35:14
Speaker
Some of my favorite sounds were done at Rancho. The Desert Sessions, which have brought together so many musicians I admire, like PJ Harvey and Billie Givens. You could just go on and on naming people who've done it. That's all done at Rancho de la Luna, which is this really cool house that's been converted to a studio.
00:35:37
Speaker
And David Catching, who runs the studio, is just an incredible and inspiring and kind person. It was such a treat to get to hang out with him and have him, you know, they've got, I think we used 100 guitars. I counted it up recently. It might be that we used 50 different guitars, like 300 pedals and 100 amps or something. Maybe I'm reversing guitars and amps, but
00:36:01
Speaker
We used everything there, and David's so knowledgeable about all his gear, and it's so lovingly curated. So that was really inspiring. And then we brought Sarah Tudson, one of our best friends, to come co-produce with us. Her band, Illuminati Hotties, is one of my favorites, and she's just a wonderful person, and so fun to work with, other than we bring out each other's worst workahawk tendencies, which is, you know, give or take. You need some of that, right?
00:36:30
Speaker
And yeah, just to have been basically not having gone anywhere for a year and a half in the pandemic, maybe it was almost two years at that, 2022. Yeah, I guess it had been close to two years at the point that we went out to Joshua Tree.
00:36:47
Speaker
we uh it was just so great to get to spend that time with my bandmates and to be in this beautiful different environment and uh step outside of the studio for Breath of Fresh Air and you're just in the amazing desert um so that was just wonderful and in terms of the subject matter and the direction of it uh one one of the
00:37:13
Speaker
400 million random jobs I do. I interview artists for publications and also to write their bios and their press releases. It's doing that latter kind of interview that you wind up hearing a lot of stories that are off the record but make you think about how the person approached the art.
00:37:30
Speaker
It feels like a common thread of folks who were writing in the pandemic and folks who tore is just this, the relentlessness of touring helps you to not dwell on or process old trauma. So things that were.
00:37:49
Speaker
Traumas that are, you know, 20, 30, 40 years old were coming up for people when they were forced to be at home. And I'm sure this is true of everybody, not just musicians. We had a lot of time to reflect, which can be scary and upsetting, but, um, in my case was really necessary and I was not an exception to that. You know, I was thinking about, um,
00:38:12
Speaker
childhood trauma and childhood abuse that I'd never written about were really discussed with anyone in decades. And that worked its way into some of the material for the first time. So it was really scary. But I was so grateful to have my friends between the band and Sarah and David to get to
00:38:35
Speaker
right through and perform some of this stuff for the first time. So that was certainly a factor.
Creative Processes: Solo vs Band Work
00:38:41
Speaker
And then there's also plenty of my, what I have been joking is my like Holden Caulfield bullshit. Tell me about that. You got my attention even more. So there's, you know, the first, the lead single of the song is called Scabs. It's about people who are antagonizing a postal worker at, um,
00:39:02
Speaker
at the postal office. And this was like in the middle of a time when the budget cuts and changes of hours and all kinds of things were being widely opposed by various mail, the mail carriers unions. And I'm like, how do you not know this? And you're going to make this person's life difficult when in the next breath you're thinking essential workers. So witnessing that and just thinking about times I've seen folks
00:39:32
Speaker
happy to pretend like they support workers until they're personally inconvenienced made me think of times when
00:39:39
Speaker
For instance, working on that Amazon campaign I described, there were plenty of musicians who were just giving us shit for what? You're going to argue that it's great that people died in Amazon warehouse and then are just on the floor for hours? Why are you shilling for Amazon? Those became combined in my mind the way that people are
00:40:04
Speaker
Happy to support workers until it would be inconvenient for them not to cross a picket line and then they'll go for it.
00:40:31
Speaker
Nihilistic greeting to a fragile repurposed Don't talk to me, don't talk to me What do you wanna prove? You're a big dog too You run through the screw But you're using the wrong size too
00:41:08
Speaker
Breaks are at two feet below, four and five fighting still Stormed up, broke a rug, went into the universe I'm not clear to you, don't talk Who do you wanna prove? You're a big dog too, you look tiny
00:42:02
Speaker
No rust, temptation, love me, it'll make sense Revenge of my life Revenge of my life Time will come and stop All those syllables, it's us who don't talk
00:42:47
Speaker
So there's a couple things like that. More so pertaining to the music industry because that's where I work, but yeah. So those are kind of the themes of the record.
