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When it was time to reconvene Speedy Ortiz to record its first album since 2018’s “Twerp Verse,” the band headed about as far, geographically and temperamentally, as it could from its Massachusetts origins: Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, Calif. Perhaps best known as a base of operations for rockers Queens of the Stone Age and frontman Josh Homme’s psychedelic Desert Sessions recordings, Rancho is operated by David Catching, who calls the studio home and pitches in as, among other things, chef for visiting acts.
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“He’s cooking us risotto. He’s like, ‘Oh, this is my friend’s recipe,’ and I’m like, ‘Is your friend Anthony Bourdain?’” recalls Speedy Ortiz mastermind Sadie Dupuis. “And yes, it was.”
As Rancho’s resident Renaissance man, Catching — a musician who served as an “invisible member” of Speedy Ortiz during the recording of what would become “Rabbit Rabbit” and played lap steel on the record — has a way of turning a wide world into a small one, distilling the desert’s majesty into something the band was able to tap into during its sessions there.
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“He’s just one of the loveliest people any of us has ever met,” says Dupuis. “He’s an inspiring person in the way he maintains his friendships and the way he has continued to foster his own curiosity about art of all kinds.”
Catching’s spirit infuses Rancho and informed the “Rabbit Rabbit” sessions. While somewhat bare-bones — drummer Joey Doubek recalls a snare that was “kind of falling apart” and other drums “jerry-rigged to stay in place” — the studio also has equipment that has been used by musical icons: a guitar that PJ Harvey sang through the pickups, or a microphone Dave Grohl used after Nirvana broke up. Speedy Ortiz’s members eagerly used and layered that gear, perhaps hoping to rub off some of the magic dust left behind by some of their heroes.
“We’re playing one guitar part that’s going to be used for one verse of one song, and we set up three different amplifiers, and each amp has two different microphones on it,” Dupuis explains. “It created a riddle in [postproduction] of how exactly to blend all these sources, but because David is this encyclopedic treasure of everybody who’s come through there, … we did wind up capturing a lot of different kinds of sounds.”
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Those sounds help make “Rabbit Rabbit” the band’s most musically adventurous album yet, as the four-piece finds new dimensions in guitar-driven indie rock alongside the distortion and dissonance it usually conjures around Dupuis’s earworm melodies and evocative, tongue-twister lyricism (“Born-to-scab solipsists are boogying for big commission”). For Dupuis, who also records under the moniker Sad13 and has released two books of poetry, the album also features forays into new, personal territory and considers the relationships among art, audience and commerce.
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On “Ballad of Y & S,” Dupuis writes from the perspective of an artist who excavates meaning and feelings, reworking one lyric three ways: “You can take it from me” becomes “You can take them from me” and then “Can you take them from me?”
“That song is raising the strangeness of producing confessional or diaristic or memoirist art in an era in which the backstories are hyper-scrutinized selling points,” Dupuis explains. “It’s great for the PR if you have a horrible thing you’re disclosing. That is a strange state to be making any kind of publicly available art for,” she says, adding with a laugh, “And, yeah, I’m continuing to do it.”
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In interviews, Dupuis is wary of “becoming [her] own Wikipedia page,” and would rather discuss the artistic output: The answers are there, in the work itself. But she does provide some context for the album. “There are a few songs on this record where I’m juxtaposing the strangenesses of contemporary situations as someone who makes art under Big Tech, but I don’t have a neat solution,” she says. “I have tried hard not to let the fact that the things I work on are publicly known change my process and dedication to making things that make me feel glad about what I’ve worked on.”
In that way, Dupuis is grappling with being a singer-songwriter in an era when the backstory is the story. Take the recent breathless fascination around Taylor Swift’s rumored relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce, a fan and media frenzy that seems to be waiting for the next album cycle where the pop star will churn her love story into chart-topping hits. On this last point, Speedy Ortiz was ahead of the curve: The first song it released as a full band — titled simply “Taylor Swift” — satirized media treatment of the pop star, way back in 2012.
Rather than backstories, “I’d rather talk about five microphones the whole time,” Dupuis says.
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With that in mind, I inquired about liner notes that credit drummer Doubek with playing not just drums, shaker, tambourine and synthesizer, but also shot glass and BB gun. Dupuis, inspired by groundbreaking producer Sylvia Massy, is always looking for ways to use non-instruments musically; on her last Sad13 album, she used a microwave as a synth. She is confident that the sounds of the shot glass and a BB gun are on “Rabbit Rabbit,” but Doubek is less sure, due to a central feature at Rancho de la Luna.
“I’ll be honest,” he admits, “there was probably some mezcal in that shot glass, which is why I don’t remember.”
Oct. 18, doors open at 7:30 p.m. at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. $20.
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