Speedy Ortiz's Sadie Dupuis Explores Trauma on Rabbit Rabbit

Indie-rock quartet Speedy Ortiz took its name after a supporting character from the great indie comic Love & Rockets. The detail isn't all that surprising. One glance at band founder Sadie Dupuis' bio reveals a unique backstory that could be the inspiration for a black-and-white graphic novel.

She starts with the usual origin story for a musician: piano lessons at 6 and making up songs as a child. As a teenager, she picks up the guitar — but then her life story takes a swerve. Instead of working toward a career as a full-time musician, she studies math at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"The kind of math I was interested in was pure math, which is very esoteric and more creative," Dupuis tells New Times. "There are some similarities with music. You're looking for similar patterns and frequencies."

Luckily for Speedy Ortiz fans, she realized math wasn't for her after a couple of years at MIT and left to study poetry instead.

Throughout her life, music kept coming out of her. In 2011, after landing a teaching job in western Massachusetts, a region where she didn't know anybody, Dupuis started making music under the name Speedy Ortiz. "It was a way to make friends in a new city, but people started liking it more than any of my other projects," she adds.

She loathes to figure out why Speedy Ortiz found an audience but can point out differences between this project and her previous stabs at music. "This is more off the cuff," Dupuis surmises. "The initial recordings were all lo-fi in the tradition of Liz Phair, Sebadoh, early Elliot Smith. I was always trying to get the home recording spirit."

The new record Rabbit Rabbit is the band's first album in five years and the first with the current lineup of guitarist Andy Molholt, bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides, and drummer Joey Doubek. Its lyrical content also had Dupuis looking back to past traumas and a difficult childhood.
"I thought on the child abuse I experienced," she says. "I didn't think I'd ever work on that musically, but you don't choose what you write about. I've always written with rage, disappointment, and finger-pointing at hypocrisy. I tried to thread the connection of what I experienced as a child and why I'm so quick to write from anger."

Playing songs based on trauma night after night while on tour seems torturous, but Dupuis says that isn't a problem for her. "When I play shows, I don't think about the subject matter," she explains. "I have a lot to take stock of on stage. I'm too busy turning on and off pedals. I'm thankful I compartmentalize."

Speedy Ortiz's fall tour will eventually make its way down to Gramps on October 23. "On stage, there's only four of us, so we're working hard to make it sound the same as the recordings, which are very dense. We also work to make the show fun," Dupuis says of the band's live performances.

Still, Rabbit Rabbit isn't entirely based on trauma. The new songs' musicality also reflects the more positive aspects of Dupuis' past.

"I listened to a lot of things from when I first started playing guitar around 2002 — Queens of the Stone Age, Mars Volta, the Breeders. I did some deep listening and analysis of what's going on in their songs."

Dupuis also found herself more involved in the production and mixing of Rabbit Rabbit than in previous efforts. The new record starts with the track named after the actress Kim Cattrall, seemingly a callback to the first Speedy Ortiz single, 2012's "Taylor Swift."

"Both titles were retroactively applied," Dupuis says. "I write the song, then I picked a title. With 'Taylor Swift,' there was a lot of chatter about her relationship history. Right after I completed the song that became 'Kim Cattrall,' there was an interview where she said she wouldn't do any more Sex and the City. She said, 'Why would I keep doing things that weren't a positive experience?' I could relate to that."

Speedy Ortiz. With Baths and Suzie True. 8 p.m. Monday, October 23, at Gramps, 176 NW 24th St., Miami; gramps.com. Tickets cost $16 to $18 via eventbrite.com.