TWO SUMMERS AGO, Speedy Ortiz crammed their gear onto the slick, beer-soaked stage at Ethiopian restaurant Habesha. The band slipped and slid through tracks from their just-released album Major Arcana while a crowd of fellow Northampton transplants shredded the passive-aggressive peace treaty known as Portland Nice, screaming "Western fucking Massachusetts" to a hapless local who'd misidentified Speedy Ortiz as a Boston band. Maybe the unusual summer heat made everybody all the more ecstatic, but before they ever signed on to play shows at Mississippi Studios (or, later this summer, Edgefield!), in that corner of Habesha's upstairs bar, Speedy Ortiz looked like the Biggest Band in the World.
Speedy Ortiz remember things a bit differently. "We got really drunk," laughs Sadie Dupuis, guitarist, singer, and primary songwriter for the band. Drummer Mike Falcone elaborates about a dinner with a prospective manager involving one too many drinks for the band, which led to "completely [dropping] a drumstick" and missing the intro to Arcana track "No Below." Dupuis proclaims the Habesha show as "not [their] finest night."
Maybe the night sticks out to Speedy Ortiz because of where they stand now. Since then, the band members have quit their day jobs to play with heroes like Ex Hex, Jenny Lewis, and Stephen Malkmus, put out two LPs on indie heavy-hitter Carpark Records, and travel across the world. With the perspective of time to focus on themselves, and their experience spent touring outside their small microcosm of East Coast musical peers, Speedy Ortiz feel a little weight on their shoulders.
"I never thought I would have to songwrite responsibly before," Dupuis says. "I always hate when people say, 'I never expected anybody to hear this record,' but we never expected the scale [of popularity]." For Dupuis, the pressure of bigger tours, bigger audiences, and bigger budgets doesn't translate to career pressure; instead, she feels the need to write for the fans who have told her stories of feeling empowered by Speedy Ortiz to quit jobs with misogynistic employers, or fans who've started all-girl bands in their own lacking scenes.
The new album, Foil Deer, finds Dupuis grabbing the spotlight and shining it straight back onto the fans. While Major Arcana remains a powerful feminist text, even as it focused on Dupuis' immediate personal life, Foil Deer demands its listeners acknowledge the record as the work of a feminist band. The first single "Raising the Skate," for example, is an overt empowerment anthem, led by refrains of "I'm not bossy, I'm the boss."
"Feminist politics have always played a part in so much of what I do, ever since I was a teenager—but to me it was enough that I was doing them in these male-dominated spaces," Dupuis says.
Foil Deer's emphasis on self-empowerment isn't lost on the band either. When I indulge in a gossipy question about the departure of their former guitarist, both Dupuis and Falcone choose only to praise his replacement, guitar whiz Devin McKnight (of Grass Is Green). "One thing people do to remove positive feeling is dwell on the past," says Falcone. "We're pretty happy right now, and that's what we want to focus on."
Maybe that show at Habesha in 2013 was a mess, or maybe it was truly transcendent. That doesn't really matter—all that matters for Speedy Ortiz is making the most out of right now.
