Sarah Mary Chadwick’s music is often a difficult listen, but that’s the whole point. Throughout her career she’s dealt with heavy subjects, including the death of her father and her own suicide attempts, delivering every line with blunt honesty. It’s a style consistent with other modern-day eccentrics like Joanna Sternberg and St. Lenox, artists who update and refine the so-called outsider singer-songwriter music of Daniel Johnston. So intimate is Chadwick’s style that it can sound almost as if she’s making up the songs as she goes along, simply setting her internal monologue to music, whether she’s playing an 147-year-old organ on 2019’s The Queen Who Stole the Sky or embracing lush chamber pop on 2020’s Please Daddy and 2023’s Messages to God.
Mostly, Chadwick sticks to her main instrument, the piano. On this album, Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby?, she strips back as far as she can go, to just stark block chords and the occasional glissando. Engineer Chris Townend recorded the piano with contact mics, which pick up sound from direct physical vibrations rather than from the air. Once recording was complete, Townend played the entire thing back while holding down the sustain pedal, capturing the sound of the piano resonances and layering them into the mix. That simple choice gives the album the scale of Chadwick’s more ornate records. Even as she’s pushed back on the descriptor “raw” (“There’s a lot of craft in what I do,” she told Bandcamp in 2019), this record’s rawness is an aesthetic choice, not a default. If the video for Please Daddy single “When Will Death Come” suggested Amélie-esque whimsy, with golden lighting and sprightly choreography, this new music is willfully monochromatic, leaving us with just her scratchy alto.
About that alto: Though the songs are better structured, Chadwick’s singing is less polished, with loose vocal doubles and frequent voice cracks. Seconds into “What Am I, Gatsby,” she sings, “Request a song right now/And I’ll sing it from the he-a-a-art,” deliberately and cheekily off-key. Other off-key moments feel like a natural outcome of the raspier singing style. As evidenced by her discography, she could write more conventional songs and sing them well, but that’s not what this album is for. Instead, it feels like one more exorcism of her demons before learning to coexist with them.
It’s genuinely unusual to see Chadwick looking up, even if she nestles that optimism within a song characterizing Life as a chronic abuser. “I’m Not Clinging to Life” is suitably morbid, but there’s an old-fashioned folk lilt to the melody. She sings about accepting hardship instead of wallowing in it: “I have lots of fun things/Planned to make up for how/He mistreated me badly/From birth until now.” Somehow, it’s one of the more optimistic songs she’s made. That resilience resurfaces on “The Show Musn’t Go On” and “She Never Leant Upon a Bar,” two songs where Chadwick knowingly stops short of her darkest material. In “The Show Musn’t Go On,” she departs a bar before the night goes sideways, reminding herself, “It’s fine for me to take a little time to feel good.” Once again, it’s a message with personal implications: By the time of the album’s release, she was sober and adapting to a new diagnosis of Bipolar II, milestones she shared on social media. Gatsby, then, is the sound of someone learning to want to live.
