In Conversation With Sad13
Having started Speedy Ortiz as a solo-project, multi-instrumentalist Sadie Dupuis, has always had a distinct creative vision for her projects. In addition to a successful career as a musician, Dupuis is a critically acclaimed poet, record label founder and one-time member of ‘Babement’, an all-female Pavement cover band.
Following a prolific release cycle with the fully evolved Speedy Ortiz, Dupuis shape-shifted into solo artist Sad13. After collaborating with Lizzo in 2016 to release the single, ‘Basement Queens’; the full-length debut, ‘Slugger’ arrived shortly thereafter. Fast forward four years, Sad13 is back with the highly-anticipated second offering, ‘Haunted Painting’. We caught up with Sadie, prior to the album’s release to get the full-low down, including talking ghosts and playing Elliott Smith’s microwave…
First and foremost, thank you for letting us speak to you about your new record ‘Haunted Painting’, which is the first release through own label ‘Wax Nine’ – so congratulations on that. You’ve obviously had records out beforehand with your work with Speedy Ortiz – does this one feel extra special being released on your own label?
It’s funny! When I started the label, I didn’t intend on releasing my own music through it. I just wanted a way to help out friends, who’s music I thought was amazing, who hadn’t found a label. I’ve been doing it now for the past three years, just more as an AR person - as a helper more than anything haha! I’ve been using it to do compilations, a poetry journal as well. But I took a lot more on with this record than previous ones, so it just seemed right to finish it with my own label as well. I’m excited, especially in these times, everyone’s stuck at home; I’m not touring, I’m not relying on a big team to take care of things for me, to run the business side of things. This is a good time to try it out I guess!
It must be refreshing to take a hands on approach?
Yeah! There’s a lot I’ve learned to do over the past three years working on other records for Wax Nine. I’m lucky, it started as an imprint for Carpark [Records], who’ve done all of Speedy’s albums and the previous Sad13 record… they’re just wonderful people that’ve taught me a lot.
This is your second solo album after 2016’s ‘Slugger’. You collaborated with Lizzo in 2016 to release ‘Basement Queens’, am I right in thinking this was a challenge assigned by Google? Can you talk a bit more about how that came about and the experience of working with Lizzo?
At the time, Google pitched it to us as ‘what a crazy idea that musicians could collaborate this way, over video and Google Docs’ and now it’s the only way we can work! It was an interesting project to work on at the time, she [Lizzo] & I were in-touch already because she did a Speedy remix with Lazerbeak, who had toured with Doomtree… I think Google had been in touch with my management at the time, we wanted to do more with Lizzo, so it came about that way. When I started Speedy Ortiz, it was my project to do home recording and to play all of the instruments and I hadn’t done that in a while; because it sort of morphed into a full band. I would still make demos, but I wasn’t building them out with every single instrument, and I missed working on that. So, when I was talking to Lizzo about the song, she was like, ‘I’m really into just freestyling right now’. Yes, she plays the flute, and every other instrument, but she was like, ‘I just want to freestyle, do you want to make the track?’ So, I just built the track at home, and we just kind of played the track together over Google Hangouts. Just remembering how much I like to work this way, playing all the instruments, made me think ‘oh it’d be really fun to make another record this way.’ It’s been five-years since I’ve done that with the early-Speedy stuff. Honestly, working on that project, is why I made the Sad13 record. I think Lizzo & I tracked that in December ’15, and I think it was around Christmas of that year, I started on the Sad13 album.
Four years on, you’re back with ‘Haunted Painting’. It was mentioned you felt unable to create music for a time, until a ghost (not a real ghost) spoke to you which lead to the writing of this record - can you elaborate on this ‘ghost’?
