The dining-room table in Sarah Mary Chadwick’s home in Northcote, Melbourne, is crammed with hand-rendered album covers. She’s been ploughing her way through 100 of them – black ink on white card, each a different design – to go with pre-orders of the limited edition pink vinyl of her new album, Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby.
Like the album itself, these paintings are splayed and stark and sometimes ignoble; with the chaotic humour of Ralph Steadman and the emotional explicitness of Tracey Emin. Actually, Chadwick’s song titles, such as I Was Much Better at Being Young Than You Are, are reminiscent of the frank humour of Emin, too. Much of Chadwick’s previous artistic output, including some album covers, has been scenes sketched from the porn she’s been watching (previous works had titles such as Waiting in Line at a Gang Bang) but this time around it’s more PG, with depictions of horses, barflies and stills from Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet.
On Guardian Australia’s visit, shortly before the launch of Chadwick’s seventh solo album (and the third album in a forensically intimate trilogy, released over two years), Chadwick’s fiancé, Simon, is invited to make himself scarce by taking dog Sylvie for a walk. Chadwick makes a pot of coffee and considers the very specific nature of her lyrics.
“My manager asked me for a few words to describe the first single,” she says. “I told her, ‘I’ve literally said everything in that song.’”
This trilogy of albums fossicks through Chadwick’s recent traumas, including losing her father, a close friend, and the breakup of a long-term relationship. Whereas many lyricists generalise their experiences in order to become relatable to as large as possible an audience, Chadwick likes to give very precise details, such as in the title track, when she recites the exact date in 2019 that she decided she would commit suicide.
Recently, a fan approached her, name-dropped a song Chadwick had written about a past relationship, and said “I’m seeing this guy at the moment, it’s so relatable.” Chadwick was flummoxed.
“I thought, ‘How the hell? Are we seeing the same person?’”
It’s probably the anguish that is relatable. Chadwick’s voice is cultivated to be ragged, defiant and tremulous, sounding as though the recordings happened in the dead of night on a bender in the bathtub (although actually, Chadwick went to work at a studio with local producer/pop artist Geoff O’Connor, fully dressed and fairly coherent).
Fans of unflinching, self-spelunking writers such as Jean Rhys, Dorothy Parker and Sylvia Plath would find much to admire in Chadwick’s repertoire, but Chadwick is also very visual, in the way that Instagram-reared writers such as Cat Marnell and Rachel Rabbit White toy with dress-ups. In the noirish video to the single Every Loser Needs a Mother, Chadwick plays the keyboard with a cigarette dangling between her finger-tips. She’s the jaded woman on the pulp fiction cover; the world-weary waitress in a million movie diners.
“I like playing a role in a relationship and figuring out what parts fit with you, and whether it’s with the right person,” Chadwick says. “If it’s the right person, they can see who you are through that. And if it’s the wrong person, they don’t see you at all.”
Chadwick periodically updates her Instagram account with photographs of herself in nice lingerie and silk robes. The fetishistic element might stem from an aunt who was a sales rep for L’Oreal, who would sometimes visit the house with her patent leather briefcase of samples.
“It was the best thing ever,” Chadwick says. “I like wearing an apron and cooking. I like artifice. I like feminine things, like makeup and perfume, and as a kid I would pore through my mum’s things. I think it speaks to me wanting to be a better version of my mum, and so picking up on those marital roles. Freud called it repetition compulsion.”
Much of Chadwick’s material makes connections between her romantic relationships and what she perceives as her own family’s dysfunctional dynamic. She grew up in rural isolation in the north island of New Zealand, and Ennui sometimes revisits that period by addressing her mother. The album is solely played on piano because that’s the instrument she played as a child.
I tell Chadwick that when I teach memoir writing it seems that most people drawn to the genre didn’t feel they were allowed to speak out when growing up. I ask if that was the case for her.
“I mean, yes, absolutely,” she says. “That’s why I’ve always liked performing – I always felt that it was the only time I could talk properly, and everybody had to listen.”
Life is on the up. Chadwick’s sessions with her psychotherapist had risen to five times a week around the period that she tried to commit suicide, but now she’s stopped going. “I was doing well, so it was becoming a luxury,” she says. She’s set to marry Simon, and now that lockdown restrictions have lifted she’s able to connect with audiences once more. Her album launch shows will run for four Fridays in a row at Fitzroy’s new Avalon Bar (on the former site of Polyester Records), from 19 February, and she’ll then switch to a Wednesday residency at the same bar, “forever”.
Live, Chadwick gets a kick out of “being silly” – explaining the songs or pointing out little puns that she’s slipped into the lyrics, offering some light relief.
“I’ve probably got drunk about five times and told people that was my best lyric,” she says of one such example in Let’s Go Home. “It’s a childhood thing again, of getting attention by being good at things. I do like a joke. When I was younger I used to make the content deliberately heavy for people, but lately it had been getting too heavy for me. I don’t really need to be crying on stage. When that would happen, I’d think, why am I even doing this?”
• Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby by Sarah Mary Chadwick is out on 5 February through Rice Is Nice Records
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
