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Haunted Painting

by Sad13

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    First cassette pressing in white ink on opaque neon pink tourmaline shell.

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1.
Arrest me, won’t you? I’ve waited for some time to face the moment you’d come to take a life into the catacombs, eradicating mine. I loved you before I knew ends. Love alone, that’s hard enough.
2.
WTD? 03:42 video
Some of us are gonna die faster than the other guys, ones I thought shoulda been shining my shoes. That’s how a gamble’s gamed, real until it’s razed away forcibly. Descend from ladder to chute and call that a truce. So high, quite low, mid-range: domains you control. “Drink me,” shrink down. Make a toast to the loss, you allowed it. And if I’ve had enough of flora and fauna, then what is the drama? Hold me close til the next year’s trauma. What is the drama? Wish I had said something but we can’t go back in time. Goons waltz in wearing shitkicking grins without reason, without cadence. So, we’re gonna die! Faster than our fathers make crime out of fiction, a silent cohesion. Less paranoia, more progress. Haha, unknowns derange me. But I make it my own and own up, get down. This is happening cuz you allowed it. That’s enough of flora, fauna. What is the drama? You were splayed for the valet, a cap gun on ya. Now put your hands where I could see ‘em. Is there any drama?
3.
You’re in it for the fight, right? A voyeur for the gore who can’t keep on ice anymore. Bring it to the yard, dare to turn it off. That’s another breach from nature. The future’s looking febrile. Clear craze, polythene for poisoning is evermore the rage. Suit up. Hysterical, you wanna see me disappear. Carve a little piece of my heart, then chop the rest for parts. You wanna see me disappear. Turn the other cheek on your mess, utter disinterest. You wanna make it disappear. Hysterical, to laugh like it’s not ammunition. Rent another wreck. Breach an unillustrative contract. Brunch to break the union that erects your crystal prisms. You’re in it for the fight, right? You clamor for the gore - you can’t hide that lust anymore. Clear craze, see me on a better day. Your sentimental way’s hysterical, to laugh like it’s not ammunition. I wanna see you disappear and laugh like I don’t need permission.
4.
Girls, come on over. I’m too loath to twist and shout. Got rose haze for the nightshade and some bubblegum for your pout. RSVP to be not going out. Going out’s just chasing the ghost of a good time. It gets you caught up in the rewind. Chasing the ghost of a good time, you start to regress to a past life. Chasing the ghost of a good time. I got it good when I’m inside. Never go. Red bottoms on the sofa, or party in a cabin in the woods? Trailblaze in the wildness. Wouldn’t compass there if I could. Here’s me, where I said I’d be. Chasing the ghost of a good time gets you caught up in the rewind. Chasing the ghost of a good time, you start to regress to a past life. Chasing the ghost of a good time. I got it good when I’m inside. Let it go. Was the crowd always so dense? Used to think I could step to it. Now I hoof to the garden, hope lilacs pop through. Heavy fog, mistook for aura, casting light not pink or blue. Traded most of my vice for botanical muses, scared but not clueless. Say, how can you thrive in this state, creeping from vines? These debased trawls in the cooler for sling - why not stay in? Chasing the ghost for a good time. They’re all by my side when I’m inside. So come on over.
5.
Oops...! 03:55 video
Lucky for me, I’m spent. Can’t overdraw a kick to the head. You may have a case, you sure know it. Just let me be one-hit-wondrous and fight no more forever. Blood red suits me better when it’s bandaged up. What a dream when you float out of sight, dragging the haze that cloaks the morning to normalize the night. What a scream, you come back to me. Hiding in plain sight under spotlight, fixture of your fantasy. Place your gamble on a string. What you love, you’ll renounce for any gain. Oops…! I stopped doing it. It used to cost me so much to acquiesce. What a dream when you float out of sight, dragging the haze that cloaks the morning to normalize the night. What a scream, you sanitize me. Crouching in congress with the vampires, that’s where I aspire to be. The profiteer’s on stake out, crying off their makeup: an obvious ploy. Portrait of a songster: young hussy crossed with cuddle core, 10,000% out for blood. What a dream when you float out of sight, dragging the haze that cloaks the morning to decimate my life. (Lucky for me, I’m spent. It’s just another kick in the head.) What a scream, you’re coming for me! Waiting in plain sight under spotlight, what did you expect from me?