00:43:02
Speaker
I think it's always interesting, you kind of talk about different types of jobs, but I know when you're talking about the idea, you know, unions and musicians or workers, we think about professional workers as type of workers, not historically, you know, unionized and just seeing how... I mean, by design, the laws have prevented us from doing so.
00:43:27
Speaker
I've talked to comic book artists. I'm a huge comic book fan. They've talked to me. They find out, hey, oh, you're a labor guy. And then you have the type of conversation. And it can be harrowing some of the things you talk about, of race, and what people do, and what's done for free, and what's expected for free. It's a lot of labor.
00:43:53
Speaker
unpaid or not paid, not paid enough. This might be related to what I was just talking about, but the name of the show and the question I have is why is there something rather than nothing? Because I love, because I compulsively work on my little projects. What do you mean? What else would I do with my waking hours?
00:44:22
Speaker
making something with your time, right?
00:44:27
Speaker
I think I've had that answer a couple times recently. It's in the doing, it's in the making of things, it's in that happening. About the record, September 1st, 2023, release date, I understand. That's wonderful. We tried to time everything to be, so Rabbit Rabbit is a superstitious thing that I say on the first of every month and have since I was a little kid, just to say it, first thing when you wake up for good luck.
00:44:57
Speaker
And so at some point, maybe like 2017, I started to tweet it once a month and it's a, I quote tweet myself every time. So people are always like, I get a reply on the first one from 2017. So I was like, wow, I can't believe I scrolled all the way back. And when we decided to name the record this, I started working on writing on July 4th.
00:45:23
Speaker
Well, I, I assemble little bits and pieces, but I started working on writing in earnest on July 1st, uh, 2020. No, it has to have been the year before 2021. Um, and so I just put it in a document. I typed rabbit rabbit up top, not expecting that to be the name of the record, but I was just like, haha, I'm starting on the first. Um, and a few months later, my bandmate Andy was like, you know what, we should call the record rabbit rabbit. And I was like, yeah, it's really funny.
00:45:52
Speaker
I like it. Working in this document where I'm keeping meticulous notes of all the things that have gone into working on these songs, what inspired different ones, all the different stages of lyrics, and it's called Rabbit Rabbit. So that's kind of how we landed on the name, Andy just suggesting that it should be. And I was like, it's weirdly already the name of the file.
00:46:12
Speaker
And so now I look like I have the most foresight and marketing genius of any other moment in my life because I've been saying this month to me. If it looks like it, you do. Yeah. It's totally retconned, but yes. Anyway, so the record comes out September 1st. We announced it June 1st. I think the third single comes out August 1st. We couldn't make July 1st happen because I think it's a weekend. But other than that, we're really trying to stick to the theme here.
00:46:41
Speaker
No, I love that, too. It's a great title, and I love to hear the background to it. So I wanted to mention one other thing with regards to your work, to the listeners, your solo work on Sad 13.
Pandemic Creativity and Learning Production Skills
00:47:09
Speaker
I was wondering with that being a different style in your solo work, just in general, do you end up feeling you have to go to that solo expression at times and more towards working with Speedy Ortiz? Or is there something deliberate about it in your creativity and what you're doing?
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like the answer has changed over the years. When I first wanted to do, well, to jump even farther back, when I started doing Speedy Ortiz, it was because I'd been in this band for five years and the drummer was an engineer and a producer. And so even though I'd grown up doing home recording and enjoyed playing all kinds of instruments, I didn't really have that role in my old band.
00:47:59
Speaker
And I wanted an outlet to make some weird stuff at home where I play the drums and I play the bass and I play all the stuff. So that's what Speedy Ortiz started as, just my home recorded lo-fi thing where I play everything and I've always really enjoyed projects that are like that.
