She started writing each song on the album by giving it a color, dressing in that color and thinking about what sounds would match it. The title of “Rabbit Rabbit” comes from a ritual Dupuis performs on the first day of every month: saying “rabbit rabbit” for good luck. The songs are so dense that it’s nice to have a preview of how all the instruments are going to be in conversation with each other.” She’ll come to the band with a demo that already has multiple guitar tracks and bass tracks and drum tracks. Dupuis has sent male guitar colleagues to a favorite nail salon.Īudrey Zee Whitesides, who plays bass in both the live Sad13 band and in Speedy Ortiz, said, “Sadie is a very driven, creative person. The plastic made fingerstyle guitar playing as loud as playing with a pick. The acrylic nails had a technical advantage, too. As she took to playing, Dupuis often found herself the only girl among male musicians, and, she said, “I dressed like a little punk boy.”īut at a certain point she chose what she called, with a laugh, “a course overcorrection” - one that has her performing lately in candy-colored dresses and long acrylic fingernails, as well as writing songs in that pink-walled home studio. She also studied guitar and keyboards, and she began posting her own home-recorded songs to Myspace while she was still in high school. “She thought if I could start playing drums, that might be helpful.” “I was a very angry 16-year-old,” she said. Her mother got her a drum kit to play in the basement. True to the community spirit of do-it-yourself punk and indie rock in the 1990s, Dupuis and her bands have been activists, putting time into causes like unionization, treating addiction with harm reduction and supplying prison inmates with instruments.ĭupuis started making her own music early. That happens to describe Speedy Ortiz songs, too.ĭupuis also soaked up 1990s indie and alternative rock: bands like the Mars Volta, Deftones, Pixies, Pavement, Helium and Throwing Muses, who wrapped convoluted ideas in squalling arrangements. “I think he really liked the irony of these angelic-looking 12-year-olds singing and holding out dissonant notes and switching between bizarre time signatures.” A crucial one was singing in a children’s choir whose director “gravitated toward really strange music,” she recalled. “But clearly I needed to work on it, because it was coming out.”ĭupuis’s songwriting grew out of disparate sources. She said she had wanted not to think about it at all. But it felt like there were more conversations that needed to happen.” He apologized for it, very close to when he passed away. “My dad was aware of it, and didn’t intervene. “I was abused by a member of my family when I was young, and I wasn’t really protected from it,” she said. Unexpectedly at first, Dupuis found herself writing about “early family stuff,” she explained. In the album’s closing song, “Ghostwriter,” she strives to find closure: “I’m tired of anger. Amid careening, dissonant guitar lines and meter-shifting structures, Dupuis sings - obliquely and sometimes bluntly - about vulnerability, power, anger and how to move ahead. “Rabbit Rabbit,” due Friday, melds private reckonings and sonic ambitions. “With her writing and guitar playing and production and everything, it’s true art.” “She’s just sort of an ultimate galaxy-brain genius,” Tudzin said.
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