6.
Good Grief 03:14
Every word you say is lost on me. Cloistered in an echo of eight weeks, avoiding answers. I picked up this time. Should I move back to our city though you don’t want me to see? You want the best for me. What gets the best of me yet: a prophetic fortune. You gotta understand, I’m taking a loss best I can but nothing else is that important to me. Hiding from the sun as you’re falling asleep. None of it is that important without you. Every word you say I’m writing down just to keep a record if you don’t repeat them. Repeat what’s lost to sound, remember crying through your clean shirt. Now I can’t work in the city or else I walk past our block and someone else’s home. That hurts, but I know: your love was the fortress. You gotta understand I’m taking a loss best I can but nothing else is that important to me. It’s been a couple years. Anytime I make a big sound, that’s when I feel you. Nothing else is that important to me. Standing in the sun like you wanted to see. All of this was so important to you and to me. Good grief.
7.
Diagnosed with OCD today. Somebody take my metal away. I just dive into my skin, looking for proof I’m okay. It’s the first time someone I slept with passed, half a decade since we spoke last. I can’t stop searching for his name, as if I wouldn’t do things the same. Magic hour burning by my side. I make the bed - it’s somewhere to lie - holding a ruby in my hand, one thing in my command. I need control. Just afloat, but treading all along.
8.
With Baby 03:33
“Meet me at the mall,” she whispered from the discount rack, flannel skivvies (pilfered) in her tote bag. “Then come over for Monopoly on Sunday.” I’m thinking maybe. At her door, twenty cats casing the place. Collected works of Franzen on her bookcase. That’s scary, but maybe I’m safe with baby. I can’t lie, I won’t do this with anybody else around. Gate’s locked, so crash through it. She isn’t anyone. Kissing the hero in the photo booth - we’re gonna get the picture soon. Love’s only magic by the light of the moon and nighttime isn’t absolute. Kissing the hero in the photo booth. Telescope the star you’ve hitched onto. If I had to see her again, it’d throw my heart out of whack, baby. Why would I lie? I won’t do that to anybody else again. Wall’s up for immurement. She isn’t anyone to me. I can’t with baby. The only kick that I want comes from a soda can. The only high that I like comes from kissing the hero. Kissing the hero, and there’s photo proof. Telescope the star you’re hitched on ‘til you see what glitz you made up. Glitter’s only dust and glue.
9.
The Crow 03:06
Another life, another voice, another heartbeat could find a happy end to tear asunder. Lonesome if you got ‘em, gagging it down. Sing another psalm, is that work enough? Oh, no. What was it like to come of age in such a cruel place, supping on the bones of your old chaperones? Priced out since your first kiss, spotty tongued, mellifluous. Stick the landing as your fingerprints erode again. Oh no! He’s dead, I’m trying on clothes I can’t afford. Guess I’ll totter down the boulevard, cash blown. Courting me in effigy. Who dares claim home any place they see? Oh no, oh no, not me! Gone from green to pink behind the courthouse bricks. Nights, I slow it down. The future just confounds me. He’s dead, I’m drinking at Taix, faint-hearted bottle blond hiding out til the smoke just passes. Menace in the mirror, who dares find joy in this terror? Oh no, oh no, oh no.
10.
Take Care 02:58
Waiting for you every day puts the throb in my vein. If you must ache, could you injure me the same? ‘Cuz I'm ready to feel your pain and I'm honored to take the blame. Could it ever pan out a new way? I care, if you're ready to take care. How I wanted to take the blame. If you must ache, could you injure me the same? I'm ready to feel your pain and I'm honored to take the blame. Could it ever pan out a new way? I care. I care, if you’re ready to take care.
11.
Market Hotel 01:47
I came over on the JMZ. Dad took a car service to Mr. Kiwi and he's texting me now, "Are you playing on time?" "We're either going last or we're first out of five." I’m working three fucking jobs, I’m too embarrassed to die. I do door here some nights, that's why we've met three or more times before. His face is blank: “Can I borrow your amp?” But he asks it to my boyfriend like I’m not in the band. I’m just an adult dirtbag. Sneak me inside of your backpack. Take me around ‘cuz I can’t take myself. I’m playing an adult, you're just playing yourself. I came over, I come over, and I’ll keep coming over, whatever the purpose. (Here comes no one.)