00:48:18
Speaker
one of my absolute absolute favorites, Elliot Smith, would frequently play everything on our recording and was kind of a big advocate of home recording. So that's what Speedy Ortiz started as, although it probably sounded more like the Lou Barlow solo thing than the Elliot Smith thing.
00:48:38
Speaker
Then, you know, that suddenly, you know, I've been in this other band for five years and I've taken it as seriously as I could to be, you know, playing the eight people, you know, once in a while. But people liked the weird solo stuff. So the band kind of built around that. And of course, once it's a band, I enjoy playing with everybody and then we get a little more professional sounding and then we've done a few records and they all sound quite
00:49:06
Speaker
professional because they are. And then I'm suddenly like, I just did the same thing to myself. Now I don't have the outlet for my weird stuff I make at home where I get to play everything. So I started doing Sad Thirteen because I just needed to do something all myself and to have that kind of creative outlet. Because I find when I'm working on stuff alone, I'm not good at jamming. I like will never, I won't do it.
00:49:35
Speaker
In your contract yeah, I like to be alone in a room for 14 hours and see what crazy Improbable ideas happen from that not so much in any kind of like jam so I started doing sad routine so I could do stuff like that and the first record was very
00:49:55
Speaker
bedroom pop influence because that's just what I could figure out how to how to play in the tiny bedroom I was subletting and then doing that made me realize I wanted to be more involved in the production end of things for Speedy 2 because it's just a part of the arrangement process is the song to me. I definitely
00:50:20
Speaker
Any little textural thing feels like part of the song to me. It's not, what do people call it, candy? It's not just decorative, it's like part of the arrangement.
Musical Influences and Appreciation Techniques
00:50:29
Speaker
So the next Beatty record, having learned to produce better with synths and drum machines, we incorporated some more stuff like that. We weren't coming from the same place with those synths and drum machines as I was with Sad Thirteen, but it still was part of it.
00:50:46
Speaker
The next sad 13 record I did, of course, had a little bit more rock stuff to it. Um, I was really enjoying a lot of like British new wave stuff. I was enjoying a lot of like guitar based pop music from like the eighties, which is not at all where the first sad 13 record was coming from, but the lines between it being like a full band and just me got a little bit blurred, even though, um, apart from our amazing drummers like Brecher, I was playing pretty much everything on that record.
00:51:16
Speaker
And then in the pandemic,
00:51:21
Speaker
you start, everybody started to have to learn how to do all these different kinds of things. So a lot of the work I was getting offered was like, do a remix, do some background music for this podcast, do some podcast theme songs, do a score for this thing. So I started to get deeper into learning how to mix and learning production things that I knew a little bit of, but I hadn't taken a recording class since the year 2007. So it was a bit of playing catch up.
00:51:51
Speaker
And now, I guess the distinction is just, I still pre-produce everything pretty fully for this Speedy record. When I sent everybody demos, it had drums and bass and a million guitars and keyboards and stuff on it.
00:52:08
Speaker
But it's a question of do I want to rework this with my friends and figure out how to play this together and have it have that kind of component to it so that sort of the distinction do I want to be alone in my room till four in the morning adding you know weird pitch tuned bells or do I want to.
00:52:27
Speaker
play a loud thing with my friends. And especially as some of the subject matter, as I was saying, was like returning to these early childhood traumas, I was thinking about what made me wanna do music in the first place and how music was this escape from things that were tough to face. And so I was thinking a lot about the music that I loved when I first played guitar. And so I think some of the heavier influences
00:52:55
Speaker
That that first excited me about music like a lot of new metal stuff. I love dev tones. I love incubus Yeah, that was like a big early influence on my guitar playing. That's not something I can make happen alone in the room or I mean I can but it's not the same thing it's you know about Doing a band and doing a band with your friends So we were all kind of thinking along those lines of like early formative musical loves and and how to incorporate them into this record Yeah, I
00:53:24
Speaker
There's something about the way you talk about music. I'm not a music expert at all. I'm obsessive about it, but the technical pieces are explaining it. I do struggle with it, but I heard you talk about...
