“Music was a helpful place to live in the yearning.” (An Interview with Sara Mae of The Noisy)
At the intersection of drag and desire sit Sara Mae and their band The Noisy. Journeying into the surreal and defiant, the band subverts expectations of genre and form, creating a sound that honors its roots while remaining stunningly, gutsily singular. Please give Sara Mae the warmest of welcomes to the Half Mystic blog!
H/M: The Noisy is multifaceted in your music, lyrics, and videos, toeing the line between the grotesque and abstract. How would you synthesize the threads of your work for those who are just now jumping in?
SM: My name is Sara Mae and I’m the frontperson of The Noisy. I’m non-binary, and I came up as an artist in slam poetry. I consider aesthetic choices in my work not as frivolous but as central to the art-making process. The Noisy uses wild visual elements in our music videos—wearing a mod dress with the same print as the wallpaper, a cartoon spaghetti flood in “Morricone.” The images in my lyrics for the forthcoming song “Glass of Olives” are meant to create a cohesively bleak and abject tone, which is reflected in the shoegaze style of instrumentation that Josh Sorrells and Jacob Lawter ultimately found in production. I’ll dress a certain way depending on the venue we’re playing: I wore a ‘76ers jersey and white tulle skirt to our recent show in Philly, I did my eyebrows very prim and old Hollywood when we played an older theater in Providence. Maybe that’s part of what you point out about the multifaceted nature of The Noisy. I’m interested in finding connections between forms of art, which I think is true of many queer performers: drag queens, DIY artists hustling in multiple genres. I’m trying to articulate my vision across planes of expression. I was a poet first, and then I came to music—so there’s just as much emphasis on the lyrics as on every other part of a song.
The grotesque is the most important aesthetic lens that I use. I want my narratives to play with too-muchness. I oscillate between confessional writing and surreal body horror in some of the songs, and certainly in the music videos. It’s a way to ground the big feelings I hold in my body—queer yearning, shame, self disgust—and alchemize them into something like a distortion of desirability.
You explore food, sensuality, and gender fluidity in the music video for “Morricone.” How do those themes fit into the cinematic language and history of the video’s spaghetti Western style? What are you demythologizing through this song?
I love that you phrased it as “demythologizing.” I wouldn’t have started there, but you’re completely right. When I think about the legacy of spaghetti Westerns, I think about gratuitous violence. The song is meant to join the aesthetic of spaghetti Western films with that of the children’s book Strega Nona. “Morricone” is about becoming dangerous by playing into ideals of desirability, and how part of that means being ruthless and distant. There was a time where I saw myself and my desire as violent, and this song is meant to complicate that story (I am not violent for owning my desire!) while also poking at the egotism of the spaghetti Western tradition. Tomie DePaola’s Strega Nona is a witch with a pasta cauldron, and in the book, the character Big Anthony floods the town with her pasta. I love the too-muchness of that, its caricature of gratuitous violence, and how it both deflates pillars of masculinity and rewrites some of my own stories about myself.
“Morricone” was filmed the weekend after my Gramma died in a car accident, which was incredibly difficult and also, strangely, the only thing I wanted to be doing. We’d planned to make her spaghetti sauce recipe for the video, and I was filming with some of my best friends, and so I was really held in the process. It felt spiritually right to be cooking her food and sharing it with neighbors and friends. The title of our first LP, The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, comes from when I asked my Gramma about the recipe, and she just kept naming all these different kinds of beef and pork and so on that she would add and add to the sauce. Gram was Italian, so the Italian history of spaghetti Western filmmakers and composers, and of the Strega Nona book, were also very much the reasoning behind some of the choices for the music video. Ennio Morricone was an Italian composer, and when Josh and I sat down to write the guitar parts for the song, we listened to some of his classics like “L’Estasi Dell’oro” and wrote variations on those riffs. Which I love, and which also feels like a queering of this iconic song.
The Noisy extends beyond genre—something between folksy pop and shimmer rock. How has the abundant music scene of Tennessee influenced you? Where in its legacy do you draw inspiration?
My album producer, Jacob Lawter of Slow and Steady, says that The Noisy is what would happen if bedroom pop turned into bedroom rock. I see it—Frankie Cosmos with a little grit. Some of that comes from going to punk shows in Boston basements during undergrad. I moved to Knoxville for an MFA in poetry at the University of Tennessee, and it was because of Josh Sorrells, my drummer, that I started playing gigs more regularly. He sought me out after a fiction workshop and said, your work is very surreal, we should write music about Leonora Carrington’s short stories. That’s how we got to “Violet Lozenge” off the upcoming record.
