The Noisy’s Sara Mae Henke takes us track-by-track through debut album ‘The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat,’ a warm, wondrous, and welcoming bedroom rock record about identity, connection, and queer metabolism.
Stream: “Ballerino” – The Noisy
The first thing you notice about The Noisy’s debut album is the sheer heat of the music.
Their lyrics ache with palpable vulnerability, and their pop-laced indie rock sound is as bold as it is brash. Each song feels like an unabridged window into singer and songwriter Sara Mae Henke’s life – even if some of the details are changed, the artist holds nothing back in capturing raw emotions and intense experiences, letting us deep into their world while creating a warm, wondrous, and welcoming atmosphere for all.
There’s no key to happiness in this world, and money trees don’t grow on Earth, but for thirty-some-odd minutes, The Noisy promises to inspire, entertain, and light a fire deep inside all who listen. The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat unlocks some deeper truths about living well as the bedroom rock outfit explodes out of the gate with a dynamic sound, charming energy, and a confessional tell-all spirit that’s as charismatic as it is irresistible.
Growing out my bangs so I can teach you
How to French braid
French press, margarine, primary blue robe
Promenade
I wanted to be dangerous before
French maid costume six figure
French doors
But walking down Guilford
with you in my yellow shorts
Is my favorite part of last year
Cinnamon bagels and shmear
Mid Atlantic manic panic
Chest freckle counting career
– “Ballerino,” The Noisy
Independently released May 24, 2024, The Secret Ingredient is More Meat is a captivating best-foot forward for Philadelphia’s The Noisy. The brainchild of singer, songwriter, poet, and multi-instrumentalist Sara Mae Henke, The Noisy began three years ago as a solo project and now includes band members Ash Baker, Josh Sorrells, Jacob Lawter, and Clay White. While the four-track Charm Bracelet EP captures Henke’s nascent artistry perhaps in its rawest form, their debut full-length effort is a refined display of their ability to blend the catchy and cathartic into one dynamic, dramatic, and cinematic universe.
“This came together when I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee as an MFA student and also working towards a full-length manuscript of poetry,” Henke tells Atwood Magazine. “Music to me meant a break from classrooms, laughing with my friend Josh Sorrells (Easy Does It) and Ash Baker (Bugs Baker) in Josh’s garage, and not having to be a professor or expert on everything. I feel extremely blessed that Josh asked me to play music with him. He was patient with me, and was willing to help me figure out these songs I didn’t have the technical skills to bring to life on my own. We tracked with Jacob Lawter, Josh’s friend from Greenville, who is a talented musician and producer (Slow and Steady) and is also the funniest person I know, truly. Jacob spent the last year painstakingly editing, re-tracking, talking through this record with me while I was in Philly and he was in Greenville. It very much feels like our record.”
For Henke, The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat is about “queer metabolism.”
“An abundant appetite, moving grief through the body, a hunger for performance and adornment, crushes and friendships that we have gathered around and been nourished by,” they explain. “This album is for our queer community.”
Smiling, Henke candidly describes the album as shiny, hungry, and (briefly) glamorous. “[The title] comes from asking Gram about the family spaghetti sauce recipe, which we made while shooting the Morricone music video, literally the day after she passed,” they recall. “It was such a whirlwind, and I am glad I was busy. I got really close with her in the last couple years before she died. It really sucks to lose someone you love.”
Their vision, from day one, was for this record to speak to express and uphold their roots. “The first day we decided to track some demos in Josh’s attic, it was around Trans Day of Remembrance and right after the Colorado Springs shooting,” they explain. “I remember doing my eyebrows blue and lighting a candle quietly in the corner of Josh’s attic. It always felt important to me that I bring my big, queer feelings to this record. I took it for granted until I lived in Tennessee how deeply important being loud about your queerness is, like you don’t know who is going to feel emboldened, affirmed just by you living into exactly who you are. You give yourself and other people permission to do that!”
“I do think I’ve been socialized to feel pressure to be graceful and sophisticated, put together, effortless. Good posture sort of thing. And this record is not at all about effortlessness. It’s about struggle! With desirability, friendships, seeing myself, being good to myself, grief. I think as I write about this now, it occurs to me how central grief always was to the record, even though I didn’t have a clear vision at all to begin with. Looking back, Morricone being the single to fundraise for the album gave the record a sort of brand identity. It’s referencing the Italian composter for spaghetti western movies, Ennio Morricone. When my Gram passed, my sweet and very Italian Gramma, the world of her kitchen, Italian-American caricatures on TV, her big emotionality became aesthetic points of reference for me.”