I think when I was working on the ‘Slugger’ album, I think ‘Foil Deer’ by Speedy had come out the year before; Speedy had stuff out pretty much every year up to that point and my old band was putting out stuff every year before that. So, I remember getting introduced thinking, ‘I want to put out albums every year,’ which is still a way I’d love to operate, but I had a number of life situations I wasn’t dealing with because I was overworking. My dad had passed away in 2015, and I remember the day after his funeral, I was doing a major publication interview. I went on tour two-weeks later and just stayed on tour right up to working on the Sad13 album, which shortly thereafter we did another Speedy album, then right on tour throughout all of those projects. I just hadn’t had time to think about, not only processing the loss of my dad… I’m 32, I play music and I’ve lost a lot of friends to overdose… it’s really hard to process those things. For a couple of years, I wasn’t interested in writing new songs… I did covers, a Christmas song every year, but beyond that I hadn’t written any new music. Maybe, early last-year, three people I knew died in a couple of weeks; I was just like, ‘I’m not processing any of this, I need to go back to therapy.’ So, I did, and it’s been awesome. After around six-months of working with my therapist, I mentioned I was ready to take on work again… I think around the time I started work on the album… just as a bassline for my life, I love creepy stuff. I love ghosts, I love the paranormal. And, I had been up in a hotel for a poetry festival with another poet friend, Dorothea Lasky, who is also very interested in this kind of stuff. And we had heard the hotel is the most haunted in Seattle, so we spent all night looking for ghosts and we didn’t really find anything. But the next day, I went to this museum, the Frye Gallery… there were just a number of portraits I found really captivating, the horror trope of: scary, feminine faced, with under eye circles, washed out faces. I feel like early 20th century portraiture is in that style, it’s really beautiful and evocative. Also, anyone who’s ever stared at themselves in the mirror when they’re going through depression can kind of relate to that expression… in a kind of self-aware and jokey way, I felt like this haunted painting.
You’ve self-produced both records – this one at New Monkey Studios in Van Nuys, the studio Elliott Smith built in the early-2000s. You’ve credited Smith as one of your ‘guiding influences in composing and home recording’, you played his piano and acoustic guitar on the track ‘Good Grief’. That must have been surreal, yet deeply sentimental to yourself to record such a personal song in one of your idol’s studios with their instruments?
And his microwave too! To be fair, Sarah Tudzin, who engineered the songs and mixed the album played the microwave. She just pressed buttons and pitch shifted it to sound like a synth part! It’s a cool studio, it has a lot of his personality and his presence in it.
Your list of instrumentation on this record is eclectic. Particularly, instruments such as, glockenspiel, electric sitar, autoharp, theremin, ‘toys, trash, ephemera’ – was this a conscious effort to utilise these instruments or were they lying around, and you thought why not?
I’ve become spoiled now, as we used six different studios in total… normally most people will pick one, or two studios to record their album. Even if a studio has an amazing collection of gear, you know what’s there and that’s what’s going to be on the record. Maybe there’s one amazing synth and that’s the ‘synth sound’ for the record. Because I only did two-three songs per studio, I had what felt like unlimited gear! As I mentioned, because I was dragging my feet working on a new record and, I had taken some time away from a prolific amount of writing/demo making; doing it in small chunks just made it less scary, so I’d say ‘two months from now, I’m going to be at, for example, New Monkey’. I have their gear list in advance; I’m going to write and arrange the songs to make use of everything there that I’m interested in. The writing process was much more parallel to what the studios could provide than it has been in the past. In the past, I’d go into a studio with my demo and think ‘alright, what’s in here that could play this part’. This time, I was like, ‘I am going to write a part because I know there’s a glockenspiel there, I know there’s a theremin there.’ I was able to use all of the gear I most excited about at every single studio. My tolerance for gear now is too high haha, I’m going to have to work in twelve different studios next time!
I wanted to elaborate more upon your writing process, particularly your lyricism. It has been said a Sad13 song is ‘rarely only personal’, do you think you write in a reactionary sense to what is going on around you at the time? Or do you find yourself channelling personal experiences, empathy, social injustice, the universal truth?
