HOW

RENTER NOT A BUYER

HOW YOU ACT

CHANGE YOUR MIND

REAL LIFE

KID 1

CASTINE

KID 2


VIDEO



BIO

Dead Gowns is the songwriting project of Geneviève Beaudoin. Her latest collection, the How EP, is a confident declaration of self-acceptance. Written in January 2021, during a period of personal and professional flux, Beaudoin found herself taking stock of what to hold onto. Having been immersed in the recording process of a separate Dead Gowns full length, these songs rose to the surface out of necessity and quickly took on a life of their own. 

When a recording opportunity emerged — thanks to a grant offered by Portland, ME studio Prism Analog — the How EP became a reality. The ensuing record boasts a cast of good friends/collaborators, including Luke Kalloch, Aisha Burns, Nat Baldwin, Peter McLaughlin, Alex Millan, Ricardo Lagomasino, and Brett DesChenes. It is a decisive statement from a band comfortably growing to meet its potential. 

Ideas of shedding, and the power and tenderness required to do so, are evoked again and again over the course of this collection. ‘Renter Not A Buyer’ is the cheekiest of the tracks, but also the most indelible. The chorus is a veritable earworm, as catchy as it is damning. It’s a multi-faceted exploration of the shells we inhabit, the work involved in preserving them, and how they so often fail us. The narrator, hungover and late to work, tumbles down the stairs from an apartment too drafty to be habitable. Bleeding from the mouth, she tries to kiss her date goodbye, avoiding a larger reality in her body. Beaudoin’s own experiences with endometriosis inform this exploration: she sets concealed pain in direct opposition to the demands of saving face. This process is invariably fraught and she is the first to recognize the absurdity of trying at all. 

The rest of the EP is less fixated on the pitfalls of how one presents to the world. Though Beaudoin first wrote these songs as unspoken dialogues, she sees them now as affirmations intended for herself. ‘How You Act’ is a reclamation of agency, empowering the narrator to forgive and accept: “Yeah it’s messy, grow up your heart” illustrates this revelation, with Beaudoin’s voice ringing out unaccompanied for a brief moment of quiet triumph. ‘Change Your Mind’ is a moving celebration of this new life, emerging with gusto from the past. Set atop swelling strings and the warm swagger of a Fender Rhodes, the track’s affirmation feels earned and regal. But it’s in ‘Real Life’ that Beaudoin realizes that there’s no fixed point here. She must make peace with the fact that her desire for change will always run alongside a past that won’t entirely stay past. 


On the EP’s one-year anniversary, Dead Gowns has partnered with Vinyl Me, Please for the first vinyl pressing of the collection, with new songs ‘Kid 1,’ ‘Castine,’ and ‘Kid 2’ closing out the b side. Rather than detract from the central narrative, the new additions fill out the frame.  

The music video for ‘Kid 1’ (which also includes a preview of the final song ‘Kid 2’) is set in a similar universe as the music video for ‘Renter Not A Buyer’ with Beaudoin’s character experiencing the push and pull of forces just beyond her reach –– that is until she finds a way to (literally) run with it. For director Emilie Silvestri, this was an opportunity to dig into the power of objects – to provoke memory, nostalgia, creativity, grief – in a way that was both entirely different from what they created together in ‘Renter Not A Buyer’ while nodding to where that character had been and what her growth might look like.

Throughout How, now in its expanded form, Beaudoin deftly traces the molting process, from the darkly comic wriggling of the larval state to the transcendence of uncalloused being. The sense of visitation in these moments – both hushed and universal – reiterates that new life begins by accepting, rather than discarding, one’s past messes.


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