All these touchstones and more serve as a stunning introduction to The Noisy, who – true to their name – makes quite a lot of (wonderful) noise over the album’s runtime.
“I’m glad it shows range because I’m curious about and moved by a lot of different kinds of music,” Henke says. “It shows a pop sensibility, and while I was recording this I listened most obsessively to Chappell Roan. (The Knoxville iteration of my band and I would cover ‘Pink Pony Club’ last summer.) It also very much has rock grit to it, like the grunge-y guitar Jacob put onto ‘Twos.’ When I moved to Philly, I started listening to Mannequin Pussy (I loved Japanese Breakfast too and it led me to ‘Missy’!) and going to hardcore shows for the first time, and I would call Jacob and say, I want to do this next! So some of that snuck onto the record, in small ways.”
“I am practicing screaming and am excited to go harder on the next record,” they add. “But maybe Mannequin Pussy is a good example of a band with range. They do pop and they do punk or hardcore on the same record, within the same song sometimes. I get bored easily! I want to show many versions of myself in my music. I’m also really proud of the lyrics, especially the ones I wrote later on in the process like ‘Twos’ and ‘Tony Soprano.’”
Screaming may not be aplenty on this album, but what The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat lacks in that arena, it more than makes up for through impassioned, sonically and emotionally charged performances.
Highlights abound on the journey from seductive album opener “Little Grill” to tender finale “Neckline” as The Noisy leave few stones unturned, unpacking love, delving into sexuality, and exploring questions around identity, purpose, place, and belonging – all through relatable anecdotes that highlight life lived in meaningful little moments. Standouts range from hard-hitting singles “Ballerino” and “Backlit,” to the dreamier “Violet Lozenge” and the intensely intimate, achingly expressive “Twos.”
“‘Backlit’ is the clear hit,” Henke says on the topic of favorites. “Ask anyone who worked on the record and they’ll say that’s a favorite. Also that music video was a really empowering experience for me. Putting on that blue dress and seeing myself in drag (which I’d done before, but felt particularly special working with Julia Kempner as MUA and Caroline Knight as director) and then getting to pull on some old burlesque knowledge to do the steadicam shots. I didn’t really know anyone on set, whereas usually I was surrounded by dear friends when it came to my artistic projects, and I think in some ways it gave me more confidence that I could just turn it on like that without needing to look to someone I knew. Like hands down none of this could have happened without people I love supporting me. But I have something in me that is special, which was nice to feel that day.”
“Also, ‘Neckline’ will just always be my favorite song to sing. I am working on my relationship with my instruments, guitar and piano, and we’re becoming friends. But my voice has always been my thing. I catch myself singing when I’m scared or sad, because it comforts me. ‘Neckline’ is a song where I get to really focus on my voice, and just enjoying the act of singing. I hope I get to do that more on this next record.”
Choosing their favorite lyrics is another story.
“I’m so f*ing proud of ‘Twos,’ they say, beaming. “I was stewing on the idea of couplets to convey this idea of infidelity for a long time. In poetry, you’re always talking about how form can mirror content. I love that when I sat down and wrote this finally, it was in the back of a copy of a Lucie Brock Broido book during Big Ears weekend, which I got to attend as a music scholar! It just feels like a perfect marriage of my poetry and musical sensibilities. Also it’s hard to capture the feeling of a memory, and with Jacob and Nyleen Perez’s work (Pubelo Now) on that song, it really felt like this sticky summer I had of being an absolute mess but having brief moments of glamor.”
“Also, there’s a video of Josh singing along with me at our last show off the summer 2023 tour, at the Radio Room in Greenville, SC. I sang “Tony Soprano” and after the show Josh told me how amazing that song is, how excited he is to see where I’m going as a songwriter. Josh is a dear friend, and also taught me so much, and that meant the world to me. Anyways my favorite line is, ‘Am I arrogant, depraved? Concave shoulders, ass raised. Who am I trying to please? Two by two I almost believe your praise.’ It’s definitely the most graphic line on the record, which I want to say is NOT why it’s my favorite. It just perfectly articulates the question I’ve asked so often, which is, who am I performing for? It feels like an existential question of my art, and I’m hoping to move into new territory on the next record, but definitely in grad school, this feels like the core question of what I was writing about. Was I doing all this for me? Also that internal rhyme goes crazy. Sorry I mothered!!!”
Even for vegetarians out there, The Secret Ingredient Is More Meat is sure to uplift, enchant, and enthrall.
