by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Life’s been a bit hectic lately for Sadie Dupuis, AKA Sad13. As our conversation begins, the multi-hyphenate artist, perhaps best known as the frontperson of Speedy Ortiz, laments her lack of time. “I need, like, two extra days and things’ll be fine,” she says from her Philadelphia apartment.
Those days haven’t materialized. Amid another album roll-out, currently for Sad13’s new mixtape, 1331, Dupuis is hummingbird-busy. Before hopping on the call, she’d spent all night finishing the edit for her new music video, the deliciously apocalyptic “Locust Releaser,” which she also directed. Plus, she’s just finished producing an album for Philly post-punkers Grocer at Machines with Magnets, the venerable New England recording studio helmed by Seth Manchester.
Even when life feels a bit on tilt, Dupuis is an affable interview subject, personable and blessed with razor-sharp insight. Our wide-ranging discussion spans grim reapers at protests, the GOATs of the short song format, and the physical and mental hurdles that ultimately led to Dupuis cutting loose and having some fun. Always hopeful, never optimistic, modern life under fascio-capitalism may be a champagne toast on the Titanic. But we gotta live, right?
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. Be advised: the conversation includes mentions of childhood abuse and overdose.
Post-Trash: Hi, Sadie. Nice to meet you. How does the day find you?
Sadie Dupuis: It’s been a little bit of hell. But it’s okay.
PT: Are we talking about the larger situation we’re all in, or something specific to you?
SD: A little bit of both. How are you?
PT: I’m… okay. I had to put my dog to sleep last week and I’m a bit of a wreck. It’s weird, because you lose someone—a friend, a pet—and life just… keeps going.
SD: And you’re like, “Where are they?”
PT: Totally. So, death has been on my mind. Then I researched a little bit about your new mixtape, and it seems to have been on your mind, too. I read that 1331 was partly inspired by a book of people at protests dressed up as the grim reaper. I didn’t know that was a thing?
SD: Yeah! The book is really cool. It was a gift from my partner and it has great photos from newspaper archives of people dressing as grim reapers at protests. The cover is this image of a grim reaper, and then, a line of cops behind. I just felt very, very compelled by that image. It felt fitting with what I was working on lyrically and inspired the painting on 1331’s cover.
PT: What protest would you wear a grim reaper costume to?
SD: I think it works for any protest—probably not one this month when it's 103 degrees out. But the thing that I thought was really interesting in the book is that [the grim reaper costume] is a message that’s so applicable across a series of different protests and causes. A protest could be about police brutality, it could be about climate injustice—and dressing as a grim reaper at any of those is a reminder not only of mortality, but of the seriousness of the issue, and of the murderousness of the folks who are often the subject of the protest.
PT: The press release says that the duality of mortality was an inspiration. You mention the “deathly dissonance in journalistic doublespeak, politeness politics, and Big Tech’s censorship.” Can you say more about that duality?
SD: It’s my birthday tomorrow, so, in a way, mortality in a positive light is a reminder that our time is short and to make good use of it. It’s a reminder that we are not algorithms or computers. We're humans who are fallible, and sometimes that makes for beautiful and cool things. And then the duality of it is that our time could be longer and less agonizing if some powers-that-be cared about anyone’s mortality other than their own.
PT: Happy early birthday! I’m not going to ask you how old you are.
SD: Why not? I’ll be 38.
PT: Congrats! Sorry, I was taught that it was impolite to ask someone their age, and yet, I know the album title—1331—is a reference to age. What does it mean?
SD: Thirteen is in my handle-turned-performance name. It became part of my handle because Sad13’s a numeronym for Sadie. But I always thought it was kind of funny that “sad thirteen” feels like an apt description of the songwriter's emotion. Teenage melancholy and overblown emotions are exactly what you want to inhabit when you're trying to write a song.
The reference to thirty-one is the age a friend of mine was when he passed away. I was thinking about how those two ages, 13 and 31, warped-mirror one another. The teenage emotions of “everything that's happening right now is so difficult and hard,” versus entering adulthood when the [reality of] things are difficult and hard—losing friends, losing family, trying to reconcile your world as it's changing. The mixtape is bookended by those perspectives, the teenage perspective, then entering adulthood, where real shit is happening, and you still have to keep living after it.
PT: Was the person you lost at thirty-one the first time death touched you personally?
SD: Oh my god, no. I feel like I have had so many friends die, starting from when I was a teenager. I mean, the last Sad13 record [2020’s Haunted Painting] was specifically [made] because, like, six friends died of overdose the year I wrote it. I've been losing friends most of my life, but it doesn't make it—as you know, I'm sure—any easier.
PT: What have you learned about grief from losing so many people dear to you?
SD: Honestly, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about OCD, which I've had since I was a child. Losing friends triggers a research part of my brain where I obsess about every memory I have of that person and every interaction we've had. I’ve found that, for me, songwriting is a helpful and more productive outlet for grieving than some of my bad OCD habits.
Something that I was specifically thinking about in this record is that songwriters tend to use the adage “songwriting is their therapy,” but those are not synonymous practices to me. Creating art about something [traumatic] is maybe one layer of processing, but it's not the only way to work through it or even necessarily the most helpful way. There are different layers of grieving that happen at different times. Some of this [mixtape] was inspired by processing events that I thought I'd grieved ten years ago, either through writing or therapy. But grief comes in waves, and you continue to figure out how to do it as time goes on. Every new loss changes how you approach it and how you think about your relationships, present and past.
PT: I know you’ve spoken out about childhood abuse in the past—
SD: You’re really hitting me with the tough questions a day before my birthday!
