“Fell down the stairs/ tried to give you a kiss/ you said oh how cute/ look how you drip drip” – opens the playful and certified rockin’ track, “Renter Not a Buyer”, by the Portland, Maine project, Dead Gowns. It’s a line that lives out its own life, setting a frantic scene of giddy tardiness as we watch a bloody, yet passive entrance of our main character unfold. Dead Gowns is the project of Geneviève Beaudoin (“GV”), who released this song in September of 2022 as a preview to How, an upcoming EP that was released a month later. The distorted guitars, absorbing dynamics and a chorus that is worth reliving time and time again offer an exhilarating release, bearing weight to the songs influence – where “Renter Not a Buyer” becomes an anthem of ownership, as Beaudoin shifts the dialogue of ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’ towards a new idea of healing.

Before How was even written, Beaudoin was already working on a full length album, sharing in the process, “I was coming back to Dead Gowns in the middle of a transitional period. I had all of these songs I was working on and I was in that space where I should have just been really committed to finishing them.” But standing out, there were four new songs that stole her focus – marking a truer representation of where she was at in her life. “These new songs just kind of came up in a particularly hard week and it felt like I had figured something out,” she shares. Recording demos in her home, Beaudoin continues, “I started sharing them around and there was this feedback of like, ‘oh, this is Dead Gowns’. It gave me a really clear idea of the sound I was going for, and just where the project was heading.” Dead Gowns soon received an arts grant from Prism Analog, a local studio in Portland, Maine, to record what would soon become How.

Up to this point in her career, Beaudoin had always functioned as an at home project, with her partner, Luke Kalloch, co-producing everything alongside her. But stepping into Prism was not only a scenic change – entering a professional studio for the first time, but also one that encouraged artists to use vintage equipment and tape machines that she was not used to. “With analog, you can’t zero in on the takes,” she says. “That made me listen more – how does the song feel in my body as I’m playing it? How does this resonate?” Beaudoin wasn’t allowed the time to get in her own head, as she reflects, “if I think I can constantly go back and change things… then it will never get done. So it was really just like, ‘the time is now, ground your feet, take a breath and play the song.’ That’s what you’ve got.” 

“I think it’s still easy for me to be critical of my presentation at any time, but I’m really proud of what the band did in Prism. I’m really proud of how we captured it. With everything done really quickly, it doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it means accepting that you captured a moment, and that’s what it is. It’s just a moment, and it’s going to be different than the moment next week or the moment in five years when you capture it again.”

“I often feel like my songs try to start off as dialogue,” Beaudoin conveys. “In my day-to-day, I often dwell (for too long!) on what I wish I had said or what I was trying to say.”  In that sense, we are given a glimpse into her process of observation – the way that pain and healing are malleable by this exchange of momentary fiction. “Collect the lawn chair debris from my yard and paint my doorway the color of a birthday card,” she sings on the last verse of the song, “How You Act” – building upon a messy post-party cleanup scene, yet bringing a particular focus towards self agency. “Maybe the color of your birthday card is different from mine,” she admits, but this color marks a clear place of where she needs to go. “Watch me leave the table cold/ leaving with my hat and coat/ Stop to do one final dish/ and leave before it’s finished/ I’ve got a real life now,” as sung on “Real Life”, relishes in this feeling of hesitancy towards change – blocking a scene that feels necessary to live through in order to formulate the dialogue that she knows she needs to hear. “I’m not great with confrontation, so those first four songs were moments of, ‘no, I wanted to say this – this is what I am really trying to say.” 

“I was reading this article about the artist Nicole Eisenman,” Beaudoin recalls, “and at one point, they described their view of their gender as ‘I don’t buy, I rent’ – I just loved how they said that, and I could relate to that feeling from a perspective of bodily autonomy.” Living years with the often-debilitating condition of Endometriosis, Beaudoin shares, “Endo really dictates when I feel like a GV that’s recognizable to the world, vs. the GV that’s got a boiling hot rubber bottle on her stomach in bed.” These days would often bear down on Beaudoin’s functionality, as a line like, “I don’t stay long it don’t matter”, puts on a face to mask the pain, yet adds commentary on the ridiculousness to even try at all. But as she sat with this new outlook, “it just became this really freeing thought, ‘I’m a renter, not a buyer… to describe those good days or bad days,” she says.

Even extended to the live shows, Beaudoin finds comfort in letting the songs mold into their own moments – reflecting a particular feeling that is caught up within her at that time. “We always joke that we have sad “Renter” and then we have fuck you “Renter,” she says. “So sometimes I’ll say to my band, ‘we’re playing sad “Renter” tonight’ – it’s just with where I’m at in the moment.”

As How inches towards its two year anniversary, Beaudoin continues to look forward in every aspect. It’s not lost upon her that the person she is now will inevitably change in time, and so will the way she perceives these songs as their moments change with her. But as ‘bad days’ go, what is considered to be long lasting feels less contracted, drawing the line between the pain that she carries and the truest form of GV that she can find. “I think it’s just being more open about these bad days. It tells you what’s bringing you down and how you can use that knowledge to pick yourself back up and make the choices that will recenter you.” 

A year after the release of How, the songs were repackaged by Vinyl Me, Please, for a special pressing of Dead Gowns on vinyl for the first time ever. The VMP edition consists of seven songs total, with the addition of “Kid 1”, “Castine” and “Kid 2” closing out side B. “We actually put some songs that I thought might have gone on the full length record,” Beaudoin shares; the one that had been put on hold for the time being. As the album unwinds, living through alt-rock convos, enduring ballads and multifaceted orchestrations, “it feels like a bridge that brings you from that first record to what we will put out in the future.” Taking the time for these new songs find their moment, Dead Gowns is currently recording their next album, set to be released in 2025.

Written by Shea Roney | Photo by Tadin Brego