, continued to run her own record label Wax Nine, remixed a bunch of old Speedy Ortiz recordings at home and scored a bunch of projects at home. “It was a lot of me sitting solely with my own brain and my own creative ideas and insecurities and obsessions,” she tells me.
“I did a tour with Stephen Malkmus and we both had pneumonia, but neither of us canceled a show,” Dupuis says. “Through food poisoning—just make sure I’m in the bathroom before and after the show, but the show’s gotta go on! I think that mentality has been well-shattered by COVID in a way that I hope continues—because I think musicians really inherited that high school theatre mentality of ‘the show must go on.’ But the cost is pretty great, of constantly working through illness.
Much of Dupuis’ approach to art in general is so deeply intertwined with a simple desire to make spaces and visibility much more accessible for folks whose necks are stuck under the boot of capitalism, classism and systematic oppression. You can connect that ethos to any other part of Dupuis’ career.