Mannequin Pussy Built Something Extraordinary
Fine Lines
A Vulture series in which artists break down lyrics to their latest album.
Fine Lines
A Vulture series in which artists break down lyrics to their latest album.
“I’m this growling animal stalking the stage,” says Marisa Dabice of Mannequin Pussy.Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice gets a distant, weary look in her eyes when she recalls 2021. “Our chest was empty,” the 36-year-old singer and guitarist says of her band’s whirlwind year, which included the start of a two-year tour, their music being performed by a fictional band on HBO’s Mare of Easttown, and gear worth $50,000 being stolen from their van. “There wasn’t space or time for us to write.” It became clear to the group that if they were going to make an album, they needed to decamp to a new destination.
So in December 2022, Mannequin Pussy went to Los Angeles to work with producer John Congleton, whose credits include St. Vincent and Angel Olsen. “That was the first time we’ve ever done something like that,” adds Dabice, noting that past albums, including their 2019 breakthrough, Patience, were written from their Philadelphia home base. The resulting project, I Got Heaven, spits, sobs, and screams, sometimes all at once.
As Mannequin Pussy have evolved from a ramshackle duo — founding guitarist Athanasios Paul departed in 2021 and the group is now composed of Dabice, Colins “Bear” Regisford, Kaleen Reading, and Maxine Steen — the band has defined punk on its own terms. On I Got Heaven, melodic softness is just as powerful as chaotic rage, and the record explores the connection between solitude and desire. As Dabice notes, it’s the only Mannequin Pussy project that was not created in the aftermath of a breakup. For inspiration, she turned to vivid, violent films by the South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, including The Handmaiden and Thirst. “His films combine romanticism and eroticism,” adds Dabice, who wrote a majority of the new album’s lyrics, with contributions from Regisford. “I don’t like when those worlds exist separately from one another because they are very intertwined to me.” She broke down the relationship between these concepts, in addition to her thoughts on loyalty, faith, and vibrational energies.
“I Got Heaven”
“I went and walked myself
Like a dog without a leash
Now I’m growling at a stranger
I am biting at their knees”
This is a vivid image to open an album.
I think of humans as the most brutal types of animals. I often find myself comparing myself to an animal or feeling like a dog, like growling or enjoying petting. Animals don’t always have control over their circumstances. Whereas humans hope to get to a place where they have a little bit of control but are still dealing with these innate animal instincts. That line was also inspired by our live shows. I play guitar less and less now and we call it going unleashed, like I’m this growling animal stalking the stage.
Was this song always intended to open the record?
No. I won’t say who, but there were some people who felt very strongly that “I Got Heaven” should be the last song on the record. But when I showed John Congleton a few of the sequences we came up with, he said it would be a mistake not to make it the opener. I also felt that it had to be the first song. It’s like swinging on the chandelier, Here we fucking are after being away for years.
“Loud Bark”
“Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up
Could get the collar round my neck
Or find one that’s big enough
I’m a waste of a woman
But I taste like success
I keep all of my sugar where I know you like it best”
This verse feels like the album in a nutshell, touching on ideas of power, independence, and womanhood. How are these ideas related to you?
I’m particularly proud of that run of lines. After I ended a relationship in 2021, I realized that I had been someone’s girlfriend pretty much my entire adult life and as a result, had been treated like property or something that belonged to someone else. So this line is about that feeling of someone trying to put a collar around my neck, and yet my instinct is to shun that, to say, “No — I’m not the type of animal you can put a collar on. If I want to walk by your side, that’s going to happen without a leash.”
Regarding the “waste of a woman” line, there’s someone within my familial sphere who has insinuated many times that the way I’ve lived my life is wrong, that the type of woman I am is wrong, and that I’ve wasted exactly what a woman is supposed to do with her life. I felt so angry about that for so long, like how dare anyone accuse me of wasting something when I really feel like I’m in a position of building. So this is me accepting it, like, Well, if I’m a waste of a woman, then it’s because I’ve done something extraordinary with my life. I’ve been able to build a life that feels more aligned with what I would choose than what someone else would choose for me.
“Nothing Like”
“Oh my useless life
It meant close to nothing
Until I breathe the air you breathe”
Around the release of Patience you spoke about self-loathing as a learned concept. You wrote, “Self-hatred is taught to us so how do we unlearn it?” But there are quite a few lines on this album where you seemingly slight yourself, including this one.
I really hated those lines when we were in the studio. That’s not the way that I feel about myself, in terms of having a useless life that needs someone else to float into it to make it have meaning. But “Nothing Like” is a bit more of a fairy tale. It’s storytelling. It doesn’t feel true to my perspective until the end.
I first started writing “Nothing Like” six years ago when I was stoned watching a Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel supercut on YouTube. I decided to write a song from their perspectives, so the context is an ill-fated romance where they’re obsessed with each other, but their love leads to the actual destruction of the world. That relationship reflects how love is so often represented in the media, that to be in love means to completely destroy yourself in the process of merging with another person. I think it’s no surprise that a lot of us find ourselves in these very toxic entanglements because we are told that love is supposed to be difficult, that love is something you’re supposed to fight for. I think that’s one of the most evil mythologies of our time.
“I Don’t Know You”
“I know 4, 5, 6, 7 ways to get ahead
But I wouldn’t know how to get you into my bed”
This song follows a nursery-rhyme, number-counting structure, how did you land on that?
