“The goal is not to become a bigger font on the festival poster,” says Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz. “It’s to make things that we care about, play with people we care about, and find art that moves us.”
That’s the mantra of Speedy Ortiz, who are playing Union Station Brewery in Providence on Friday, December 15. I spoke to Dupuis, leader of the alternative rock band, while she was enjoying a brief break from a busy touring schedule. The singer/songwriter/guitarist founded the band in 2011, and had since toured endlessly, playing dive bars and performing at major festivals like Bonnaroo and Primavera.
With a post-punk, high-voltage sound reminiscent of Newport’s own Throwing Muses, and a voice that quivers like Liz Phair, Dupuis’s band is edgy, relevant, and fun to dance to, required qualifications of any great band.
They’ve received critical praise for their new album Rabbit, Rabbit, with songs described by Billboard as “fresh and hard-earned” and “full of twirly guitar-work and call-out lyrics” by Stereogum. Dupuis is out front, playing guitar and serving as chief songwriter for the four-piece ensemble that includes guitarist Andy Molholt (Laser Background, Eric Slick), bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides (Mal Blum, Little Waist), and drummer Joey Doubek (Pinkwash, Downtown Boys).
Her songwriting on the new album was inspired partially by her experience with childhood trauma and abuse.
“Seeing what is unfair in my workplace, seeing what is unfair in parallel workplaces, seeing what feels unfair to me in the world at large, I think that my songwriting frequently comes from this place of outrage, anger, and indignation that the world can be the way that it is,” explained Dupuis.
“I wanted to look at that mode of righteousness; it is so easy for me and feels like the most natural place for me to go,” she continued. “To consider that emotional response, I found myself looking further back, at some trauma and abuse that I dealt with as a child. Child abuse is not a good thing to survive or experience, but in some ways, it informed a response where I feel very protective of others and don’t like to see others mistreated. I’m very quick to stand up for what I believe is right. I was looking at how those things intersect and how playing music fits into all that.”
“I found myself looking back at a lot of the music that inspired me when I first became a songwriter and started playing in bands,” she added. “My earliest songs when I was 13, 14, when I was finding my way into it, from the Bush election onward, that kind of political, activist lyrism was part of my process, not all the time but increasingly as I got older.”
That mindset led to her taking a leadership role in musician’s rights organizations, that began when she was a union member as a graduate employee at UMass Amherst.
“For many years, the kinds of work I was involved in felt like things that were ineligible for unionizing. I was a freelance writer, I worked for small publications, and I was a touring musician, so I felt inspired in the years leading up to the pandemic, seeing my writer friends and peers, my former co-workers organizing. I was also inspired to see friends organizing politically as arts laborers, withholding their work from festivals or venues that were aligned with sponsors they didn’t believe in,” she explained.
During the pandemic, Dupuis met with other concerned musicians on Zoom. They formed the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, now called the United Musicians and Allied Workers. They support “various campaigns to not only improve the lives of working musicians, but also to educate music fans and consumers about what these conditions are like, about how little we’re able to make on the road, about venues that take merch cuts, and about how grossly low the royalty payouts are from streaming services.”
The UMAW affiliate in the band’s home in Philadelphia is involved in direct community action. “We did a gear drive and got a number of local artists to donate their equipment so that we could distribute it in prisons so that incarcerated musicians could have access to the tools they need to have joy and fulfillment under the terrible conditions of incarceration.”
Dupuis explained that the band wasn’t necessarily built to go viral or achieve fame with Top 40 hits. She enjoys playing dive bars, DIY venues, and notes “we’re also lucky to play some bigger rooms and festivals, but I wouldn’t say a continuous upward climb was ever a goal of mine or of this project. Early in our career, in our first shows outside of basements and dive bars, we were lucky to play with musicians like Ted Leo, long-term heroes Deerhoof, Steven Malkus, even Liz Phair – lifers in music. I feel grateful that we’ve always made things we like, we’ve always toured with artists we like, whether as the opening act or as headliner bringing out an artist we love.” Speaking of which, Foyer Red opens the show at 9PM.
Click here for more on the Providence show.