In the past two years, we’ve played the Pilot Light, Pretentious Beer Co., WDVX Blue Plate Special, and Beardsley Garden Art Gala. I’m beyond lucky that the Knoxville music scene is so tight-knit. After I did a show with Kelsi Walker at the Women’s History Month showcase, I started getting asked to perform more often. I opened for Willa Mae and Ben McLaughlin, and then venues got to know us and put us on bills with touring acts like Tenci, Scout Gillett, and zzzhara. Knoxville is absolutely its own scene, distinct from Nashville, though of course musicians go back and forth between the two cities. Appalachian music is so much about storytelling, and I have felt my songs become more narrative and less abstract, just being around wildly talented local musicians and hearing Dolly Parton in every bar around town. The last song I wrote for the record was “Tony Soprano,” about my Gramma who passed this year. It was a rare moment of just coming out and saying how I felt.
Also, I’m inspired by my friends. Ash Baker, my bassist, who also has their own music project, grew up in Knoxville. I think they are an incredible writer. The generosity of spirit in this community has informed my work more than anything. I have so much admiration for Knoxville’s fiddlers and banjo players, like Evie Andrus and Duck Ryan. I hope one day I know an instrument that well.
Outside of The Noisy, Game Over Books published your chapbook Priestess of Tankinis. What similarities do you see between publishing and releasing music? What could these processes learn from each other?
Jacob as the album producer took the songs so seriously. I remember Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso did an interview where she talked about how many times she had followed male album producers who hated her into shitty basement studios to record. Producing with Jacob was the opposite of that. He worked with me to make sure each word, each note, each guitar part was in a good place. Vocals were my favorite part of the process, partially because that’s where I feel most confident, but also because it was just Jacob and me really working it out together, no background noise or distractions.
Priestess of Tankinis was only the second chapbook that Game Over Books had put out, so Josh Savory, the founder, went back and forth with me in an astonishingly generous and patient way. There were moments we disagreed, but he gave me the ultimate say. In that way, I have been wildly lucky in both recording and publishing. You hear so many stories about artists being disempowered and losing creative authority. When I look at the processes side-by-side, I’d say that musicians deserve more of an editorial eye in album production, and literary editors should make more moodboards with their writers. While producing the record we were constantly referencing songs by Japanese Breakfast, Wednesday, Chappell Roan, Lucy Dacus. On and on. Some literary writers are great about that on their own, but there’s a pressure to be completely original and groundbreaking in writing, in a way that I don’t feel with music. People will be like, this song sounds like Fleetwood Mac, and that’s awesome. But if you read someone’s poem and say, oh, they’re just doing what Ada Limón is doing, it’s seen as an insult. Maybe that’s the academia of it all, because I didn’t feel that way in slam. People would write “after” poems all the time and it wasn’t a problem, because slam was so often a conversation happening in the context and community of others’ poems.
If The Noisy had a purse, what would be in it?
A jar of pitted Castelvetrano olives, a glue stick, and my iridescent chartreuse hair clip.
In your Junie B. Jones & the Strawberry Moons project, inspired by Japanese Breakfast, you attempted to write a song every day for a month. What lessons did you learn from the challenge? Did it change your perspective on songwriting?
I had just gotten my synth at the time, and was still learning how to use it. Poets do 30/30s all the time—30 poems in 30 days—and I had been in accountability groups for that. But I did this song-a-day project on my own, when I didn’t know much about recording yet. Honestly, the songs sound kind of awful, though there are certainly catchy moments. I think I was sharpening my skills in finding melody, but working in isolation was my biggest challenge. Were I to do it again, I would find someone to write with or be mutually accountable to. There’s a song I wrote that month, “Spaghetti Western,” that is nothing like how “Morricone” ended up—but the seeds of the final product were planted there.
Day Night Dress, The Noisy’s first album, has an eponymously named track. What’s changed since your debut record? How have you grown into the band’s name?
I just decided to take Day Night Dress off of streaming platforms and keep it exclusively on Bandcamp. I’m proud of some of its lyrics but at this point I feel really far away from the person I was when I wrote it. I recorded the EP on a cassette machine with my guitar teacher, Jonathan Rodriguez, at a time when I could barely hold my instrument. It was in my old bedroom in Jamaica Plain, Boston, and I do love that those songs hold the emotion and nostalgia of the space where they were recorded. In some ways, I am still up to the same shit: “Brad Pittsburgh” is about desire, and pokes fun at pop culture references (Brad Pitt getting a boner in the filming of Thelma and Louise). But I want to believe I’m a more sophisticated, intentional writer now. When I recorded Day Night Dress I was so entrenched in slam poetry, and writing songs was a break from getting every word exactly right. But ultimately, I do want to have higher standards for the music I put into the world. That EP was just a guitar and my voice; the new record, meanwhile, is with a full band and even then some extra orchestral flourishes.
