Photo by Romain Lefèvre Roland

In the past year and a half, Massachusetts’ smart and searing rock outfit Speedy Ortiz has gotten quite familiar with the inside of D.C.’s smaller music venues. After impressing the crowd at Comet Ping Pong—wherein most of the audience heard the songs from 2013’s stand out album Major Arcana for the first (or maybe third) time—they gave new fans several chances to catch them. In fact, Speedy Ortiz has been on the road for most of the year, giving the rest of the country the opportunity to pump their fists along with compact songs that are somehow both dissonant and melodic.

Although they take obvious cues from bands like Helium, Polvo and Pavement, Speedy Ortiz seems less like a throwback act and more like a band with sharp lyrics that expanded on their predecessors’ good ideas. In advance of their Sunday night show at the Black Cat, we caught up with Speedy Ortiz guitarist/singer Sadie Dupuis. She spilled on the changes in her songwriting style, her love of crappy television, and the enjoyment that the band gets out of visiting strip clubs.

DCist: When did you move to Boston?

Sadie Dupuis: I guess August 1st. But I’m barely home. I haven’t even unpacked yet. It’s silly.

DCist: What prompted the move to Boston?

SD: The reason I moved to Northampton in the first place was because I was getting an MFA at UMass Amherst and I was teaching there. I finished all that stuff in December of last year. We were basically on tour for seven months straight after that and I was barely home and a lot of my close friends are in Boston. It just sort of seemed like when my lease was up that there wasn’t any real reason for me to live in Northampton anymore. If I had limited time at home, I’d rather be as close as possible to my friends so that I could maximize loafing time. That was really it, I wanted to hang out with my friends more. So far, it’s working great. I got to watch Sleepaway Camp last night with a bunch of my buddies so it’s been nice to be close to friends.

DCist: How much of the year do you think you’re spending on the road?

SD: We were on tour so far this year for eight months, I think. We had one month off and we’re about to go out again. We had September mostly off other than weekend tour dates, but we spent two weeks recording so I don’t know if it really counts as time off. So yeah, we really just had July off this year so far. So, we’re going to have down time at the end of the year for the second half of November and December. We’ll all pick up ice skating or something—learn some figure skating tricks.

DCist: You have a bunch of dates coming up with Ex Hex and have already played with them once in Chicago. Were Mary Timony’s bands in your rotation of what you listened to growing up?

SD: Oh yeah. I’m a huge fan of pretty much every band she’s been in. I love Helium and I love her solo stuff and I love Autoclave and I also know their bassist, Betsy. I met her playing at a house show in Charlottesville, Va. with my old band and her old band a bunch of years ago. So, I’m fans of every musician in that band and I’m really excited that I get to tour with them. They’re very cool people and kind of amazing to watch. Mary Timony—for everyone in my band, not just me—is an idol guitar player. I think both Devin and I grew up listening to her records and being like, “Whoa!” The ideas that she puts out on the guitar are so interesting.

DCist: I’ve noticed in the past couple of shows that I’ve seen this year that the Major Arcana songs have taken a back seat. Why is that?

SD: Well, part of why we haven’t been playing them that much is because we changed guitarists. We had a little bit of a switcheroo. The guitarist that played on Major Arcana—we stopped playing with him. So, Devin, who plays guitar with us now, kinda just picked the songs that he liked best to learn and up until a week ago we only knew half of Major Arcana with him. But he learned the whole album now, so maybe we’ll start playing more of those again. But I think it was just because we went on tour for so long after that album came out, we got really sick of playing those songs every night and there wasn’t enough distance to rearrange them or anything whereas some of the older songs, when we came back to them when we were touring off of Major Arcana and Real Hair, we were like, “Oh, let’s try playing it this way with this kind of feel.” It was just too close to that album to rearrange them, really. But now, I think we’re going to start playing them again and it’ll be a little bit different from the record and make them fun again for us, hopefully. But we also just recorded fourteen songs so we’ll probably be playing a bunch of new stuff, too.