Whether you yourself connect to the intimate emotions and experiences expressed in The Noisy’s debut album, or take these songs as a window into the artist’s innermost sanctum – into their world – there is no denying the passion, the heart, and the humanity at the core of this special record.
“I hope people feel less alone! Whether it’s having a catchy story to keep them company on their road trips alone, or feeling through muddy queer feelings, or missing someone they’ve lost, I hope this record can make people feel held!” Henke shares. “The response from my friends and Philly community and people around me has been already so heartening. I think any question that art is frivolous feels irrelevant. It is life-affirming, and I’m so glad that it seems other people have found aliveness in the art I make too.”
“I think it was Jeff Tweedy who said, ‘you don’t know what you are doing on one record until you finish the next one.’ I’m starting to demo out the next one now, and so it is only a little bit starting to feel clear to me what I was up to. I was trying to open myself up again. I’d been really hurt, isolated, and feeling like shit about myself, and was acting from that place. I was trying to move some of those feelings. And arriving at the next period of songwriting, I definitely feel differently, more readily. I’m grateful to my younger self for that work.”
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside The Noisy’s The Secret Ingredient is More Meat with Atwood Magazine as Sara Mae Henke goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of their band’s debut album!
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:: stream/purchase The Secret Ingredient.. here ::
:: connect with The Noisy here ::
Stream: ‘The Secret Ingredient is More Meat’ – The Noisy
:: Inside The Secret Ingredient is More Meat ::
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This album was written in my time in the poetry MFA at UT Knoxville. It was my place to go when school felt academic, overwhelming, too serious. I wrote a lot of these songs with Josh, then Ash and Jacob. I worked through a lot of my big shames here. I grieved my Gram here. And I started to take myself seriously as a musician and performer channeling these stories.
Little Grill
I must have been reading Gertrude Stein when I wrote this. A lot of word play. I finished it in one sitting in my partner’s parent’s attic in New Jersey. To me this one ended up feeling like me and Ash’s song, my bassist from Knoxville. We sang a stripped-down version facing each other in a small bookstore in Boston, our first leg of the summer tour. It felt like telling a trans fairytale.
Ballerino
So many attic songs! Josh, my first big collaborator in Knoxville, and I wrote this together in the spring in his attic in Knoxville. I wanted to write a Vundabar song, a true pop rock song. I came up with the words and it ended up being a love song for my partner, Alex. He’s a dancer, and we fell in love in Philly and Baltimore in 2021 right when things were starting to open back up from the pandemic. I took him to have martinis for the first time on a chilly patio, we did each other’s makeup and took pictures, we went dancing at the Dolphin. This song feels like a handful of vignettes from that time. Just the feeling of opening myself up to the world again, quite literally, but also after a long hiatus from earnest attempts at romance.
Twos
I am so proud of this song. I had been sitting on the concept for a little while, and then during Big Ears weekend in Knoxville, I sat between shows at Barley’s, had a Blue Moon, and wrote it out on the last page of my copy of The Master Letters by Lucie Brock Broido. It felt like the perfect combination of my poetry self and my music self. And it talked about a sad and hard time in a way that felt sexy, mysterious, and sad all at once, which felt honest.
Backlit
There’s an old demo of this song that is interspersed with voice memos between me and my partner when we started dating, that sound of the grocery store check-out robot saying “move your tomatoes on the vine” over and over. It ended up completely transforming. I had written this riff I was really proud of, and I brought it to Josh and said, I want this to sound like “Diving Woman” by Japanese Breakfast. We played it in his garage over and over, moved around the pieces, tried out new moments for the peaks and valleys. I think the harmonies really solidified it. We were all so tired at that point, it was right before our last show of the summer tour at the Radio Room, and we were in disagreement about whether to get tacos and tattoos, or whether to track the melodies. Lol. We found the right balance I think! Filming the music video for this was a moment where I really surprised myself and started to take myself seriously again after the departure from the context of the Knoxville music scene. I was hitting every take, and my makeup artist, Julia Kempner, was being really encouraging, and was like nobody is stressed because you’re nailing it. It was one of the first times I felt really confident about being a front person.
