Mannequin Pussy

Fever to Tell:
Mannequin Pussy’s Patience Pays Off

When I connect with Marisa Dabice by phone she tells me she had been in Atlanta the prior day – not to play a show, but passing through Hartsfield Airport on a connecting flight. Does it still count as a Busman’s Holiday if someone spends their days in a tour van?

With her band Mannequin Pussy having been off the road for all of two weeks, didn’t some quality time hunkered down in the Philadelphia homebase she rarely sees sound more appealing than yet more travel? “Not when there’s an opportunity to go to Mexico,” she retorts, adding that it was her first true vacation in seven years.

If living out of a duffel bag strikes one as a miserable existence, then I suppose fronting a punk band would be a lousy career choice. When Mannequin Pussy played the Masquerade in Atlanta in August in support of their newly minted album – and Epitaph Records debut – Patience, Dabice seemed to be genuinely bursting with pride, effusing about how happy the band was to finally be out playing these songs.

I was aware of some red tape surrounding the label switch that held up the release of album number three, but the road following the late 2016 release of Romantic included more bumps than I realized. “That’s the basis for the title (Patience),” Dabice explains, “that two-year period.” It wasn’t the first time she’s had to exhibit some patience.

By the time Romantic – Mannequin Pussy’s first recorded output as a quartet – began to draw acclaim for its mesmerizing blend of angry punk, shoegaze guitars, raw lyrics and just enough melody to wash it all down, Dabice was already writing new material that further tested those boundaries.

The folks at Epitaph took notice as well, dangling the promise of a significant step-up in visibility and resources from scrappy North Carolina indie Tiny Engines. Dabice doesn’t offer many details over the wrangling that ensued, but I’m reminded of the words of noted sage Larry Tate on 1960s sitcom Bewitched: “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” (Since our conversation broader allegations of unpaid royalties have emerged against Tiny Engines, whose ballooning roster includes other breakout acts like Illuminati Hotties and Adult Mom.)

I pictured a standoff akin to the one that kept Bruce Springsteen and band off the road for eons circa Darkness on the Edge of Town, but in reality the opposite was true. “We pretty much went crazy playing shows, because that’s all we could do. When you don’t have any money to hunker down in the studio…” Dabice trails off. “The only place we’re consistently making money is when we’re out playing.”

They also had no idea what kind of budget they’d have to work with, given the gap in resources between Tiny Engines and Epitaph. “We didn’t know who the daddy would be – that’s essentially what labels are, the bank daddy. They can be more than that too, but it’s more fun to consider them as the daddy. Finally we decided we need to stop freaking out and let this process take itself wherever it’s gonna.”

Meanwhile, Dabice (pronounced da-BEESE – a nod to the Italian side of her heritage – although she laughingly acknowledges smart asses often bastardize in into “da bitch”) had written a pair of songs that established the new album’s wide parameters. “Drunk II” brought melody front and center without defanging Thanasi Paul’s guitars, while simultaneously nailing a pissed off vulnerability (“I still love you, you stupid fuck”). “Drunk I,” by contrast, spews 40 seconds of unbridled rage, with incongruously sweet harmonies lurking in the background making the ride all the more eerie and thrilling.

Although “Drunk I” and “II” bear little resemblance to one other, Dabice explains they were written on the same night, using a similar chord structure. “It’s a different sound but the same angry mental state, a combination of anger and sadness over the dissolution of something I really cared about.” The titles were holdovers from the shorthand she scrawled on the tape the late night she recorded the demos.

“‘Drunk II’ was the first song I ever wrote that was four minutes long and there was nothing about it I wanted to cut. And I thought there should be a guitar solo, and Thanasi is such a cool guitar player he was able to nail it in a couple takes.” She thinks of it as “November Rain” inspired, but admits she has no idea if Paul had Slash on his mind.

The dust still unsettled, Mannequin Pussy eventually decided to record a proto Patience in the same studio as Romantic, with the same team. “I think there’s something really exciting about the way our second record sounds and feels to me, so we went to do that with the same people. I think there’s a certain magic when you connect, so why keep looking around when you know something works?” But in this case the magic wasn’t rekindled, or at least didn’t port over to the new songs. “We felt like what we were hearing in our heads wasn’t coming through. We wanted someone who matched our obsession and intensity about the new material.”

Enter Will Yip, whose credits include bands like Title Fight and the Menzingers with a similar melodic punk vibe – some of which also share Philadelphia and Epitaph lineage. “I think Will courted me,” by Dabice’s recollection. “We were touring with Turnover, who had recorded their albums with him, and I think they made the connection.” Yip sent Marisa a DM that she says read, “I think we would crush this. I don’t care how much you can pay me, I just want to make this record.” So they re-started the process on Yip’s home turf, Studio 4 in nearby Conshohocken, their budget still a mystery.

Are Marisa and her bandmates still friends with the original production team? “I hope so’” she responds somewhat ruefully. “It doesn’t feel good to take projects away from people you care about.” She attributes the false start to the chaotic nature of the its studio setting, which made it hard for her to focus. “For the amount of heavy shit happening on this record, I really wanted the four of us to feel immersed, able to shut everything out.”

It’s hard to argue with the results, including touches as surprising as the vintage-sounding piano that carries the melody on closer “In Love Again.” “Studio 4 has a beautiful piano in it – I think it’s the one used on Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man,’ the same fucking piano. Thanasi is also a great pianist – he’s the first to try to put piano on every song,” she laughs. “We just had one piano afternoon, no big departure, just seeing how it would fit on different songs.” According to Dabice piano made a few appearances on Romantic as well, “but was less forward – on a cleaner sounding record (like this one) it’s easier to distinguish.”