DCist: Cool! Are there any songs that you’re particularly excited about?

SD: It’s kind of an interesting thing because for the previous releases, everything we recorded was super road-tested and we’d been playing them for months and months on tour. This one was all stuff I wrote in July that we hadn’t really played live at all. So I’m kind of excited to see how some of these translate. There’s one song that’s almost like a hip-hop song in terms of the instrumentation. I’m kind of curious how that will translate to our live setup, which is two guitars and drums and bass. But I’m curious to see how they translate live for an audience because a lot of them are a little more acutely arranged than previous songs and have a lot of sections and more going on.

DCist: Can you speak to the subject matter of your new songs? How does it differ from your previous work?

SD: It’s hard for me to listen to some of the older stuff because it seems so personal and it seems kinda pathetic to me. A lot of the songs are motivated by feelings of being hurt and almost wanting to exact revenge by outing people who were shitty to me. It’s a negative place to come from. I’ve kind of moved past needing to use music to do that. I’m a little more optimistic now than I was whenever those songs were being written. So, these songs are either a little more self-empowering or upbeat and if they’re not I think they’re coming from more of a fictional place because there wasn’t really any horrifying breakup or whatever else that inspired this set. This has been being comfortable with myself as a songwriter and trying to write things that I find interesting or fun. So, I guess that’s a major difference. I’m not trying to shame anybody into admitting they were an asshole.

DCist: On the flipside, I found the story behind “Tiger Tank” pretty interesting. It wasn’t what I thought it was.

SD: Yeah, when Speedy was on tour we were watching some talk show and there was a person on the show who identified as a person without limbs and were getting rid of their own limbs systematically. I think they even did a demonstration of how she had previously cut off her leg and used pantyhose to tie off her thigh above the knee. It was very graphic and upsetting so that was part of the inspiration for the song. It’s an interesting story of how this person identified. But it’s not really about that—it’s really about my friend who would never believe me when I was bummed out because he said I seemed like I was very happy. That was the major impetus.

DCist: It does seem like in general, you have fun including pop culture references in your music.

SD: Oh, for sure. I think lyrically, I’m more interested in association and I think maybe rap is more inclined to that than most rock lyrics where you’re describing something. It just becomes more fun to make connections and draw associations and so much of what I’m consuming is pop cultural that those are the kinds of associations I’m inclined to make. In one of our songs is a reference in the chorus—it’s a simultaneous reference to Kelis and also to Melanie Safka. I like stuff like that and I like even better when people call me out on it. If they can get what the reference is.

DCist: Do you watch a lot of TV on the road?

I do. I didn’t use to. I was one of those kids who grew up not interested in TV at all beyond cartoons. So, I feel like I missed out on a lot of shitty TV and in the past year, since I quit teaching, I spend almost all of my free time watching crappy TV. So, I’m very excited that Nashville has started again this week. SVU also started again this week. American Horror Story starts next week. So, I spend a decent amount of time watching TV on tour. It’s a good way to feel slightly grounded when you’re driving eight hours a day to go to work. I wound up watching the first two Scream movies the other night and I just kept looking up all of the actors and they’re all in terrible ‘90s sitcoms that I now want to revisit.

DCist: I remember you made a comment during a show, probably in Baltimore, about how you made the mistake of having a milkshake before the show…again. Do you make this mistake regularly?

SD: I think I made that comment in Chicago because I always go to Chicago Diner there which is the best vegan fast food place in the country, in my opinion. I always get a milkshake and I can’t help myself and I drink the whole thing. Then when you’re onstage and you’re singing, you’re using your core, you’re using your abdomen. I’ve been in the unfortunate situation of throwing up in my mouth a little bit onstage just due to overeating any time before the show. So, generally I can’t even eat a full dinner before we play. I’ll get food earlier in the day and then as soon as we’re done, I’m going to the van to eat my dinner. So, that’s the story. I have kind of a sweet tooth and I really like eating, but I shouldn’t do too much of it before we have to play or else I’ll be sorry. But Baltimore also has that diner by Metro Gallery so it’s very possible that I’ve made this comment more than once. It’s a fairly common problem for me. I can’t resist the milkshakes. Also, even though it’s kind of unpleasant that you sing hard enough that you throw up in your mouth a little bit, it’s kind of funny. So, I’m not too bothered.

