DEAD GOWNS
Remembering it over and over again: the way it happened in Vegas, the way beginnings spill over onto endings. Geneviève Beaudoin, the Portland, Maine-based songwriter, went to Las Vegas in the summer of 2021 to help a close friend move and start a new life there. But buried within that newness, there was an old and gradually widening fracture—and in that city, the friendship ended.
On a certain level, we anticipate strain and rupture in a romantic context. But we don’t as easily expect or extend that same kind of awareness to close friendships, which cut just as deep, and hold up just as much of our sense of belonging and mattering. Feeling raw and unraveled, Beaudoin realized these were songs she needed to hear, as much as she needed to write. Back home in Maine, she began crafting her second full-length album as Dead Gowns.
Recorded in a farmhouse at the foot of the White Mountains with Beaudoin’s long-time partner Luke Kalloch, and produced by Sam Kassirer and Colin Lester Fleming, Vegas is a series of raw, smoldering songs that suddenly gape. It is an album that watches grief move, point by point. Every track blurs place and time, as memory and self, seed and fruit, “hardcore and wellness” become refracted and indissoluble.
We find ourselves, with the opening track, “Everything You Wanted,” stranded in a brooding portrait of anxious, overwrought intimacy. “It’s not like it was / But it’s not like it wasn’t,” Beaudoin equivocates, her voice cloaked. The chorus, which shifts the song down rather than up, is a baneful refrain of the title: “I wanna give you, give you / Everything you wanted,” Beaudoin chants, slow, deliberate, enormously lonely.