about

$1 per album sale in 2020 will benefit Prevention Point Philadelphia, a harm reduction organization providing free medical care, syringe exchange, shelter, overdose reversal training, and other vital social services. Learn more about them at ppponline.org.

For nearly a decade, Sadie Dupuis has been celebrated for her literary lyrics, accomplished guitar playing, and embodied ethos of empowerment, whether with rock band Speedy Ortiz or the pop-oriented solo project Sad13, which debuted in 2016 with Lizzo co-feature “Basement Queens.” It was followed by the self-produced Slugger, featuring “Get a Yes,” a glitter-bomb of an ode to consent, and other bedroom Top 40 tributes centering feminism and inclusivity. But in the ensuing years, reconciling with a delayed processing of grief, Dupuis felt unable to create new music.

At the Frye Gallery in Seattle, a ghost spoke to her—or an approximation of one. It was an early 20th century painting of the dancer Saharet by German expressionist Franz von Stuck, one of many haunted-seeming gold-framed oil paintings in the gallery: washed-out faces, under-eye circles, expressions that told stories. Looking at these portraits, she related. And she started to write.

Haunted Painting, Sad13’s second album and first for Dupuis’ label Wax Nine (Melkbelly, Johanna Warren), marks her return to artmaking. “Some of these songs feel like emotions that came from a cloud, and I was trying to translate them,” she says. But the scope of a Sad13 song is rarely only personal. As ever, Sad13 weaves timely societal critiques into rushing hooks and whip-smart wordplay that’s all still a blast: riffer “WTD” is about climate gentrification and billionaires’ consequent desire to colonize the ocean and space. Album opener “Into the Catacombs,” which melds orchestral strings with glitched-out horror sounds, came after a 2016 trip to Buenos Aires’ human rights memorial ESMA with her mother, Diane Dupuis—who also painted the Stuck-inspired cover image of her child as a ghost. Haunted Painting braids the political and the poetic, interests that extend to Dupuis’ recent work with No Music for ICE, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, and as editor of the newly-established Wax Nine poetry journal.

It all finds Dupuis, already one of the sharpest lyricists of her generation, leveling up as an arranger and producer. Drawing inspiration from 1980s British pop-rock à la Tracy Ullman and Joan Armatrading, as well as the contemporary digital gloss of post-PC Music electronica, she calls Haunted Painting “decidedly non-minimal,” mixing technicolor synth-pop and math-rock dynamism. Accompanied throughout by drummer Zoë Brecher—and, on two songs, by an eight-piece orchestra—Dupuis handles all other instrumentation herself, expanding her palette of guitar, bass, and synth to include organ, lap steel, marimba, glockenspiel, sitar, autoharp, theremin, “toys, trash, and ephemera.” Dupuis tailored her arrangements to the gear lists of six different U.S. studios, scheduling time in between Speedy Ortiz’s festival dates and touring her book Mouthguard. She worked exclusively with women engineers; among those credited are mixer Sarah Tudzin (Weyes Blood, Illuminati Hotties), tracking engineers Erin Tonkon (David Bowie, Esperanza Spalding) and Maryam Qudus (Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, mxmtoon), and Dupuis’ long term collaborator, mastering legend Emily Lazar (Beck, Dolly Parton). The process allowed for a diversity of timbres, as well as guest vocal contributions from Helado Negro’s Roberto Lange, Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, and Pile’s Rick Maguire.

