Sad songs, psych and going solo
The former lead singer of Batrider is a cult figure in Australia and beyond, writes
It’s a blustery day at a park in inner-city Melbourne, and Sarah Mary Chadwick is playing ‘‘Fetch’’. She throws the ball. Her dog ignores it. She goes and gets it. She throws it again. Rinse and repeat.
‘‘A guy just walked past before you called and said, ‘You know it’s your dog that’s supposed to get the ball, right’?,’’ she tells me over a soundtrack of mad barking. ‘‘My dog always likes to humiliate me in front of all the people with better behaved dogs. People must think I’m a pretty useless human.’’
Perhaps, but we know better. Former Wellington artist/ musician Sarah Mary Chadwick is something of a cult figure in her adopted homeland over the ditch.
‘‘Thank f… for passionately malcontent artists like Sarah Chadwick,’’ wrote Aussie’s influential Mess+Noise music site. ‘‘Sarah Mary Chadwick’s new album is a beautiful and insightful collection of songs,’’ enthused visiting American punk legend, Henry Rollins.
And you have to love this endorsement from UK tastemakers, Norman Records: ‘‘If everyone that buys Florence and the Machine records went out and bought her record instead, the world would be a better but more miserable place.’’
Due out early next month, Chadwick’s fourth album Sugar Still Melts In The Rain is her first since signing to Sinderlyn, a spinoff from heavyweight New York indie label Captured Tracks, whose founder Mike Sniper is a fan.
Chadwick’s solo albums are sparse, sorrowful, oddly gorgeous affairs. Her scrupulously direct songs can make you feel pretty weird, to be fair. They position the listener as some sort of emotional voyeur, lurking outside the bedsit door as the singer pours out her most intimate personal revelations at the piano inside.
But when I saw her play a decade or so ago, Chadwick’s sound was very different. Back then, she yowled and yelped and hollered out her lyrics over swampy punk-blues backing tracks as sharp as flying shrapnel.
Back then, she was lead singer with fearsome Wellington band Batrider. They lasted 10 years, moving from Welly to Sydney to London to Adelaide, picking up fans along the way. But then it was time to do something else, and that something else was this: write and record her sad solo songs in a heroically rural King Country accent, and make wildly pornographic artwork on the side.
‘‘I grew up in Taumarunui on the family farm,’’ she tells me. ‘‘I sing in my own natural voice now, but that took time. If I listened to recordings of my high school band, I was probably singing with a quite intense fake American accent. But it’s weird to sing about such personal stuff in a voice that’s not your own, right?’’
When she was that kid in the countryside, Chadwick learned classical piano for 10 years. ‘‘I started on a s...ty little Casio keyboard, but when I was 9, my great-uncle passed away, and his beautiful grand piano came to me. I was always a performer, even as a kid. If I knew that one of the neighbouring farmers was in a paddock near the house, I’d open up the door to make sure they could hear me from their tractor.’’
Chadwick was expelled as a boarder at Hamilton Girls for being ‘‘too loud and disruptive’’. She started hanging out with the day girls, going to see bands and being infected with the wanton spirit of rock’n’roll.
‘‘I formed Batrider in Wellington around 2002 with Julia McFarlane, who’s now in a great Melbourne band called Twerps. [The Spinoff/RNZ cartoonist] Toby Morris was our bass player for a while. We went through a few bass players, actually.’’
I once saw Batrider play at some sort of ‘‘four bands for five bucks’’ shindig in Wellington. They made a fearsome racket, the rhythm section pounding like a migraine, the guitars all dirty and dark and unhygienic.
Right up front, thrashing her guitar, stood Chadwick, wailing out her vocals like a banshee with a bruised heart. ‘‘Batrider was together for about 10 years,’’ she tells me. ‘‘We started when we were about 20, and I’m 35 now.’’ It was hard to get beyond ‘‘cult band’’ status, what with all the relocations, the line-up changes, the stylistic shifts.
‘‘We always made things hard for ourselves. It was that usual stupid early-20s nonsense. We made four albums together and toured Europe three times, but we would self-sabotage wherever possible.
‘‘If someone said, ‘hey, this person could help you out’, we would be rude to that person when were drunk at some party. If someone told us our songs were too slow, we’d play them slower. If people complained a song was too loud, we’d play it louder.’’
At one point, Chadwick got sick of going out with her guitarist and started going out with her drummer instead.
