Sarah Rose, Susy Reyes, Beth Ballinger, and Kienan Dietrich speak with us on literature, rituals, and 22nd-century punk rock.
Punk-rock sextet Sarah and the Safe Word recently performed with Shayfer James at Photo City Music Hall in Rochester, N.Y. as part of Shayfer’s Shipwreck Tour. We got the chance to interview the band, gleaning insights about their processes on and offstage, some opinions about the future state of the genre, and, of course, their excitement about rest of the tour.
Thank you for taking the time to let us conduct this interview with you on behalf of Behind The Curtains Media and SwitchBitch Noise.
Sarah Rose: Of course.
Shayfer James’s Shipwreck tour features 22 stops, including the venue called Hell, located in Atlanta, Georgia. Since you’re originally from there (Georgia, not Hell), what leg of the tour are you most excited about visiting and why?
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I think this is the first time we’ve ever played the West Coast of America, so we’re really excited to play L.A., Seattle. I mean, all those states, it’s kind of a big first for us, so it’s something we wanted to do for a long time. This is the story that it finally worked out on. So yeah, I can’t wait to hit the West Coast and it’ll be great.
Susy Reyes: That’s awesome. Yeah, We’re seeing all of America, all the places I’ve never been.
In 2019, Luci Turner of the website AudioFemme mentioned a tagline you used for the band: “Jay Gatsby died; we played the funeral”. Springboarding off of that, what are the most prominent literary inspirations to influence your lyrics?
Sarah: Wow.
Susy: That’s a great question. Normally we get lame questions like “What is a safeword?”
Sarah: So it’s hard because I draw from so many different literary sources. I’m a big book nerd. I mean, Kienan [Dietrich] is too actually, so he could talk your ear off about that. But what I’ve been really into lately is the writing of V.E. Schwab. She’s a fantasy writer that I love. There’s a lot of really great world-building, and I admire her a lot. Erin Morgenstern wrote a book called The Night Circus. That was one of my favorite books I’ve read. If you know our band, you know, that we kind of align with the whole aesthetic of that book. Yeah, those are the two that are coming to mind right now. I often say that K.A. Applegate, who wrote the Animorphs series, is one of my favorite authors of all time. She’s a huge trans advocate too, if you go on her Twitter, and I probably owe a lot of my childhood creativity and her coming out as a queer person to that book series. I think if you identify with Tobias from that series, you probably are inevitably going to be a non-binary person.
Speaking of Kienan, [Sarah] and Kienan have cited older genres like cabaret, vaudeville, and burlesque as the punk rock of their time. What do you imagine the punk rock of a century from now to be like in theme, if not in musicality?
Susy: I love these questions.
Sarah: I’ll say this. I think that no matter what it sounds like, punk rock is a movement that was inherently rooted in queer liberation.
Susy: Yeah, it goes hand-in-hand.
Sarah: So whatever the punk rock of the time is going to be a century from now. I’m pretty sure queer people are going to be the people inventing it.
Does the band have any pre-show rituals?
Sarah: Yes, we have. Like we have one for this tour.
Susy: Yeah. You want to do it?
Sarah: One, two, three.
Sarah, Susy, and Beth (singing): Welcome to the Jungle! [Kienan joins in, ululating to the “Welcome to the Jungle” refrain]
Susy: Ah! See? You heard it!
Sarah: So, that’s our group ritual.
Beth Ballinger: Like our own little things that we do, though. You know, we do our little, like, vocal warmups, you know, walking around. And I know I do a tea and maybe like a moment of peace for a second. And I think we all do. We kind of all go to our corner for a second and then we come in for that. “Welcome to the Jungle”.
Sarah: It’s a “Welcome to the Jungle” circle before we go on.
In your opinion, what are the best and worst parts of going on tour?
Susy: The best part, honestly, is meeting all the cool people. We’ve met so many friendly faces while being on tour, and, like. I mean, we get to meet y’all. Like, that’s amazing. And it’s just. It’s. It’s amazing to see just how universal music is and the fact that, like, America is huge. My family’s from Mexico. And I mean, Mexico’s a big country, and I’ve done the drive from Georgia to Mexico and literally, it takes us 20 hours and it’s just so cool to have people on the other side of the country like, “yeah, we love your music!” And then across the sea as well, like we got a UK tour coming up. And so to me, that’s one of the funniest things. I run the merch and we all pitch in and run the merch store, just getting to meet everybody and like hear everyone’s story, where they come from, what they like, or the people who have never heard us before and they gave us a chance. Can we back up to that literary question [for Kienan]?
So you and Sarah have cited older genres like cabaret, vaudeville, and burlesque as the punk rock of their time. What do you imagine the punk rock of a century from now to be like in theme, if not also in musicality?
Kienan Dietrich: I think there are several themes that are just straight-up universal anti-inflammatory; individuality, independence, that kind of thing. I think those themes are pretty much the same centuries from now because they were the same as, you know, centuries past. It’s just the authority change. The names change, and the dates change, but the feelings don’t change as far as the style, like the music. I have no idea, man. I mean, within my lifetime, music went from cassette tapes to CDs to digital. So I’m assuming like 100 years from now, kids are going to be like, Yeah, when I think of that, my favorite song just plays in my head instantly.
Sarah: Oh God, I think of Betamax.
Kienan: The good thing is, by then we’ll have robot bodies. Yeah, You know, we can just download.
In your opinion, what is the best part, and the worst part of going on tour?
Kienan: It’s a tie between being able to see all of these locations that I would never have the opportunity to normally, and seeing the audiences react to all the differences, just a sea of people who love what you do and are so into it and just like keep singing back at you. People being, you know, changed, people experiencing emotions from things you’ve written. So probably a tie between those two. And as far as the worst, I mean, other than the gas, which is kind of an obvious thing floating around there, gas and all that.
Sarah: It’s all money.
Kienan: I would say just being away from home, you know? Yeah. You’ve got a cozy little homestead of just being away from that, like missing our dog and all that kind of stuff. But it does even out because we get to experience things we would never have experienced.
If there was one song from Sarah and the Safe Word’s repertoire that you’d add any one additional instrument to, what song would you choose and what instrument would you add to it and why?
Kienan: That’s such a weird question because that’s never stopped us.
Susy: Which is good. Literally, when we’ve recorded, there’s been, like, what, 200 tracks on one song.
Kienan: We’ve definitely broken 500 tracks before, on some of the horn ones.
Beth: Yeah, for sure.
Kienan: I guess if I would just go back and add any instrument, I would add an orchestra. Is an orchestra an instrument? I’d love to add, like, a full 60-piece orchestra.
Sarah: I think Bring Me the Horizon did a record where they have a great orchestra, Right?
Susy: You know what I would like to add? I’d like to add a mariachi band.
Kienan: Yeah, we wouldn’t add that to a song; we would do the song.
We know that you all are doing the UK tour after Shipwreck, so after the UK tour, what are your plans?
Sarah: Well, the record [The Book of Broken Glass] is coming out during the tour, so we have the new album that’ll be out this year. So we’re going on the UK tour and then we’ll probably do another tour in September. That’ll be a headliner, so that’ll be fine. We don’t know exactly where we’re going yet, but it’ll probably be a U.S. tour. We had some conversations about doing an Asian tour eventually, and we’d like to do that. But yeah, I would expect that we’ll probably do another round of U.S. tours later in the year as well.
We wholeheartedly appreciate Sarah and the Safe Word taking time out of their schedule to allow us to interview them! You can listen to their newest album, The Book of Broken Glass, on Spotify now, and be sure to catch them performing with Shayfer James during the Shipwreck Tour!
