Haunted Painting
Sadie Dupuis was seeking to combine the pop element from solo project Sad13 with the driving guitar rock of her band Speedy Ortiz into one coherent vision. \"I think on the first Sad13 record, because I was trying to do something different from Speedy, I was a little afraid to really use the guitars, which is clearly my primary instrument,\" the multi-instrumentalist tells Apple Music. \"And on this record, I just wanted to do really big-sounding pop. And if you go back in a lot of the ’80s pop I\'m referring to, I feel like arena-rock guitar solos are just what happened there.\" Sonically, *Haunted Painting* features 11 tracks that could fall anywhere on the vast indie-pop spectrum, whether it\'s the maximal hooks featured on \"Ghost (Of a Good Time)\" and \"Hysterical\" or darker synth-based tracks such as \"Good Grief\" and \"The Crow.\" But underneath the album\'s glossy veneer is Dupuis facing down death, eco-fascism, and her own OCD diagnosis—looking to the late David Berman as an example of how to blend black humor with bleak subjects. \"The brightest-sounding fun country songs would have these really bleak one-liners, and then songs that sounded totally maudlin would be hysterically funny at times,\" she says. \"So I\'m always kind of trying to seek that balance, too.\" Below, Dupuis discusses *Haunted Painting* track by track. **Into the Catacombs** “I really like opening tracks that set a mood that may be using the consistent tone of the record. I always think about the Unwound album *Leaves Turn Inside You*, which is like a several-minute drone. The song has been floating around since 2014, and I knew whenever I used it, it had to be an intro song. So I started working on it for the last Sad13 record and it just didn\'t really fit, so I\'m glad it finally made it onto an album.” **WTD?** “I sent the record to Jason DeMarco, who does just a lot of everything at Adult Swim, but certainly is like the music person. And he\'s sort of the reason that I\'ve been able to play at their festival and do a number of these singles. And so it was kind of a scramble to figure out how can we get one on there in time for it to be like before the record comes out. And I\'m really, I\'m always psyched to get to do stuff with them.” **Hysterical** “I wrote the song sort of in response to a bunch of comedians. I don\'t care for all of them making stupid comments to the press simultaneously about how woke culture has destroyed comedy or how not being racist is somehow destroying comedy. I think it\'s so great that I got to do this music video with the comedians that I really love who absolutely prove that it\'s such an outdated and like simplistic way to feel that not being cruel is not funny.“ **Ghost (Of a Good Time)** “I was thinking of a lot of like indie bands that go poppy for this one: of Montreal, certainly Thao & The Get Down Stay Down record was a big influence, the one that Merrill Garbus produced \[2016’s *A Man Alive*\]. I think, other than the sort of weird time signature breakdown, it\'s a pretty straightforward song. So I had a lot of fun bringing in different layers and removing them and just sort of subtly changing things as it goes along.” **Oops…!** “It\'s like a perfect drum sound that I feel like once you hear it on the first one, you deserve a second drum listen. I\'ve been wanting to work with Sarah Tudzin \[of illuminati hotties\] on a couple of songs.” **Good Grief** “This is another song that I\'ve been working on for a number of years and originally kind of wrote it almost like a country fingerpicking acoustic guitar song. And then when I revisited it for this record, I found this great synth sound for it. So it was like trying to find the balance between weird futuristic very off-sounding synth and then this sort of more traditional country ballad fingerpicking guitar stuff.” **Ruby Wand** “I feel like I just got in there and said what I needed to say. But what\'s really fun about it to me is all these little synth parts. I\'ve been trying to figure out how the heck I\'m going to do any of these for livestreams, if I had to do a radio session. And I was like, all right, there\'s like 15 different synth parts that I did at home. And then probably 20 more I did at the studio. It was this kind of wanting to get a guitar and bass sound that would push against that very rigid synth.” **With Baby** “Someone once asked me, ‘Are we dating? I need to tell my manager and publicist.’ And I thought it was so funny, and I just never forgot that line. Kind of made a song around it as a joke and then came back to it a couple of years later. And obviously I got rid of those lyrics and there\'s sort of nothing about that. And it became more about a public image and the internet. But this is another one that I kind of imagined it being a little bit country and then it wound up really, really \'80s.” **The Crow** “It\'s for sure the first time I\'ve read about the death of someone I didn\'t know personally, but there\'s so many sad and difficult things happening constantly and increasingly, and what a lot of us retreat to is art. So the loss of people who create that art can have a really baffling effect when you\'re sort of relying on them to help you process what\'s difficult. And that was sort of how I felt at the death of David Berman. His writing was so acute and incisive, but also funny, warm, and we really need voices like that. And I\'m thankful we got so much work from him.” **Take Care** “This is another one that I started a few years ago and I thought that I had just like sailed with it. And there were a couple songs like this where I had the session on my computer and I was like, let me just open it up and see what it\'s like. And it was basically all there. I wrote the woodwinds and the strings, and I don\'t have a great sense of how to write for those instruments. I took music theory in college for like a second, enough to write for a string quartet for like a final project. And that\'s the only experience I have. So it was a lot of like looking up how to write for an orchestra, like what ranges can they play? And I was really anxious about it, but it came out amazing.” **Market Hotel** “My rule for myself on this album was to not hit the four-minute point on any song, which is a challenge because all these songs have so many sections. So it would be like, even if the song was four minutes and two seconds long, I\'d be like, okay, we got to make a couple of full measures half measures so I can get under my arbitrary limit. I really believe in like getting in and getting out, but doing as much as possible while you\'re there. I was really thinking about like The Cars, Big Star, a lot of kind of power pop.”