When I first started writing that song it existed in a different key and it wasn’t working. That singsongy thing came out as soon as I changed the tuning. John was sitting next to me and he encouraged me to keep going so I used “1, 2, 3” as placeholders thinking I would write actual lyrics later. But then I couldn’t get away from them. There are a number of songs that employ that melodic tool and I have a feeling they probably all started the same way. It made sense to allow this song to be a little childlike because it’s about fantasy and desire. There’s something immature about having a crush. I also was just thinking about the Feist song, like this is a moment to do “1234.”
“Sometimes”
“I’m a giver I would give it all to you
Even if it meant that I would have to choose
Between my life and now it’s aging fast for you”
Where was this line coming from?
That outro bridge is reckoning with the uneven cycle of giving within many relationships. Very often one person is a giver, and another is a taker who expects the other person to acquiesce in certain ways that are in line with their perception and desire of you. The “aging fast” line is a reference to growing older and finding myself now in my 30s wondering, What’s a body worth?
“OK? OK! OK? OK!”
“You’re gonna fuckin
Beg
And heel
And learn
Only way thru
Is heal
And learn”
I love the interplay between “heel” and “heal.” What is the relationship between those words here?
Colins “Bear” Regisford: There’s a duality in a lot of us. There’s one side that wants to scream and yell at the world and blame everything else. Then there’s the other half that can try to tell you to just slow down. It’s not necessarily about begging for other’s forgiveness, but forgiving yourself, and healing to try to actually learn from pain. The first half of the song is this person screaming about all these things that are going wrong. The only calm and assertive part of the song is the most monotone, and that’s the person saying, “No, bend the knee, you need to ‘beg and heel and learn.’”
Marisa, you adopt a snotty Valley-girl voice on this song. What’s the deal with that?
This song started as that vocal affectation. We were in our practice space and I just started being like [adopts a snotty Valley-girl voice], “Okay, okay, okay.” Kaleen started playing that drum beat and so we had this top-line vocal affectation going on as Bear and Maxine filled in the spaces. I’m embodying this character of a woman who is pretending to listen and not actually giving Bear the time that he deserves to be heard. I think this song is emblematic of the way that we don’t listen to the emotional world of men, sometimes especially those whom we’re close to. I think we can be very quick to villainize that experience instead of trying to find a commonality between it. Also, this is kind of what white feminism sounds like in a sense: It’s very vapid and doesn’t actually have anything to do with true intersectionality.
“Softly”
“What if one day I don’t want this anymore?
What if one day I don’t want you anymore?
What if one day I don’t love you anymore?”
Have you found answers to these questions?
I don’t worry about the “one day” in terms of my deep friendships and creative collaborators, but I think this is what scares me so much about romantic relationships. I think those are honest questions to ask yourself. I’m not saying that you should go into everything with an exit strategy, but everyone should be aware of where their feelings are at and if they are living them as honestly as possible.
How does this verse relate to the wordless screaming that comes after?
The rush of all those questions in succession creates this overwhelming sense of emotional responsibility and the possibility of your own failure to deliver on this romantic promise. That scream is coming from the place of frustration with the self; it’s an exasperated sigh rather than something of rage.
“Of Her”
“I was born
Of her fire
Of sacrifices
That were made
So I could make it”
When did you begin to become cognizant of the sacrifices your parents, especially your mother, made for you to succeed?
My mom had a stroke when I was 23. This was also the event that led to the formation of Mannequin Pussy. I was feeling very intense anger and despair and didn’t know what to do with it. My mom was in the hospital and the night before her surgery, she started opening up about how her life might have been different if she had made different choices, and feeling that she sacrificed her autonomy and individualism to be part of a family unit and to raise me and my sister. This song is for my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and the great-great-grandmothers, everything that they did to put me in a position of independence.
“Aching”
“I got to be free
Rewind yourself get me off
Make me feel so elite
I want it I want it I want it
I want it in threes
But I got to be free”
Where was your mind at when you wrote “Aching”?
Maybe this is too New Age-y, but I really believe in people’s vibrational energies and the way that they intersect with your own. Best-case scenario, every single relationship in your life is making you feel lighter and more cared for than you would on your own. We talk a lot about this as a band. It’s hard to keep a band going for a long time and to make sure that what you’re bringing into that space is something that makes everyone feel more inspired and elite just by the virtue of being together.
“Split Me Open”
“My body’s a temple
It was built for you
To do all the things you dreamed you do
With someone who deeply wants you”
Do you consider this line to be romantic?
I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever written. There’s something very divine about the intersection of bodies. Yes, it’s animalistic, yes, it can be full of lust, but it’s a divine union that happens between people. To recognize your own body as possibly being built for the pleasure of another feels very devotional to me. I don’t consider the title “Split Me Open” to be graphic or obscene in a porn-daddy way. I think of it as in your whole being, your whole body, starts to crack open to pour someone into it when you really want them.
Why was this song the closer?
A lot of the other songs are conversations that are happening between people or changing perspectives throughout one song, but “Split Me Open” is about talking to yourself. It happens within the headspace of recognizing your desire, being fearful of your own desire, and then ultimately deciding that this is not the time or the place for it. If I let this thing overwhelm me, I’m going to be distracted and not be able to continue on the path I’ve been building for myself. It would have been easy to end this album holding hands with someone. But at the end of this record, it’s still a solitary figure walking alone.
More Fine Lines
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