Sarah Mary Chadwick
Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby?
KILL ROCK STARS
Long before Patti Smith turned to Instagram for her daily musings, she’d create poems and write tributes to heroes such as cabaret doyenne Lotte Lenya, or sing the praises of soul’s high priestess Nina Simone by covering the smoked-ham jazz of “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” That’s who Sarah Mary Chadwick is: the poet Patti looking to Brecht’s next whiskey bar for something resembling tremulous theater. High praise, indeed—even if you don’t recognize it as such.
Nine albums deep into her still-young career, the Melbourne-based New Zealander of Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Pākehā descent is living, singing, and writing soberly after a long period of self-abuse. The voice isn’t cracked and broken Bukowski-style on her latest LP, Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby?, and she’s not obvious in giving away her endings or beginnings (oddly enough) in songs such as “The Show Musn’t Go On,” the record’s exquisite finale. But the deep crevices of profound dependence live within Chadwick’s every word and melody throughout the grayly comic LP.
Momentarily thinking back to Smith’s version of “Don’t Smoke in Bed,” with its lone piano background to a crinkled, slow-spoken intro and its eventual bassoon-like open vocal: Chadwick co-produced this album by placing mics onto a piano’s frame, running the playback of that recording through its sustain pedal held down by a sandbag, then recording that resonating naturalistic reverb. Chadwick’s confining yet open-ended experiment says a lot about the drinking-piano sound of Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby? and how she’d manipulate each tortured poem and laughable lyric within that trembling test-pattern tone.
The shaky snaky-ness of her throaty, Aussie-accented vocals (see lines like “Baby, I am better now” and “I don’t miss rock and roll”), when combined with the softly hammered melodies on songs such as “Not Cool Like NY / Not Cool Like LA,” “Soundtrack,” and “Fade Like Rain,” will tear your heart out.
