Sarah Mary Chadwick Announces Brand New Album Take Me Out To a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? due out April 4 on Kill Rock Stars
Born in New Zealand of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Pākehā descent and currently based in Naarm/Melbourne, producer, songwriter, vocalist and visual artist, Sarah Mary Chadwick has announced her ninth studio album Take Me To a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? due out April 4 on Kill Rock Stars. Today she shares the first preview track “Not Cool Like NY / Not Cool Like LA“. The dreamy, piano lead composition describes fragments of a far away mystifying childhood, colliding with the desperate and dissociative present in which the artist precariously exists. Chadwick performs her signature sucker-punch, an elegant kill switch from poetry to blunt reportage, intrinsically linked and blood related to the almost chintzy, dark drama of her piano.
Listen / Share: “Not Cool Like NY / Not Cool Like LA”
Each of Chadwick’s records marks a moment in time. This new collection signals the beginnings of control and self-renovation. Words written unconsciously that are always five steps ahead of her own actual awareness. After a lifetime of alcohol use disorder, she got sober immediately after recording this record. “I can hear it,” says Chadwick. “The desolate desire for change, the goodbyes, the fading romance, the memories. And the pain- that’s different but that never leaves, it’s part of me.”
Chadwick knows what the right song — or the wrong song — can do to a room. And Take Me Out To a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? marks a deliberate pivot. This new devastating record seems to emanate from a dive bar jukebox. Something that can survive, fulfill its purpose, comfort or delight while fearlessly beckoning listeners into her sunken universe. Intended to be less demanding for the listener, “something that you can dip in and out of, phrases that tilt the room for a moment but allow space for the listener to inhabit or leave”, with an abject awareness that “last call” is approaching.
This new collection pivots like a broken lullaby around stop-you-in-your-tracks lyrics and a low lit bar. Glasses tinkling, smoky scattered laughter and the banal becoming beautiful as the pianist creates the mood, anonymous and as romantic as a streetlight under the gentle ebbs and flows of intimate chatter. Chadwick sees Take Me Out To a Bar / What Am I,Gatsby? as the elegant-aspiring sibling of ‘the tantrum record’ Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby, 2021.
Take Me Out To a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? was co-produced by Chadwick and Chris Townend at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art’s Frying Pan Studios. To create the dreamy and cinematic feel of the record, Townend screwed contact mics to the piano’s body, played the entire album back through it with the sustain pedal held down by a sandbag, and recorded that resonating, a natural reverb — close, claustral, — that cradles each song the way a music box shelters its melody. “These days the most punk thing you can do is be resourceful,” Chadwick shrugs, “Making choices is free.”
