Throughout the year, Atwood Magazine invites members of the music industry to participate in a series of essays reflecting on art, identity, culture, inclusion, and more.

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Led by award-winning poet Sara Mae, The Noisy are a unique indie rock group who merge influences like Perfume Genius, Jay Som, Japanese Breakfast, and Chappell Roan with the elegance and romance of classic pop groups like The Ronettes. In 2024, they self-released their debut album, ‘The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat,’ one of the year’s more underrated titles, which we at Atwood Magazine invited them to talk us through in a special track-by-track feature.

Now partnered with the Audio Antihero label (Frog / Avery Friedman / Tiberius / CIAO MALZ / Magana), The Noisy have issued a deluxe edition of their cult favorite album, aptly titled ‘The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat.’ This expanded collection is accompanied by new music videos, and includes reimagined versions, a radio session for New York’s WVKR and a previously unreleased new song (Nightshade). To celebrate their label debut, Sara Mae has written an essay about the influence of the nightlife scene in Philadelphia, their chosen home, on the band’s visual world.

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Stream: “Ballerino” – The Noisy

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PINK MERKINS & MEAT SWEATS

How Philly Nightlife Shaped the Visual World of My Music

by Sara Mae

In the time between recording my album and releasing it, I finished my grad program and moved from Knoxville, Tennessee to Philadelphia.

It was summer 2023, a year before Chappell Roan would paint herself an oxidized green and become a fixation for a global audience, but she was already beginning to blow up. My friend Zenaida had played “Pink Pony Club” when I went to visit, and I didn’t totally get it, I thought it sounded like a Kids Bop song. But then I saw the music video for “My Kink is Karma.” Chappell was doing it all, drag, clown, burlesque choreo, theatre kid turned pop star vocals.

Early that spring, I planned for my music video for “Morricone,” a spaghetti western meets Strega Nona western, and I kept going back to the delicious alchemy of that video. Chappell’s heart shaped makeup and high drama scene cuts. The revenge of femininity made larger somehow, monstrous.

My first week in Philly, we went to see Wet Betty’s Wet Dreams at Franky Bradley’s. Wet Betty is a drag artist who’s been doing clown and performance art in Philly for over 10 years. She was coming off of her win of local nightlife competition, Snatcherella, the winner getting a producer residency at beloved gay bar Franky Bradley’s. Franky’s is shaped like a ship and is known for its fries with short rib on top. The week we moved I felt like I was floating, alternately crying and numb and missing the greenery that framed Knoxville’s quarries, the brewery where I ran into all my friends, the DIY venue with dusty paper lanterns and $3 dollar beers, unheard of in Philly, whose famously $5 city wides were likely closer to $12 these days at most bars. But then Wet Betty came onstage, and she looked straight out of the Jetsons with her uppercase 50s wig, neon green glints of liquid eyeliner. She did a burlesque routine as a clam shell. She had a neon pink merkin. She was brilliant and as the performers she’d curated went through their own routines, I started to feel a little more at home in Philly.

It wasn’t that I’d never lived in a big city – I hopped from Boston to Minneapolis to Baltimore before grad school, with some small towns in between – but the music scene in Knoxville was where I learned how to be a musician. By the time I left, “Pink Pony Club” felt like my story – “I’m having wicked dreams, of leaving Tennessee, oh Santa Monica, I swear it’s calling me.” But I came to the music scene in Philly with no album out and realized I was starting completely over. This recorded album was not yet released, and nobody knew anything about the tour I’d been on with my Knoxville bandmates, where we thought we were larger than life. I was out of my depth in a bigger scene, but I went to Franky’s almost weekly, learned all the performers’ names, and started to think harder about the visual world of my album. Good drag isn’t just about enjoying incredible performers at work (and tipping them well!) it’s also what reminds you of your larger than life self, your big gay feelings, your embarrassing quirks, and it celebrates those parts of you.

How could I tell the story of this album we made, or rather, communicate the impact of its making on my life, on my perception of myself? Making the album had changed me, had shown me I can do more than stand on stage reading poems from Google Docs on my phone, pulled young Sara Mae out of pop choir and church solos and made them a touring artist, who wanted to push themself to be a real performer.

So I got to work. For the music video for “Violet Lozenge” I worked with Wet Betty and her drag sister Avery Goodname (whose strip tease to the sound of a truck backing up remains the act I’ve laughed at the hardest) and Miss Thing, Philly drag artist and practical effects goddess. I hired Sabine, who won the nightlife sewing competition Seam Queen, home based at Franky’s, to design my meat dress for the album cover. A year later in taking on the deluxe, Miss Thing starred as a skin-pire high priestess for our song “Twos,” and did my makeup in my dream style of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Drawing from a short background in burlesque, I’ve taken a couple performance classes with people from Pig Iron, a Philly clown and devised theatre school, while beginning to think about and write towards LP2, Good Night Hot Clown, and ask questions about how I can break open my performance, how I can go bigger. In my first class of Clown 101, the instructor passed around a sheet with quotes from “the clown elders.”

The one that stuck out to me was about how a clown is who you would be if you were never told no. I produced my first show at Franky’s to celebrate its release and sang my songs to a packed room, punctuated by drag and hosting from all these artists I learned from, and admired deeply. I was counting my tips, eating the last of my Franky fries, saying goodbye to the other performers I’d cast that night, who I had admired for so long, and finally felt still. Being a fan first made me a better artist.

In a new city, where I was preemptively embarrassed and nervous to put myself out there, drag held up my loudest, most absurd parts of myself, and made me love it. I remember early on, a friend saying to me, Philly really loves clowns… and I see the overlap in the scenes, the Venn diagram that is a circle. I may be biased, but Philly drag is like nowhere else. It’s stranger, more clever, more committed to the bit. (Wet Betty once hosted a Chappell themed drag night, and it was the first time I saw her famous pizza delivery guy drag act, which culminates in her pulling pizza dough from her underwear and rolling it out with her ass on, don’t worry, a floured surface.)

My work as an artist, and my understanding of myself as a genderqueer person, takes shape in the outsized nature of drag, in the wrongness made oh so right. And the most at home I feel in Philly is still at Franky’s, watching Avery Goodname lip sync to “Love on Top” as the key change hits the ceiling and then keeps going up, or listening to Allyria Everlasting vamp while the producers help someone get ready backstage, making a story of genuine pain – getting hit by a car when she was younger – into something that had us falling off our bar stools. – Sara Mae

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‘The Secret Ingredient Is Even More Meat’ is out now via Audio Antihero.

The Noisy’s Philadelphia live dates:
Nov 2nd @ Liminal Space
Nov 5th @ PhilaMOCA (Philly Tenants Union Fundraiser)
Nov 9th @ Launderette Records (Launch Show)

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Stream: “Twos” – The Noisy

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