Before taking to the road for this fall’s extensive headlining tour, Speedy Ortiz spent considerably more time in rehearsals than for any previous tour the acclaimed indie pop-rock band has done.
Blame it on “Rabbit Rabbit,” the band’s newly released fourth studio album.
“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,” explains singer-songwriter/guitarist and keyboardist, Sadie Dupuis, in a recent phone interview. “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.”
A good bit of time was also spent in making the “Rabbit Rabbit” album a reality. For Dupuis, as she has done since she formed Speedy Ortiz as a solo project in 2011 before it evolved into a band for the 2013 album, “Major Arcana,” that meant writing and demoing all of the songs. This time around, the process was more involved than ever.
She says for the previous three Speedy Ortiz albums that, while she generally played guitar and keyboards and did drum programming on her demos, they weren’t as detailed and were more open ended when she brought them to the band. But in the time leading up to the “Rabbit Rabbit” project, she made “hyper-arranged” demos for the 2020 album by Sad 13, “Haunted Painting,” to help minimize her studio time and expense, while also working at refining her home production and mixing skills. That work was reflected in the demos for “Rabbit Rabbit.”
“I basically made a version of the album at home by myself and produced and mixed it so that then the band could learn it and change things and go from there,” she explains. “But 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.
She thinks that is what accounts for a lot of the “knottiness” of it.
“Of course, my bandmates (guitarist/keyboardist Andy Molholt, bassist Audrey Zee Whitesides and drummer Joey Doubek) brought their own ideas and twists and turns to the table. So it’s very dense, hopefully in a way that’s comprehensible. But yeah, we spent quite a lot of time making sure all the details worked together and thinking about which ones to highlight where and why. And it was a really fun and interesting recording experience.”
“Rabbit Rabbit’s” spiky feel, angular, intertwining guitar lines and catchy vocal melodies – as well as the opaque, impressionistic lyrics – will be familiar to fans of their previous albums. But the new songs are more intricate, more rhythmically creative and a bit thornier than before.
Also different is the subject matter of certain songs. Speedy Ortiz has long been known for the activism of its members. For instance, Dupuis and Molholt work with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, which works for better conditions and pay for musicians. Dupuis’ experience with unions inspired the pro-labor lyrics of “You SO2.”
Just as notable are the multiple references that pop up on the album to childhood abuse and its lasting impacts, a subject Dupuis knows about firsthand but declines to discuss in specifics, other than to say it didn’t involve her parents. It’s a topic she had avoided in her lyrics until a co-writing session during the pandemic with A.C. Newman of the New Pornographers.
“I did a couple of songs for him, and I think most of what was the initial draft is not at all what’s in the songs, but in the initial drafts I was like, ‘Huh, this is about,’ I could see clearly my lyrics are a little archaic sounding, but I can tell this is about the child abuse that I went through, that I never wanted to write about this 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 and it seems like what my brain wants me to do. So I tried then to write about it with a little more intentionality. And that’s sort of how I wound up broaching it on this record.”
Fans can expect to hear a healthy number of “Rabbit Rabbit” songs in the shows Speedy Ortiz plays this fall.
“We are doing a lot of ‘Rabbit Rabbit,’ but we are doing some amount of back catalog, too, and that tends to shift every day,” Dupuis adds. “So I can’t fully speak for what we’ll be doing with this run, but we will be playing quite a lot of the new album. Maybe it’s about a half-and-half thing.”
Speedy Ortiz performs with Baths and Susie True at the Camel on Thursday, Oct. 19 at 7 p.m.