Two of Haunted Painting’s stickiest pop songs were tracked at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco: The heart-tugging “Hysterical,” inspired by the convoluted logic of outdated offense comedians, skewers apathy with wit in a dizzying power-pop rush. “Carve a little piece of my heart, then chop the rest for parts,” she sings. “Hysterical, to laugh like it’s not ammunition.” Revisiting her formative DIY years, Dupuis calls “Ghost (of a Good Time)” her “party song about not going out”—an oddball dance anthem for the introverts and anti-nostalgists among us, inspired by a recent Bushwick basement show with a 1 a.m. start-time she would have tolerated a decade ago.

In a meaningful turn, Sad13 worked at New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys, California, the studio Elliott Smith built out in the early 2000. “He’s one of my guiding influences in composing and home recording,” Dupuis says. “He was kind of a gear nut, and the equipment there reflects it.” She felt a good energy working on her “haunted album” in Smith’s old space, playing his piano and acoustic guitar on the plaintive “Good Grief,” originally written for her father when he was diagnosed with cancer and rewritten to be about “how normal things look surreal after mourning.” There, she also tracked the syncopated, swaggering “Oops...!” —a heavy reflection on her own “vengeance complex” that can crop up in the face of flagrant abuses of power. (“Portrait of a songster: young hussy crossed with cuddle core, 10,000% out for blood,” goes one verse.)

After the New Monkey sessions, Dupuis learned that another hero of hers, the musician and poet David Berman, had suddenly died. She retreated to the bar of Echo Park French restaurant Taix—a favored hangout of beloved L.A. author Eve Babitz—and started work on proggy, 808-and-arp-indebted “The Crow,” thinking of Berman and Babitz both. “The future just confounds me,” she wrote. “Who dares find joy in this terror?” Death leaves her conflicted: “I’ve spent my life working on music, but art can feel inadequate in a world of escalating crisis. Art is not enough to keep your heroes with you. How do we process that?”

How else but with art? Haunted Painting honors that eternal, and complex, impulse. That’s a gift of Sad13’s work: You can’t look away from what’s around you, even—especially—when it’s haunting.

credits

released September 25, 2020

Sadie Dupuis - production, engineering, arrangements, guitar, bass, synth, organ, piano, vocals, lap steel, marimba, glockenspiel, percussion, drum programming, resonator, electric sitar, baritone guitar, autoharp, theremin, toys, trash, ephemera
Zoë Brecher - drums, percussion

Sarah Tudzin - mixing (Sonic Ranch, Tornillo, TX); engineering, “Oops…!” and “Good Grief” (New Monkey, Van Nuys, CA); microwave
Maryam Qudus - engineering, “Hysterical,” “Ghost (of a Good Time)” and “Ruby Wand” (Tiny Telephone, Oakland and San Francisco, CA); handclaps
Erin Tonkon - engineering, “WTD?” and “Market Hotel”; drum engineering, “With Baby” and “The Crow” (Studio G, Brooklyn, NY)
Lily Wen - engineering, “Into the Catacombs” and “Take Care” (Figure 8 Recording, Brooklyn, NY)
Anne Gauthier - engineering, “With Baby” and “The Crow” (La La Land, Louisville, KY)
Emily Lazar - mastering (The Lodge, New York, NY)
Chris Allgood - assistant mastering

Audrey Zee Whitesides - bass, “WTD?” and “Market Hotel”
Roberto Lange - vocals, “Into the Catacombs”
Merrill Garbus - vocals, “Ghost (of a Good Time)”
Satomi Matsuzaki - vocals, “With Baby”
Rick Maguire - vocals, “Take Care”
Camellia Hartman - violin
Anna Takeda - violin
Joshua Gomberoff - viola
Eva Lawitts - double bass
Alexander Davis - bassoon
Hillai Govreen - clarinet
Kana Miyamoto - flute
Shun Katayama - flute
Samuel Weissberg - conducting, score revision

Cover painting by Diane Dupuis. All other art by Sadie Dupuis. Photography by Natalie Piserchio.

All songs written by Sadie Dupuis, July Was Hot (BMI)

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Sad13 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

sad13 is a cyborg dog astrally projected from the recent past to save the middle school dance. sadie dupuis is sad13.

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