Sad13, aka Sadie Dupuis, aka the singer and guitarist from Boston’s favorite indie rock band Speedy Ortiz says she makes music because “she needs to hear the message of the songs.” But we—and I mean EVERYONE—also need to hear the messages on Dupuis’ solo project, Slugger. Dupuis sings about consent and female friendship, among other important topics, in a fun and real way (what?! sex can be mutually desired and girls don’t all hate each other?!). Yes, it’s true, and Dupuis provides narratives that don’t make you cringe eternally in songs she recorded and co-produced and learned a new software for as a “fun challenge” during her month off touring with Speedy.

Slugger comes out November 11, but Dupuis is already back at work with her bandmates on their third album. Catch Sad13 on day two (11/5) of Hassle Fest and hope that Dupuis is sporting her glam crystal unibrow from the video for her latest single “<2.” In the meantime, read our conversation about “Genie in a Bottle,” avoiding gendered pronouns in songwriting, and our mutual Grimes obsession.

SD: Wow I just found this book on the street that’s called where to eat pizza. It has over 1,700 pizza joints.

KO: That’s amazing. Pizza is good. So you’re going on tour soon, right? How are you feeling about that?

SD: I’m very nervous. I’m kind of freaking out a little bit. It’s going to be what it’s going to be. And I hope that it’s good. And I hope that its good by the time we get to Boston.

KO: Do you get stage fright still?

SD: I mean it’s just a different thing for me. I don’t in Speedy ever, cause I’ve been performing guitar live since I was 15. And I consider myself a multi-instrumentalist, but most of the other instruments that I play, I only ever play to record them. And I’ve never had to play them live, and keyboards for sure is one of those. I think that I did a piano recital when I was like 10 years old but I haven’t really played it in public. I’ve played mostly guitar bass and drums live since then. I was able to do it on record, but I didn’t have to sing while I was doing it. So it’s been a big learning curve for me. It’s exciting to learn something new, and in that sense I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m also really nervous because for me playing a show for the past 15 years has always been playing guitar.

KO: It’s awesome that you recorded and co-produced Slugger. Is it important for you to record your own music?

SD: It just kind of happened that way. I always really enjoy making demos and recording at home, and I still enjoy that, I just hadn’t released any music like that in a while. I think the last time I released a thing I recorded was like the early Speedy Ortiz demos. So when I was making this record I was intending them to just be demos, but they kind of came out much better than I was expecting. So I just kept them. So I recorded all of the instrumental parts and I redid the vocals at a proper studio and I redid the drums there.

So yeah, it was exciting for me to do that, especially because I’ve been so inspired by a lot of women who self-produce and have been vocal about getting recognition as producers. I mean when I was in college I was very interested in recording, I first went to MIT and I did music and math as a double major, and I was taking recording classes and I was really interested in it. And I sort of lost interest, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten into different professions. But you so rarely see women working in studios that I sort of regret not pursuing that just to bring more diversity to the world of engineering. I don’t think like I did a super technical or proficient job recording this record, but I feel like it was important to make clear that I did do it so that other people don’t feel like they should be intimated to try and do home recording.

KO: I really like Grimes too and she—

SD: Yeah she’s a big influence, for sure.

KO: Yeah, and people are always like—“oh let me produce this record for you and, “she’s like, um no, I know how to do this and I enjoy doing this, let me do my work.”

SD: Right, although on the other side of things, if Grimes ever wanted to produce something I worked on, I would leap at the chance in like a microsecond.

KO: That would be amazing, please make that happen.

SD: I’m very happy to let other people—I wouldn’t say like produce me, but co-produce. Mostly because a lot of the stuff I’d do I learn just by doing, I don’t have an expensive technical background. So I would love to work with someone who has more technical know how than I do, and in this case I had a mix engineer work on it who was really great and we did it together. But like yeah, it would be great if the people with the most technical know-how, if people could recognize that those are women too.

KO: The songs you’ve put out for Slugger thus far sound a bit poppier than Speedy. What inspired the sounds on Slugger?