DCist: Does the band on the whole have any bad tour habits?

SD: Not anymore. Since Devin joined the band, things have been much better. We went on tour with Pile; we played at the Black Cat as part of that tour. Then we went straight from that tour, which was almost a month long, to another three weeks with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. Both of those bands are two of my favorite bands ever. They also really have a good time drinking beers before shows. I think it was almost two months of drinking a lot of beer every single night because that’s what the bands we were touring with were doing. And not that anybody had anything serious go on, but we all got really wary of drinking too much to the extent that I quit drinking entirely for a few months after that tour. I was, like, “This isn’t fun anymore.” Now I drink a little bit, but not very much and we’ve all toured so much in this band and other bands that we tour pretty smart. We try to eat healthy and make time to do fun things and alternate who gets a nice bed. I think we’re pretty fair to each other, especially now that Devin’s in the band. He’s the most relaxed person ever. We have a pretty easy time usually. Although we do go to strip clubs sometimes. Maybe that’s our bad habit.

DCist: Strip clubs?

SD: Yeah. We went to one in Portland the other night that was this super kind of awesome dive bar that had dancers as well. I ended up having a really in-depth poetry conversation with one of the dancers. She used to live in Northampton as well. She lived across the street from Emily Dickinson’s house. So, it was kind of like the best time ever. They were just playing really cool music and they were really good dancers and I got to talk about Emily Dickinson. So that’s our bad habit maybe: we make it rain singles too much on awesome literate strippers. I think it’s one of those things that when you’re on tour visiting friends, they’re like, “We’re going to show you a night out on the town in Atlanta” and part of that is showing you this historic old strip club. So, just from going on tour we’ve seen a fair amount of them. There’s definitely a variation in terms of the vibe and how comfortable the dancers are. I also like to think that dancing is really cool. It’s super athletic and I wish I could do it. The pleasure that I get from going to strip clubs may be different than what my bandmates get from going there. I feel like now I sound like a connoisseur of strip clubs. I’ve maybe been to four or five of them. But it was fun. Portland has a cool club.

DCist: You’ve mentioned previously that you know D.C. better than some of the other cities where you’ve toured. What do you like to do when you come here?

SD: Well, I really like that children’s science museum. That’s a pretty cool D.C. thing. I think I just have a lot of friends that are from the D.C. suburbs, so I’ve hung out there. There’s great food in D.C. as well. I’ve had really, really, great Thai food and there’s that vegan place…Sticky Fingers. My answers for every city are always the vegan restaurants, but that place is pretty great. I think I’m actually driving into D.C. the night before we play just so I can hang out a little bit.

DCist: Going back to bands that you’ve played with that drink a lot, you got to open for Guided By Voices.

SD: Yeah, we did! We did and now they’re gone!

DCist: I know! I’m so sad!

SD: I was really sad. They were so fun to play with and my mom came to the show. She was hanging out with Mitch in the dressing room. The drummer and I got a really silly picture of Bob Pollard hugging us. It was kind of a life-affirming moment and to know that it happened so close to—what is this, their third breakup? Their third untimely end? That kind of makes it even more special. We’re big GBV fans. But I think they’re all involved in other projects. Pollard obviously is in so many other things. They’re kind of amazing. Especially considering how much alcohol they drink onstage. And backstage. I can’t believe that they can play that well with that much poison inside them. They each have two handles onstage and the multiple coolers of beer and Mitch has two packs of cigarettes. It’s unbelievable and here I am complaining about drinking a milkshake before we play!

Speedy Ortiz plays Sunday night at Black Cat with Ex Hex and Teen Liver. Doors at 8 p.m. $15.