00:53:36
Speaker
Elliott Smith and favorite Elliott Smith song. And I, I'm just telling you, I was, I was just, I was just fascinated. And I remember in your description and talking about the members of the band that there was there, I think it was a list of 10 Elliott Smith songs in each band member. And there was only convergence on. Oh gosh. Yeah. I forgot. We did this a long time ago. Yeah. I, I, I, I adore Elliott Smith. And for me, listen to somebody talk about music.
00:54:08
Speaker
I understood everything and it was exciting to listen to. And I haven't articulated all that, but when somebody's talking about music and just, I could understand when you're talking about like structurally how it was put together, it wasn't just driving me nuts. It was just like a way of understanding things that I don't have the ability to describe in general that occur in Elliot Smith's song. So I just wanted to thank you for that because it was wonderful to listen to. It's funny.
00:54:39
Speaker
I wrote an essay for an anthology recently that's about food and I was talking about how as I have gotten more
00:54:52
Speaker
technically into production and music and music analysis, I'm less mystified by it. So there's still a huge appreciation and love and excitement, but I'm not having the thing where when I was 15 and putting on the headphones, I don't understand how a sound came to be. And so I'm obsessed with it because I don't know what it is.
00:55:15
Speaker
Now if I return and listen to, if I listen to things, I can kind of tell how they did it. So it adds a layer of like appreciation, but it also removes a layer of like mystification. And the gist of the essay was like food is the mystifying thing because I, you know, know how to cook. I'm not a bad cook, but I'm not like making whatever cilantro foam or,
00:55:45
Speaker
I can't taste something and say, oh, the eggplant was done at this temperature for this amount of minutes. Whereas I can listen and be like, oh, I think it's this kind of delay, and I think this is the time that it's set to, and I think they panned it this way, and that's how it sounds like the crazy, overwhelming thing that
00:56:00
Speaker
So what has been fun is to return to, especially in working on this project, I listened to a lot of music that I was obsessed with when I was 14, 15 and didn't understand how it was made and kind of listened to it and was like, oh yeah, I think they did this. Let me try to make a drum machine that sounds like that. So that's been fun too. I do love trying to figure out how something got, how the sausage, this is the second time I've said this today, how the sausage gets made. Well, the, um,
00:56:30
Speaker
The the the piece I mean in in listening to being a big Elliott Smith fan and listen to his I've always had this
00:56:38
Speaker
It's like an investigation for me because for me and whatever I understand there's a what sounds like a simplicity to it yet as I get into it or I hear somebody describe things being shifted and change I can gain an understanding of like what's occurring and like I don't like I need to have like I want to have a different understanding of what's going on and to be able to realize that and
00:57:02
Speaker
that really helps. So anytime you want to talk about... I think that's one of his real strengths is making something complicated sound simple. It really does, though. It's not just like a throwaway phrase with, as you're saying, like with him it really is this like magic or like deception of a veil or something and then this is behind it and
00:57:27
Speaker
Couldn't it's just an attractive attractive idea. So anytime you want to talk about Ellie Smith songs your analysis of them comparing them Open mic something rather than nothing anytime. It's funny. There's a couple a couple songs on this record So when I wait for when I first started
00:57:48
Speaker
tracking the demos. I'd written a lot of the songs. I use voice memos and I always refer to them and try to cobble them together. So some of the voice memos are from like years and years and years ago, pre-pandemic, but
00:58:02
Speaker
It was like July of the year I started working on it that I was like, I'm going to sit down and listen on the voice memos, figure out the chord progressions, piece these together, write the, write some, you know, first passes at lyrics that most of which I'll throw away. And so there were a couple of songs that I worked on and that, and then I didn't return to it until December. So I spent July making a bunch of songs and then in December I was like, let me.