Much of The Noisy’s discography investigates queerness and desire. How do you subvert the heteronormative narratives that so often surround rock music?
Some of it is silliness. And I think I’m not afraid to be sentimental. I’ve found Academics and Men In Music in the institutional sense to generally look down on sentiment. The song “Ballerino,” off the new record, is a love song for my partner, and I include some of the sweeter details of our everyday: “walking down Guilford with you in my yellow shorts / is my favorite part of last year / cinnamon bagels and shmear / Mid-Atlantic, Manic Panic, chest freckle counting career.” Also, some of it is very literally writing about queer desire and queer conflict: “Backlit” is about an unrequited queer crush and a night out at our karaoke spot in Baltimore. “Violet Lozenge” is about a queer friendship that soured. That messiness is important, too. I’m not just writing about queer joy, though I hope to get into some of that on the next record. But on The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, I had some shit to work out. Music was a helpful place to live in the yearning.
The music videos for “Skirt” and “Morricone” have such strong aesthetic visions, building atop a tradition of drag and camp. Tell us about the experience of translating your music into a visual medium.
Those videos were very much the product of collaboration. I’ve worked with Ewan Hill on three music videos now (the third, for our single “Ballerino,” comes out in the fall), and we’ve gone into each project having intensely moodboarded and charted out our aesthetic reference points. “Ballerino,” which we created with poet and photographer Golden as our cinematographer, thought about Dario Argento’s Suspiria and the original Wicker Man from 1973. We used lighting, eerie dance movements, and ‘70s outfits in the vein of Suspiria, and animal face masks and horror movie suspense in the vein of Wicker Man. Drag has helped me feel connected to these cultural fixtures and make them my own—queering the narrative, etc.
I do think it is healing for me to play characters in the music videos that are hot, and also terrifying or uncanny. I feel that way especially about “Ballerino,” but in “Skirt” too, my looks were scary. I don’t have to be the hot girl you’re looking for. I am smearing that version of hotness, making it messy and grotesque. I grew up near Baltimore, and inherited a lot of pride for John Waters films. I often do my eyebrows like Divine as an homage, and I think John Waters’ fearlessness in being completely disgusting has informed the tone of our music videos.
The Noisy just finished a tour, and The Secret Ingredient is More Meat comes out next year. Give us a glimpse into your future: what do you want to find on your next journey? What are you hoping to escape?
I can’t say enough how transformative the experience of our summer tour was for me. I had toured as a poet before, but this felt different. I booked, managed, and marketed all of the events myself, with some graphic design help from my partner. I learned a lot and made some big mistakes (don’t film a music video on tour. Take a day off instead). But the lifestyle of touring is so exhilarating, and I think I’m cut out to be a road dog. I love long drives and eating Dunkin’ Donuts every morning and killing time for a few hours in new cities. Also, traveling with a big group of people instead of alone as a poet is really exciting. Of course there were frustrating moments, but I was so fortunate that the iteration of the band that I took on tour got along well, was truly funny, and loved each other a lot.
I’m working on writing songs again now, and grounding myself in foundational music knowledge. I just moved to Philly, leaving my band in Knoxville (which I am so devastated about, it’s hard to articulate). But I’m getting into the house show scene here, and taking piano and guitar classes. I want to tour again off of the album release—I’d love to get to the other side of the project and not feel completely empty. I like producing new work. I like writing as often as I can, so I’m sure I’ll have some of a new record ready by the time this one comes out. I’m cold-emailing bands I admire and hoping someone will let us open for them on a spring tour. Some dream venues I want to put out into the world: the Orange Peel in Asheville, Johnny Brenda’s in Philly, Big Ears in Knoxville. My favorite band, the one I’ve followed the longest, is Hop Along, and their lead singer Frances Quinlan (also non-binary!) used to work at Johnny Brenda’s. As much as I’m so ruined about leaving Knoxville, all of my favorite bands came out of Philly—Hop Along, Japanese Breakfast, The Districts. It does feel like the right next step. I’m scared and thrilled for what’s to come.
The Noisy is a bedroom rock band that got their start in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their single “Morricone” with an accompanying music video was released in April 2023, and the band’s debut full-length album is set to be released in spring 2024. They went on a month-long tour in summer 2023 across the Northeast and the South, and have played historic venues like the WDVX Blue Plate Special, the Radio Room, and the Columbus Theatre. The Noisy is fronted by poet and songwriter Sara Mae (they/them). Explore more: Bandcamp | Spotify | Merch store | Instagram