Sarah Mary Chadwick – “Shitty Town”

Photo by Sian Stacey

The star of every Sarah Mary Chadwick song is always her personality in spite of whoever or whatever the Melbourne songwriter may be throwing more than several layers of quipped shade toward. Her voice is rowdy in her boozed confessionals and her humor astutely wry, deprecating and morbid, pulling all the energy into the room her way to the point where she needn’t much dalliance instrumentally for every intonation of consonant and syllable to bulldoze you right over. “Shitty Town”, the lead single from her forthcoming album, Messages to God, is masterful at that in her singular, brutalist form. The church of Chadwick is in full regalia here – a bad breakup, a loser of an ex, and the place you both live that becomes all the more unbearable because every corner is a reminder. “You left me a widow in my life / Except not a widow, you’re alive / With your shitty car / And that shitty town / Sleep with shitty girls / ‘Cause they’re all around,” Chadwick’s voices barges through the barroom over a humbled piano and flute, as if to call out the object of discontent at the risk of her own public embarrassment. As much as this song may sound like it’s about him and that shitty town, however, Sarah Mary Chadwick is the only one you see.

Directed by: Geoffrey O’Connor