$1 per album sale in 2020 will benefit Prevention Point Philadelphia, a harm reduction organization providing free medical care, syringe exchange, shelter, overdose reversal training, and other vital social services. Learn more about them at ppponline.org. For nearly a decade, Sadie Dupuis has been celebrated for her literary lyrics, accomplished guitar playing, and embodied ethos of empowerment, whether with rock band Speedy Ortiz or the pop-oriented solo project Sad13, which debuted in 2016 with Lizzo co-feature “Basement Queens.” It was followed by the self-produced Slugger, featuring “Get a Yes,” a glitter-bomb of an ode to consent, and other bedroom Top 40 tributes centering feminism and inclusivity. But in the ensuing years, reconciling with a delayed processing of grief, Dupuis felt unable to create new music. At the Frye Gallery in Seattle, a ghost spoke to her—or an approximation of one. It was an early 20th century painting of the dancer Saharet by German expressionist Franz von Stuck, one of many haunted-seeming gold-framed oil paintings in the gallery: washed-out faces, under-eye circles, expressions that told stories. Looking at these portraits, she related. And she started to write. Haunted Painting, Sad13’s second album and first for Dupuis’ label Wax Nine (Melkbelly, Johanna Warren), marks her return to artmaking. “Some of these songs feel like emotions that came from a cloud, and I was trying to translate them,” she says. But the scope of a Sad13 song is rarely only personal. As ever, Sad13 weaves timely societal critiques into rushing hooks and whip-smart wordplay that’s all still a blast: riffer “WTD” is about climate gentrification and billionaires’ consequent desire to colonize the ocean and space. Album opener “Into the Catacombs,” which melds orchestral strings with glitched-out horror sounds, came after a 2016 trip to Buenos Aires’ human rights memorial ESMA with her mother, Diane Dupuis—who also painted the Stuck-inspired cover image of her child as a ghost. Haunted Painting braids the political and the poetic, interests that extend to Dupuis’ recent work with No Music for ICE, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, and as editor of the newly-established Wax Nine poetry journal. It all finds Dupuis, already one of the sharpest lyricists of her generation, leveling up as an arranger and producer. Drawing inspiration from 1980s British pop-rock à la Tracy Ullman and Joan Armatrading, as well as the contemporary digital gloss of post-PC Music electronica, she calls Haunted Painting “decidedly non-minimal,” mixing technicolor synth-pop and math-rock dynamism. Accompanied throughout by drummer Zoë Brecher—and, on two songs, by an eight-piece orchestra—Dupuis handles all other instrumentation herself, expanding her palette of guitar, bass, and synth to include organ, lap steel, marimba, glockenspiel, sitar, autoharp, theremin, “toys, trash, and ephemera.” Dupuis tailored her arrangements to the gear lists of six different U.S. studios, scheduling time in between Speedy Ortiz’s festival dates and touring her book Mouthguard. She worked exclusively with women engineers; among those credited are mixer Sarah Tudzin (Weyes Blood, Illuminati Hotties), tracking engineers Erin Tonkon (David Bowie, Esperanza Spalding) and Maryam Qudus (Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, mxmtoon), and Dupuis’ long term collaborator, mastering legend Emily Lazar (Beck, Dolly Parton). The process allowed for a diversity of timbres, as well as guest vocal contributions from Helado Negro’s Roberto Lange, Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, and Pile’s Rick Maguire. Two of Haunted Painting’s stickiest pop songs were tracked at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco: The heart-tugging “Hysterical,” inspired by the convoluted logic of outdated offense comedians, skewers apathy with wit in a dizzying power-pop rush. “Carve a little piece of my heart, then chop the rest for parts,” she sings. “Hysterical, to laugh like it’s not ammunition.” Revisiting her formative DIY years, Dupuis calls “Ghost (of a Good Time)” her “party song about not going out”—an oddball dance anthem for the introverts and anti-nostalgists among us, inspired by a recent Bushwick basement show with a 1 a.m. start-time she would have tolerated a decade ago. In a meaningful turn, Sad13 worked at New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys, California, the studio Elliott Smith built out in the early 2000. “He’s one of my guiding influences in composing and home recording,” Dupuis says. “He was kind of a gear nut, and the equipment there reflects it.” She felt a good energy working on her “haunted album” in Smith’s old space, playing his piano and acoustic guitar on the plaintive “Good Grief,” originally written for her father when he was diagnosed with cancer and rewritten to be about “how normal things look surreal after mourning.” There, she also tracked the syncopated, swaggering “Oops...!” —a heavy reflection on her own “vengeance complex” that can crop up in the face of flagrant abuses of power. (“Portrait of a songster: young hussy crossed with cuddle core, 10,000% out for blood,” goes one verse.) After the New Monkey sessions, Dupuis learned that another hero of hers, the musician and poet David Berman, had suddenly died. She retreated to the bar of Echo Park French restaurant Taix—a favored hangout of beloved L.A. author Eve Babitz—and started work on proggy, 808-and-arp-indebted “The Crow,” thinking of Berman and Babitz both. “The future just confounds me,” she wrote. “Who dares find joy in this terror?” Death leaves her conflicted: “I’ve spent my life working on music, but art can feel inadequate in a world of escalating crisis. Art is not enough to keep your heroes with you. How do we process that?” How else but with art? Haunted Painting honors that eternal, and complex, impulse. That’s a gift of Sad13’s work: You can’t look away from what’s around you, even—especially—when it’s haunting.
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