00:58:27
Speaker
One a day I'll do pre-production and my pre-production is pretty extensive so it's got the drums in the bass and all the stuff. So there were a couple songs I did in July that kind of waltzy acoustic guitar songs, Elliot Smith, early Elliot Smithy to me. Just not to say Elliot Smith didn't rock, he might as well rocks and later stuff all has amazing double drums and
00:58:48
Speaker
wild sounding. So I had these like kind of waltzy songs. I was like, you know, I've done a lot of like kind of Elliott Smith, aping things in my time, including recording at New Monkey on the last South routine record. I think I'm inspired right now. I was like, I love Mars Volta. I have at the drive-in. I love all this like Texas
00:59:12
Speaker
post-hardcore stuff, so all the Elliot Smith waltzy stuff became a very different sound, which is fun to reflect on when we're playing them live. I'm like, oh yeah, this was like a little acoustic waltz, and now it's the most difficult riff I've ever had to play in my life. I had the director of the Elliot Smith
00:59:41
Speaker
I'm spacing out right now with regards to the name of the Elliot Smith documentary on. But it was- Is it Heaven Adores You? Yeah, Heaven Adores You. Thank you so much. Yeah. Beautiful filming and just really loved that music. What's interesting for me is I grew up out of Easton. I was in Wisconsin for about
01:00:07
Speaker
I don't know, like about 12 years. So I got into, I got out here and, you know, it was past the times like Elliot Smith and all that, but I had been a fan. And so it's always interesting to enter a territory and be around something to be able to kind of get around and hear some of the lore around it or to find like super big local fans who saw all his shows in this area.
01:00:34
Speaker
It's been a real treat to have those conversations and get deeper into it. So I don't forget, Sadie, and this is going to be a bizarre question for you, but a necessary question. Where do you want people to go to find your work? We got the new album coming
Where to Find Sadie Dupuis' Work and Future Projects
01:00:59
Speaker
out. What do you want people to see? Where do you want them to go?
01:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, you could go to speedyrt.com. It has all the necessary links to listen to whatever is out by the time this airs and watch whatever videos are out by the time this airs. And that's where you get concert tickets, too. That's kind of, yeah. And if you want to follow me on a social media thing, it's at sad13, which is S-A-D-1-3.
01:01:31
Speaker
Thank you so much. If I could, studied poetry, I saw a lot of references to great poets in the back of your book, one which I adore, Morgan Parker. Yeah, I love Morgan. I love Morgan Parker. We did a reading together on this book launch in LA.
01:01:50
Speaker
And I got to tell Morgan, my book initially had some epigraphs to introduce the different sections and the book initially opened with one from Morgan. And then I got scared about clearing all the quotations and just deleted them all at like the final edit. So it was cool to get to read together and to, yeah.
01:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, I point out that part. As a poet, I get excited about and hope to have her on the show. Yeah, and I hadn't read her novel yet, but she sent me a copy. And I'm I feel like I always try to save the books I'm most excited about for July, because that's my, my birthday. And I, one of those, my whole month is my birthday. So I try to read the books in the queue that I'm most excited about in July. So that's when I'm going to read Morgan's
01:02:43
Speaker
YA novel. I think it's YA. Music in the queue I'm excited about. That's another thing to look for from you. Sadie, I just want to tell you, it's truly an honor and a pleasure to talk to you. And like I said, as I was prepping for this, I became a
01:03:05
Speaker
concerned as a host because I'm like, okay, this is my brain. This is what I'm interested in. This is what she's... So I got a little bit, but I just really appreciate you, you know, talking about music and talking about great art and sharing. Honestly, and thank you for the important work that you do.
01:03:28
Speaker
you know, speaking up. I'll just say that straight up. I know, you know, speaking up and saying what needs to be said is not an easy act, so I just wanted to point that out as well. Yeah, it's great talking to you. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. Everybody, Sadie Dupuis, thank you so much.
01:04:01
Speaker
Rather than hawking out a spit, take taste Replace my predecessor over
01:05:08
Speaker
Why should a puppy drink the hair of the dog?
01:05:41
Speaker
Circle the differences between our pages Sometimes the imagery is the same A little inch up is just living It's not the sheep who's got a spook alone So what's the takeaway for format 10? Let's put the legwork in the bottom It isn't what you really need to say
01:06:11
Speaker
There's a rabbit scare to call you. This is the start of me, just hold it up.
01:06:47
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.