Yeah I think that’s a bit of both, and I think that’s true for anybody writing about their times or experience. You know, things that happen to me, don’t happen in a bubble. Things that happen outside of my apartment are touching, if not me directly, but to my friends, my family or my community/people I care about… I envy songwriters that are able to do songs that are sillier or narrative driven, the times that I’ve tried feel a bit disingenuous to me. Sometimes when I try on my fiction writing hat, it’s still very allegorical and I can say, ‘well, yes, this is a story but it’s actually not a love-story, it’s a metaphor for specific flattening of personalities that happens on the internet!’ Because I tend to all the music before hand as well, it tends to be whatever I’m thinking about or processing that day that ends up in the lyrics. So often I think about ‘what is the song about?’, I can remember, ‘oh, this was the day that Jonathan Franzen’s stupid climate change op ed came out’ that’s why I’m dissing him in this song! When I look back on it, I can often pin-point ‘what did I read that day that set me off in the lyrics?’
There is a strong female presence on the record, not just in the personnel on the record but your Mum, Diane, designed the album cover. Having read up on your work, empowerment seems to be paramount in everything that you do as an artist. Feminism, inclusivity, climate gentrification are only some of the topics you’ve written about – how important do you think it is for artist’s to be using their platform to evoke discussions on such topics?
Not just to use your platform in discussion, but in hiring power is really crucial. I think the second I thought I had any hiring power, once this band wasn’t just my ‘after school hobby’, once it was like ‘we need to hire someone to do sound, we need to hire someone to do merch’, I’ve always been very conscious. I don’t think we’ve ever hired a front of house who was male, the same goes for merch. In support bands, I think we’ve been really conscious… after the first couple of years when I realised we did have a platform, we were very conscious to bring out gender and racially diverse touring bills… I hosted a panel a couple of years ago for women in audio engineering, with some of the people I admire most and I’m friends with. After the panel, I thought ‘why am I the person who gets to host this panel?’, I looked at the engineering credits on my record, some of my longest collaborators are still cis-men. So, I had a people that I really wanted to collaborate with for years and finally on this record, I got to make it happen so that was personally very exciting for me. In the same way I’m a gear nerd, I’m a linear notes nerd, I want to see who engineered the track, who mixed the track, who played all these instruments… For so many women to be represented in the technical audio side of things, it’s exciting for me; because reading the linear notes, it’s just not as common as it should be, even when there are world-renowned engineers like the people on this record.
You are donating $1 of every album sale in 2020 to Prevention Point Philadelphia, can you discuss a bit more about the charity and how that came about?
Starting about a year and a half ago, I started working with The Harm Reduction Coalition, which is a US national organisation which provides different resources to people impacted by drug use; whether that is providing anti-overdose medication, training, or medical testing, all kinds of resources depending on the State and City. We did a bunch of fund raising work for them, working alongside various organisations they’re affiliated with, to provide ‘Naloxone’ which is the overdose reversal drug distributed for free at our shows, as well as other resources depending on the state and city… the laws really vary depending on where you are here, in terms of what we can do to literally save people’s lives… As this record is processing grief, and often for people my age, that grief is losing people to the preventable death of overdose; I wanted to help give some money to people in my community who are doing really important work every day to save lives. Prevention Point does that: syringe exchange, onsite drug testing, all kinds of medical resources not pertaining to drug use, they’ve even been doing COVID antibody testing… they’re a really great local organisation and I’ve wanted to do something with them for a long time, so I’m psyched this record is able to help them in some way… I feel overdose is so stigmatised, many people die of overdose on drugs they’re prescribed, on the dosage they’re prescribed. It’s so ‘taboo’ that people are afraid to have these conversations. So, by having the name of this organisation right at the top of the press release, by touring in support of The Harm Reduction Coalition and saying on stage ‘here’s what we’re collecting money for’, I wound up having really amazing conversations with people in the audience; who would say ‘I’ve been in recovery for ten years’, or, ‘I lost a family member to overdose and now I really want to ensure that doesn’t needlessly happen to others.’ It’s really nice to be able to have those conversations and I’m happy more of us are having them.