PT: (laughs) That’s the hard-hitting journalism our readers have come to expect. The point I’m awkwardly trying to get to is that I have some of those same issues in my past, and I’ve realized that many of my bad habits—alcohol abuse, obsessive tendencies—are products of the grief that comes from experiencing physical or sexual abuse as a kid. I’ve found that listening to albums like [Speedy Ortiz’s 2023 album] Rabbit Rabbit and 1331—where grief seems to be dealt with head-on—has made me feel less alone.
SD: I found when I was doing [press for Rabbit Rabbit], it was a lot of conversations like these, where I'm really sad to hear that you've experienced this, but glad to have the opportunity to have honest points of connection.
PT: Sadly, this stuff is not as rare as people think.
SD: No, it’s not. It’s a common experience that is uncommonly discussed because of the stigmatization survivors are unfortunately made to feel. Between this, and writing about harm reduction, I guess a lot of what I write about has stigmatization around it.
PT: And I’m thankful that you do that. For lack of a better word, it makes people feel ‘seen’ to experience art that confronts such stigmatized topics. It’s sort of why people like art, is it not?
SD: Yeah, definitely. Though I think there's more of a focus now than in the past on the specific backstories behind songwriting and songwriters. There's plenty of records that I connected to when I was younger that I could say, emotionally, “This feels true to what I was experiencing,” but I didn’t have the play-by-play biography of the songwriter and every person they knew. I don’t know how helpful some of that overly-biographical lens is for the interpretation and appreciation of art.
PT: Do you think something is lost when you know everything about an artist, or when the meaning of a song is explained to you?
SD: I think it's nice that some of the information exists out there. I think the in-your-face-ness of the algorithm, and the you-promote-a-song-but-the-thing-that-actually-will-sell-it-is-the-front-facing-camera-video, which I can't stand to do, I'm a little more irked by. But I kind of have to feel ambivalent to that stuff, or I'll just spend all my time being a hater, which I'm already prone to, right?
I certainly have gained a lot when artists post details about process. [Experimental artist] underscores had a file sharing link a few years ago where she was like, “Here are all my stems.” I found it really helpful to hear, for example, what her snare drum sounds like. I like having an excess of information as a tool of democratizing the process of making and recording songs. I think in those cases the TMI is kind of cool and interesting and allows people to build upon and collaborate and make things that wouldn't have been possible without pulling the curtain back.
PT: Switching gears a little, let’s talk about the album’s make-up, which is comprised of thirteen songs that all clock in around a minute long. Who’s in the short song hall of fame for you?
SD: This album is almost a direct homage to Philadelphia's Tierra Whack, whose Whack World was a mixtape that I continue to play to death. Earl Sweatshirt as well, who's inspired by Tierra Whack, as he’s said. Guided by Voices are favorites. Rob Crow is one I think of very often, both with his bands and with his solo music. He’s got a lot of songs that are fifty seconds to a minute-twenty.
And then, I have done a weird amount of covers of TV show theme songs, where I'll do them in the forty-second theme edit. I did a cover of “We Used to Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols, in the Veronica Mars edit. I like that form. I like the idea of packing in all of the ideas into this very short format. It's a fun way to explore songs.
As a songwriting experiment, it was a motivating way for me to do something that I like, while I was really going through it in intensive therapy. I needed something else to focus on and make me happy. It felt nice to not write songs about me and instead, write songs about the hellish stuff that is universal to all of us.
PT: So, would you call making this mixtape a fun experience?
SD: I mean, it was a pain in the ass because of my shattered elbow. [Editor’s note: In 2024, Dupuis was in a serious cycling accident. The injury required two surgeries.] It took so long to record it, that was a minor pain in the ass, but it was still really fun. There are more kinds of sounds and layers [on the mixtape] than there would have been if I'd done it in my normal quick fashion.
PT: While you were recovering from surgery, how did you stay creative when you physically couldn't play guitar or record?
SD: I did not. I had luckily just written all this material, and I knew that, when I got back to playing and computer use, this [mixtape] would be the thing I would work on. But it was basically a full-time job just to try to get this elbow to work.
I was not creative, and that was fine. I went to shows a lot, and that's part of what was really inspiring on this record. I feel like I was at more shows than I had been in years, certainly since pre-COVID. I got to take a lot of inspiration from seeing how people presented their music live, just noticing things about playing technique I hadn't thought about before because I wasn't disabled in this particular way.
PT: In addition to your creative work, you’ve mentioned a ton of your freelance work comes from working on a keyboard, so I’m sure you’ve had to confront the specter of AI. I’d love your thoughts on it.
SD: I don't especially like that my work has been used to train it without my consent. I don't have an interest in using AI for creative work, and I don't think I've seen anything good or redeeming that has been made from it.
I read a few books prior to the big AI scare boom—and I'm not using ‘scare boom’ frivolously, like, it is scary—like Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble and Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. This is pre- and early COVID, when people who were talking about AI and algorithms were more like, “Hey, all this image-training produces weird racist stuff, and that comes down to hand-washing sensors not recognizing darker skin tones initially. It comes down to these Meta glasses that are all being trained by people who are watching naked users”—again, without their awareness or consent. There's so much weird dystopian stuff that comes as a result of it, so it's been fuck AI from the onset.
Obviously, there's utilities for certain kinds of machine learning, and we use them often in all kinds of processes. When you quantize a shaker, I think that is technically something that now could be classified as AI. But any of the generative stuff that's trained on people's work without their consent, I don't really see any use case for it. The environmental implications are horrifying.
PT: There’s a song on the mixtape called “Hopeful but Not Optimistic.” Does that describe how you’re approaching life right now?
SD: I’m hoping for the best, but there's not many opportunities for the best to occur these days. The structures are not put in place for most of us to get what we need. I think humans are good, and I think power is bad. So, I think the intersections of humanity and power produce a lot of badness.
1331 is out now via Exploding In Sound Records.