The mysterious process of making art can bring once-buried feelings to the surface. Just ask Sadie Dupuis, the celebrated singer-songwriter behind the Philadelphia indie-rock outfit Speedy Ortiz. During a writing session with New Pornographers mastermind A.C. Newman, the 35-year-old musician found herself unpacking trauma from her childhood that she never intended to explore in her art.
“My lyrics are a little archaic-sounding, but I can tell this is about the child abuse that I went through — [which] I never wanted to write about before, because it’s not even something I [talk about] in person with my friends,” Dupuis says. “But if it keeps coming out in my writing, I think I should try to honor that impulse. It seems like what my brain wants me to do.”
At first, Dupuis was uneasy about sharing such painful and personal details with the world. (“I was just like, ‘Oh, this is going to destroy my life,’” she recalls.) But she has since found that dragging those dark feelings into the light on her band’s anticipated fourth album, Rabbit Rabbit, has carved more space for connection.
“So many of us have had these harrowing yet formative experiences that we’ve been afraid to talk about or relate to one another because of the way child abuse is stigmatized,” Dupuis says. “I’m not alone in these feelings, and for other folks … to also know that they’re not alone, that has been helpful in a big way.”
Dupuis’ journey of connection rolls on with an extensive headlining tour for Speedy Ortiz, coming to Globe Hall in Denver on Nov. 16. In order to translate the band’s first album in half a decade to the stage, Dupuis and her bandmates — Andy Molholt (guitar), Audrey Zee Whitesides (bass) and Joey Doubek (drums) — was the most involved process of the band’s career.
“This new material was really time-consuming to rehearse, more so than previous stuff because there are so many little details we wanted to make sure we get just right,” Dupuis says. “We want everything to be very tight live, so we spent more time rehearsing this new stuff than we’ve ever spent on rearranging a new record for the live setting.”
Twists and turns
Rabbit Rabbit, the first Speedy Ortiz album since 2018’s Twerp Verse, is the band’s most intricate offering yet. Here Dupuis’ trademark overabundance of melodies and hooks meet instrumental breakdowns, rich vocal harmonies and shifting time signatures that reward listeners who venture down the proverbial rabbit hole.
“We did a fair amount of rearranging, too. So a song like ‘Cry Cry Cry,’ for example, opens with this choral arrangement with a lot of layers of my voice. I was like ‘I am not doing this. I will die of shame if I use a vocal pedal to create a chorus of me live,’” she says. “So we took a synth part that I played on the record — it’s pretty buried in the mix, but it’s like a cool texture. Now the live version opens up with that. So we had a lot of fun creating little things like that [to] differentiate the live set from the recording.”
But all that work put into making Rabbit Rabbit a reality didn’t come without a significant investment of time and labor. For Dupuis, that meant writing and demoing all of the songs — as she has done since forming Speedy Ortiz as a solo project in 2011. But this time around, the process was more involved than ever.
The result will feel like a familiar embrace for Speedy Ortiz fans long clamoring for new material. The album’s angular, intertwining guitar lines and catchy vocal melodies dance with Dupuis’ opaque, impressionistic lyrics. But these new songs are more intricate, more rhythmically creative and a bit thornier than previous efforts.
“I basically made a version of the album at home by myself and produced and mixed it so the band could learn it and change things and go from there. It gave us a really strong blueprint and direction toward what production might sound like, even before we picked a studio and brought Sarah [Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties] on as a co-producer. I think that accounts for a lot of the knottiness of it,” Dupuis says. “Of course, my bandmates brought their own ideas and twists and turns to the table. So it’s very dense, hopefully in a way that’s comprehensible.”
ON THE BILL: Speedy Ortiz with Spacemoth and Mr. Atomic. 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 16. Globe Hall, 4483 Logan St., Denver. Tickets here.