“In Love Again” brings Patience full circle from “Drunk II,” emerging from a heavy ride with the embrace of a brighter horizon. It’s a device she used on Romantic as well with “Beside Yourself.” “I always want to end with acceptance and something positive because I have to believe that things can and will be better,” she explains.

Another attention getter is “Fear + Desire,” one of Patience’s two slower tracks, neither of which sacrifices an iota of intensity. Mark it down as my favorite gut-punch meta lyric of 2019:

And when you hit me, it does not feel like a kiss
Like the singers promised
It was just a lie that was written for them.

 “For a while our songs were so short I didn’t have the space to say all the things I wanted,” Dabice explains. “I don’t think I’ve ever been very referential, but that line has always struck with me. Ronnie Spector’s time with Phil, a young woman’s experiences being in love with a fucking monster.”

She’s referring to the 1962 Crystals hit “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” of course, the Goffin/King classic (since disavowed by Carole King) written by the couple based on a conversation with their babysitter – who was Little Eva of “Loco-Motion” fame, by the way.

“I know it’s not a Ronnie Spector song, but Phil produced it, he still has his hand in it. ‘Oh, he wouldn’t do this unless he really loved me’ is such a horrible lie to have to grow up with. Not only is this story autobiographical, I wanted to bring the past into it, looking at the history.”

Although Mannequin Pussy’s profile is on the rise, they’re hardly an overnight sensation. “We now have this time stamp of a decade, to assess how things started and are ending up,” Dabice offers. If it took her a bit longer than most to find her rhythm, so to speak, she has a darn good excuse.

Dabice had been living outside Boulder after graduating from the University of Colorado, when she found herself unexpectedly moving back to her Connecticut hometown after her mother suffered a stroke. “I was 23 years old and found myself living at home again in this situation I never thought I’d be in. So I spent my nights learning how to play guitar.”

She and Paul had known each other since elementary school. Thanasi had always been in bands – Dabice always wanted to be, but never managed to scratch that itch. “I took maybe four guitar lessons when I was 16, but it didn’t really stick. Connecticut did not have a ‘scene’ in the early 2000s – even the local teenagers were playing dad rock. It wasn’t the music that was the soundtrack of my soul.”

That soundtrack included the likes of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sum 41. “I stumbled upon Pixies at that time too. Anything that was loud and heavy but had that melody and a sense of beauty to it,” which pretty much reads like a template for Mannequin Pussy.

“Boulder was my beginning – I lived in a house where we had bands play, I got a sense of what it was like to be part of a scene.” Once back home, she started commuting into New York City in the evenings to play guitar with Paul. Eventually the duo migrated a bit further south to Philadelphia and fleshed out a band.

Dabice has another good excuse for being a late bloomer. At age 15 she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer – alveolar soft part sarcoma – which caused a tumor to grow on her face. “At the time I think there had been like 300 cases of it worldwide. The only thing they knew is that it didn’t respond to chemotherapy or radiation – so I was lucky in that sense because children exposed to those can experience health problems later on.” On the other hand, of course, she was subjected to invasive procedure.

It seems a particularly cruel twist of fate for a self-conscious teenager – in other words, any teenager. “How do you relate to your peers at that age? All you want is to be accepted and understood by other people, and then you add this on top of it… it was a dark time. Then there’s the ‘why me?’ you deal with afterward. I think as an adult you can feel lucky, but I didn’t I didn’t really feel anything. You carry that experience with you, the process of unpacking these things emotionally. Now I feel lucky – that experience is probably why I play music now.”

And that’s music’s reaching a wider audience, but how wide can it get when delivered by a band named Mannequin Pussy? Dabice remains defiant, if somewhat conflicted. “I would fucking hate if our name is what kept us from finding certain markers of an audience. I’m still committed to this concept that art should be this challenging thing that breaks down notions, revisiting the rules.” She says it dates to a late-night random association session in Boulder trying to devise the most incongruous band name. She recalls another entry was The Nuns – and although Dabice seems to be a pretty good historian, she didn’t seem to realize that one’s already been claimed.

Dabice has been receiving “you can’t please everyone” counsel from friends with longer tenure in the spotlight. “Oh fuck – we’re finally at that level where we’re getting criticized. I’m a gamer, so it’s like ‘Oh cool – we just leveled up.’ The kinds of people who seek me out to criticize us, though, or to tell me we should change our name, they seem to neatly fit into a certain avatar. Older white men love to seek me out.”

Yet slowly she’s learned to embrace some minor concessions. “I don’t feel attached to song titles, but I’m now at a point where we ought to consider them a little more, that they’re not the place for our inside band jokes.” Until recently, “In Love Again” appeared on setlists as “Kaleen” because of its reliance on drummer Kaleen Reading’s “percussion odyssey at the end of it showcasing her wild abilities. “Are people gonna think I’m singing about Kaleen because we have this love relationship?” They don’t, not that there would be anything wrong with that – in other interviews Dabice has noted that the band includes queer members.

“I think most band names are reactionless, they don’t inspire any kind of feedback. It’s exciting to have that but on the other hand, I’d fucking love to play Saturday Night Live. And I don’t know if that’s possible. But it’s not going to force me into a corner where I think we should be changing our name yet.” That last word was barely audible.

Photo by Marcus Maddox.