Sounds like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, right? But those cocaine-addled soft-rocking bed-hoppers kept things pretty hetero, and Chadwick did not. ‘‘Me and Sam the bass player went out for most of my 20s, and then when we split up, I decided to do my own thing musically, by going solo. But around that time, I started going out with my current girlfriend, Stephanie Crase, who was our drummer. It was all pretty complicated.
‘‘In fact, it was probably the s...tiest time of my life. But now we all love each other again! Me and Steph hang out with Sam and his new wife Zoe, and we’re all like family now. It was all very stressful at first, but I suppose even the tough times gave me a few painful things to write songs about.’’
Indeed, Chadwick sings the kind of raw, mournful ballads that make your own life seem pretty peachy. Batrider always had a dark streak, but the bleakness was offset by the energy that comes from a raucous guitar band in full flight.
The solo stuff, though, is hushed, hypnotic and subtle, with strong melodic hooks. ‘‘The solo stuff is quieter, for sure. Sugar Still Melts In The Rain is my fourth solo album, and a lot of the new songs are recorded on an acoustic piano that was in the studio, with just a few drums and bass added.’’ The sparser instrumentation suits her voice, she says.
‘‘When I sing, it’s a bit croaky and worn, like my speaking voice. I’m not the world’s greatest singer, or piano player, either, but I write good lyrics, and it’s great that people can hear the words now. I don’t have to fight against the band to be heard.’’
She writes songs about grief and longing, family dysfunction, anxiety, the rougher regions of love. And if those lyrics are a little tragic, well… that’s life.
‘‘Part of my motivation for doing creative stuff is to process things that happen to me. I’ve done psychoanalysis for the past four years, and my analyst told me it was important to move from the real into the symbolic.
‘‘You’re trying to articulate with words or music or drawings or paint these things that you’d otherwise perhaps find unsayable. You’re giving more of a concrete shape to your thoughts and feelings, rather than letting them stay esoteric and foggy, and that helps you process these things.’’
Sometimes song ideas come to her during her day job, as a chef. Other times, she writes prolifically at home then whittles and shapes the results.
‘‘It’s compulsive, I guess. I write a song every couple of days. It’s similar to psychoanalysis, in that you let loose a flow of language and then you figure it out afterwards.’’
Chadwick is inspired by ‘‘old weird New Zealand indie guys’’, in particular Chris Knox, Alistair Galbraith and Peter Jefferies.
‘‘I don’t sound like those people, but I respect that they’re very individualistic, and they’ve all spent years and years doing it for love, rather than for cash. You have to be tough to stay in this game. I’ve been making music for 15 years, and every time I make a record, I go at least five grand into debt, then by the time I pay it off, I’m making the next record!’’
Besides music and cooking, she also makes a sporadic trickle of cash as an artist.
‘‘I’ve always designed band posters, and also had painting and sculpture exhibitions in Melbourne and Adelaide. And someone’s about to compile some of my older recordings, so I’m doing painting shows alongside that in London and Manchester.’’
These paintings generally feature loose-lined, witty, sometimes garish pen and ink reinterpretations of key scenes from hardcore porn flicks.
‘‘When I’m about to have an exhibition, I’ll spend a month or so drawing every day, with my laptop open and porn playing.’’
Why porn? Because Chadwick is fascinated by the strange power dynamics that play out between the genders.
‘‘It started out because I was too shy to go to life-drawing classes, and watching porn was a good way to draw naked people in interesting positions and really loaded and symbolic scenarios.
‘‘Also, I like the way porn is really complicated. It’s gross, but hot. It’s funny, but sad. And you can project whatever you want onto it.
‘‘But yeah, I guess using porn as the subject matter for my art will seem a bit strange to some people. I remember one guy I know messaging me after he’d been to an exhibition of mine.
‘‘He said, ‘What does it say about me that I recognise some of the women in your artworks?’ I wrote back saying, ‘It says that you spend far too much time in a dark corner of the internet, watching pornography’.’’
‘‘It was that usual stupid early-20s nonsense. We made four albums together and toured Europe three times, but we would self-sabotage wherever possible.’’
Sarah Mary Chadwick
❚ Sugar Still Melts In The Rain by Sarah Mary Chadwick will be released on May 11 via Rice Is Nice in New Zealand and Australia and Sinderlyn Records in America.