New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick presents a new single/video, “Full Mood,” off of her new album, Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby, out February 5th on Ba Da Bing. It’s the follow-up to previously released tracks “At Your Leisure” and “Every Loser Needs A Mother. In “Full Mood,” Chadwick’s measured voice is stark over simplistic piano. She describes ardent, all-consuming emotions: “‘Cause you got me in a full mood // I’m on fire for you // Wanna colour in the world for you // ‘Cause you got me in a full mood.” The accompanying video, directed by Tristan Scott-Behrends, visualizes the track’s tenderness, depicting intimate moments between a couple.
“‘Full Mood’ is about a Valentine’s Day date I went on,” explains Chadwick. “The owner of the bar we were at tried to get us both to fuck her, but she wouldn’t let me be in charge so we didn’t. I remember afterwards we were walking down the road and it was streetlights and still at 3am and everything felt great and shining and I remember thinking that I wish my dad could’ve done this, got drunk and kicked around the city at night when it’s all sparkly, holding onto someone who lights you up, not been stuck in silent dark rural New Zealand, watching other people’s lives on TV, drinking half glasses of box wine while his frowning wife ironed.”
Videos by American Songwriter
To celebrate the launch of her seventh studio record Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby, Chadwick is pleased to announce four live performances starting in February. Performing Me And Ennui… in its entirety, Chadwick will also be revisiting her favourite moments from her two previous records, 2020’s Please Daddy and 2019’s The Queen Who Stole The Sky. Either performing with guests or alone, the four shows promise to be very magical evenings. Each event will be live-streamed from Australia via Bandcamp’s new live platform. Tickets to the live-stream performances can be purchased here.
Comprised entirely of minimal solo piano arrangements, Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby is despondently clear-eyed and smirkingly self-deprecating. It completes a trilogy of records that started with The Queen Who Stole The Sky (2019) and her only outing to date featuring a full band, Please Daddy, released earlier this year. Each record has followed Chadwick’s internal processing after a traumatic event, with Chadwick’s zeal for psychoanalysis front and centre. On Ennu, Chadwick presents an exacting intensity with her choice to pare back to piano and vocals. It’s in this stark setting that she focuses on the attempt she made on her life in 2019.
Just weeks before the Ennui recordings in 2019, Chadwick endured the breakup of a long term relationship and attempted her own life. These events followed the deaths of her father and a close friend, and it’s from this weighty internal mire that Chadwick emerges throughout the trilogy. Imaginably, the result is staggeringly abject.
Joined by long time production collaborators, Ennui was mastered by David Walker at Stepford Audio and mixed and recorded by Geoff O’Connor at Vanity Lair – both expertly bringing scale, subtlety and intangible ascendence to this recording. On Ennui, Chadwick is free, there is nowhere for her or us to run from the need to very presently and repeatedly articulate her trauma until it is simply, “articulated out.”
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