SD: Like I said, guitar is my primary instrument and I think that for that reason its like—I think a lot of times genre is more defined by instrumentation than songwriting, especially as we enter a world in which I think people are more educated about music than they have been in the past. Like, it’s a stupid thing to say but thanks to the Internet, people who might otherwise have only learned about certain genres of music from hearing the radio now have like this whole world of things they’re culling from. So I think my songwriting is kind of what it is. I love pop music and I always have, but I think the song structures are pretty similar in Sad13 to Speedy Ortiz. It’s just that I play synth on most of it and use drum machines because I was doing it myself. So if there’s a pop aesthetic, I think that aesthetic exists in Speedy too, and because it’s a guitar band, people don’t necessarily assign a pop label to it.

KO: You studied poetry at UMass Amherst. How do you approach writing lyrics versus writing poetry?

SD: Well, when I write songs I write all the music first generally. In a way, I guess the lyrics are similar to writing a poem except I have the constraint of knowing how much space I have to fit in a certain amount of words. Like generally when I write lyrics, I already know what the vocal melody is going to be. I kind of write as I’m demoing, and I usually have a melody in mind and a chord progression that kind of goes with that and I usually layer things on. And I might even have one keyboard part that’s playing what a vocal melody would be, just to make sure everything fits in.

It’s really only after all that’s done that I’ll put in the actual lyrics or write them, so I already know how much space I have to fit things in. I guess its like doing a crossword puzzle versus writing a bunch of words down. I might be trying to say the same things, but with songs I know how much space I have.

KO: So do you think those limitations make songwriting harder or push you to be more creative?

SD: It’s just different. I wouldn’t say one is harder than the other. I do find that for me, writing music has always been very automatic. So sometimes, if I come up with a song, maybe some words will just come to me. So I think of the melody and I just look down and like 10 minutes later there’s a song written. Whereas I’m not as often surprised by where the poems come from. With the songs its like this really complicated song with like a million sections and counter melodies appears.

KO: How do you think you’ve grown as an artist since your first EPs with Speedy?

SD: It’s funny to see how people interpret these things because I feel like a lot of people are like this is your first album outside of speedy Ortiz. But the reality is, Speedy was like, my third or fourth band. I’ve been putting out music since I was 14, all of my bandmates too. This is the first band I’ve been in that people know about, so it doesn’t seem weird to me to have a side project. I home record, because Speedy Ortiz started as a side project from home recording, when I was in a band called Quilty so—this is for Hasslefest right? The guy who drummed on the Sad13 stuff is in Ava Luna and used to be my band mate in Quilty, which was my first serious band before Speedy.

So its not like this is the first time I’ve put out a solo album, it‘s just the first one where anyone knew who I was already, so it’s not like I feel like oh I’ve gotta make this change from Speedy Ortiz. Mike—our drummer in speedy—is making—he’s got like a side project record coming out this year as well. I think we all just really like playing a lot of music and we knew that speedy needed to take a little break from the road so we used the time to work on other projects.

KO: Oh god, it’s so annoying that I asked that. I’m just like every other jerk who is like “oh yeah, you’re the person from Speedy Ortiz” even though you’ve been playing music forever.

SD: It’s not annoying at all, it’s just that I’ve read interviews—like, PJ Harvey talks about when she made her debut album, she felt like all of her feelings in the entire world up to that point in her life had to go into that debut album. And then when she made her second record, she was like ‘I don’t have my entire life to cull from anymore.’ And that narrative is so romantic and cool.

When we made the second Speedy record people were like ‘oh well you already made your first record.’ And its like ‘well, its not really my first record, its like the sixth time I’ve made one, you know? It’s just the first one that people know. So I think we’ve all been playing music so long we just keep working on things.

KO: You did go into it with a goal to make something that was an alternative to a lot of music, though, right? Something that celebrates female friendship and consent as opposed to a lot of the themes of sexual domination and petty jealousy between women we’re exposed to all the time.

SD: I mean I wouldn’t say it’s an alternative only because it’s not a mainstream pop record, it’s not produced that way, and I wrote the songs, and they’re kind of weird. But for me as a big fan of pop music and really just–I feel like I keep up with a lot of mainstream media, I watch a lot of really garbage TV shows, I’m pretty pop-culturally invested. And there are certain things that I see, like the political discourse in my friends’ zines and on their Twitters that just never even enter into mainstream portrayals of sexuality or women or relationships. So I felt like this was a record where I could kind of explore some of those themes, like songs where I was like ‘I’ve never heard a song about this but it’s important to me, so maybe I should make one.’

