Speedy Ortiz Outsmart the World
“You make me wanna leave the one I’m with, start a new relationship. . .” Speedy Ortiz‘s Sadie Dupuis is unexpectedly covering Usher during her band’s soundcheck at Washington, D.C.’s Black Cat. There’s a pale yellow electric guitar at her feet – right next to an amp with a shirt that says “GENDER IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT)” slung across it – but she’s singing a cappella, and it’s sounding pretty great. “You want me to keep going?” she asks as the club’s sound guy watches, amazed. “I could go forever.”
Dupuis likes surprising people. “Expectations have historically been low for female musicians, so I want to be really technically good onstage,” the 26-year-old singer-guitarist says later, sipping bergamot-flavored iced tea backstage with her bandmates. “So I always write parts that are a stretch for me. Someone tweeted that I looked bored onstage. I’m like, ‘I’m just focusing so I don’t fuck up this guitar part!'”
That refusal to ever settle for anything easy has made Speedy Ortiz – Dupuis, guitarist Devin McKnight, bassist Darl Ferm and drummer Mike Falcone – one of the most exciting bands in indie rock. Their second studio LP, Foil Deer, is full of sneaky hooks and sharp turns, plus densely tangled lyrics to match the intricate instrumentation. Who else could make a line like, “I am not averse to getting salt in my face/Let me marinate a week and reevaluate” as catchy as Dupuis does on the new album’s “Swell Content”? “The jagged music they make gives her room to sing these jagged, original words,” says Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, who brought Speedy Ortiz on tour last year with his current band, the Jicks. “That makes them special.”
Dupuis has been writing songs since her Manhattan childhood, but she says she found her voice during the miserable year she spent at a “very strict” Connecticut boarding school around age 13. “I did not do well there,” she says. “That was the first time I ever became depressed. And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m sad. What can I do with my time?'” Soon she was demoing original compositions as an outlet for her unhappiness.
After that year, Dupuis’ parents sent her to a public school in rural Litchfield County, Connecticut, which she notes is the only part of the state that voted for George W. Bush in 2004. She became a budding activist, volunteering for a marriage-equality campaign and attempting to found a gay-straight alliance student group at her school. “I got called in and talked to: ‘That’s not appropriate,'” she recalls.
Aside from that run-in, she flourished in her new environment. Academically, Dupuis – a self-described “real nerd” – was drawn to math and science. “There was a competitive thing, where the only other people who were into that stuff were boys, and I wanted to be better than them,” she says. “And I was.”
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