KO: You say that songs like “Genie in a Bottle” are reproducing this harmful message about sex, which I totally feel. But also I think it’s hard sometimes because it sort of understandable that people write songs about how sex is messy sometimes, how we have contradictory feelings, because it really isn’t always so black and white.

SD: Yeah I think like a lot of people have those kinds of complicated feelings and I think that’s often the reality, but I just think that you need a variety of representations about sex and like I always only see the conflicted thing, or like—I’ve never seen consent enter that rhetoric. I do think there’s room for all kinds of stories, but for some reason one that’s positive—talking about consent is like an important and cool and fun thing—has been excluded. I mean, there’s plenty of songs that are about what happens when consent is violated, but I don’t typically see it explored in pop culture in a way that’s like ‘hey this is not only an essential thing but can be a really exciting and positive thing for a relationship.’

KO: How did you first start developing a feminist consciousness? I don’t want to make it seem like, you didn’t have one and then did, but I know that I had these feelings about the unfair state of the world but didn’t know how to express them until I had a cool teacher in high school.

SD: I mean certainly I’ve been very privileged in that I was able to go to college and take classes that were political, and I was lucky that I had a great professor early on and like, got to read bell hooks. But I don’t know that its something that I felt like explored explicitly in art as well the last two years, maybe just because I’m getting older and I have more of a concept of the gravity of these imbalanced systems in the world and how negatively impactful they can be to me and the people I care about, and people I don’t know. I’m less interested in writing songs that solely pertain to me and are more concerned with a sense of hoping for justice and healing for more people besides just me. I feel like your empathy muscles just get better and better the older you get.

KO: Is making music also therapeutic for you?

SD: I think that’s always the first reason I turn to music. I think I first started seeing a therapist or realizing I had issues when depression and anxiety right when I was 13 or 14 and that’s also when I stated playing guitar and writing songs and record music. And I think every kid who deals with depression finds some kind of outlet. Or hopefully they do, because that can be the real transformative thing in your life that determines whether you’re able or not to cope with all the stress and anxiety and sadness, and for me that was always music.

So I think I started writing just to get a handle on trying to understand those feelings which were so new to me. And so growing up, I’ve always used music—and not just writing songs, but playing with other people or playing shows as an outlet or a coping mechanism. And I still very much feel that way about it, but as I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve realized that all the things that make me upset aren’t just about me, they pertain more to a world that seems increasingly out of control and is just persistently unfair to a lot the people who live in it. So the songs are a way of personally venting, but the things that are personal to me are often quite practically prevalent.

KO: On the Genius lyrics for “Fun” from Major Arcana, there’s an annotation on the lyrics “getting my dick sucked on the regular” about how you write in a gender neutral voice. I thought it was interesting to characterize it that way instead of gender subversion. Can you expand on that?

SD: I think I just mostly avoid using pronouns in songs altogether, partially from having been a fan of music as a kid. A lot of the rock bands I knew about because I was not cool were mainstream rock bands and all the members were men, and if they were writing about romantic strife, it was always about women and she was always the bad person. And at some point as I got older, I was like ‘I feel really alienated from all this music that was really exciting to me as a kid and it’s partially because I’m the bad person in this song!’

I never want someone to feel that they’re shut out from a story because they don’t relate to the genders presented because I just don’t think that someone’s gender is the most important identifying feature. So often songs are so short that you don’t get many narrative details in and if you get like ‘she did this to me,’ that’s already like, that’s like the only defining feature of the characters, so [most often] I just try to avoid it altogether.

KO: Where did the concept for the “>2” video come from?

KO: I just really like makeup tutorials and wanted to make some. I think part of the song is about having supposedly conflicting identities and not letting other people’s perceptions of how you should present yourself impact your decisions and just be who and what you want to be. So I like this video because I like the idea of the one character, me, having all these different looks but still being the same person and singing about the same message. But honestly we just wanted to try out a lot of those make up looks *laughs*

KO: Which would you recommend for a night out on the town?

I really like the crystal unibrow, honestly. I felt really really cool with that one on and I was like, I would wear this out.

KO: Please do. Every show you could wear a different one.

SD: It’s a lot of effort though. But it would be cool. A lot of the stuff I learned in that video I’ve just been doing in my everyday makeup now. I never really wore fake eyelashes. but now I’m really into them. I would always ask people to do them for me, but it’s like anything else, like any other skill. There’s a learning curve.