Tony Soprano
I wrote about this in a secret newsletter somewhere, but this one is for my Gram. “Tony Soprano” was the last song written for the album. The early parts of tracking the album were emotionally, shall we say, ungraceful for me. Because as someone who constantly feels like I am supposed to be proving myself, sitting through Josh’s tireless drum tracking and feeling completely useless was brutal. I needed to be busy, so I went for a run one day around Furman University in Greenville where we were recording. There’s a pond and a little tower there. I remember watching the ducks, (ha, Tony) and grabbing some brochure from the floor my car, and writing in the margins with pen. I wrote the words first and the music came later. I shared in a previous newsletter the voice memo where the song kind of crystallized, sitting with Ash and getting the last chords together in the garden behind Jacob’s house, where we recorded. I read the words to Josh later that night and I remember him just being so certain, oh yeah, that’s the song. (Josh also pushed me to ask myself, why did I feel like I had to be useful at all times? To let go of the ego of thinking I’m supposed to be doing everything for the album myself. Thank you Joshy.) When I got the chords right, I brought the song to Jacob, the album producer and mixing engineer, and in the middle of playing he started moving equipment around. I was like, oh you hate it. And he said, no it’s perfect, let’s start recording.
Grenadine
This is one of those songs that jumped in my head in the shower. I went back and listened to a bunch of Lucy Dacus’s discography because I was convinced it was just a Lucy Dacus song. I spent a lot of time trying to get the lyrics right, because I’ve tried to write about this for years–working at City Dock Coffee in Annapolis, MD and what it meant to me as a 16 year old to be brought into the worlds of twenty somethings, who celebrated me, who took me seriously, who made me feel important, who made my queerness feel more urgent and real. I had these pink flower hair clips my one coworker bought me for secret Santa, that were my most cherished possession for years. I lost them eventually and was devastated, but this song talks about that person in small pieces. (And the hard rock I talk about, what to me was hard rock as a 16 year old, was the White Blood Cells album by the White Stripes.)
Violet Lozenge
This was certainly the most difficult song for me on the album. Recording went by so fast, I had about 18 hours to track all the vocals for the record. I got stuck on this one on the second morning, started crying, which of course is awful for your voice. The story of it is the hardest for me, a friend who really truly hurt me when I was already in the worst period of my life. I think it took making the upcoming music video with Sam Cush, visually realizing the speculative future with two Philly drag queens I love. Sam and I were both so exhausted after the first day of filming, but Sam went with me to a wine bar I wanted to try in our neighborhood. And we talked about gender for hours. I was like, oh this is what this song is hopeful about, imagining what could have been. I have this elsewhere, in my other queer friendships. The image of the violet lozenge comes from Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. The protagonist’s best friend is always offering them to her, which I thought was strange and beautiful.
Morricone
The original version of this song helped fundraise for the full album, and I thought the ending always sounded a little like Top Gun, in the best way. Listeners have affectionately called the album track “soft version” Morricone. Jacob and I went back and forth about it so many times. He had me record a hundred takes of those little vocal runs. Josh took the first attempt at mixing it and it reminded me of “Psychopomp,” the instrumental off Japanese Breakfast’s first album with the same title. It put in my head that it would be quiet, spare, reflective, maybe like a Samia song, but Jacob came back to me and said, what about some 80s cheese? And I said go forth! It was a moment that I’m proud of in our working relationship because I can be really insecure when it comes to production choices, and it felt like we were able to really talk through and understand each other’s points of view, and come to an agreement on direction for the song that felt good to both of us. I love the ending. Jacob snuck in some chords that truly do nod to a Morricone arrangement. Singing it live at Knoxville’s Dogwood Arts Festival for the first time this spring, just ahead of the album release, I got to hold that really high note, while Jacob broke into the big guitar solo. Marone! Emotional. Important!!
Glass of Olives
I had been watching this clip of The Godfather for years and trying to figure out how to incorporate it into a poem. Clemenza shows Michael how to make sauce, and gives him a hard time for not telling Kay he loves her, like come on, be nice to the girl. It’s a moment of intimacy between men that always really fascinated me. Then there’s the personal mythos over top of it, thinking about moments where I’ve desperately wanted connection, but felt myself becoming harsh, brutal instead. I left tracking in Greenville, SC to teach my last class of grad school in Knoxville, TN and when I came back, the boys had turned this song into this huge shoegaze moment. In retrospect, the sparkly doom of that worked out so perfectly.
Neckline
Jacob modeled the decay on the keys after the piano at the Columbus Theatre, one of our first shows on tour last summer when we finished recording. It was really hard to wait on this record, but also, the live performance informed so much of how it sounds now. We learned as we went, and I love that this song holds some of the magic of that performance. We were listening to Marina Allen a lot before recording, because Jacob had just seen her live. And I think that song “Getting Better” had some say in this production too. The album ends on a note of acceptance, recognizing how badly you want something from someone who will never give it to you. Which isn’t exactly sad. More like a feeling of readiness to hope for something else.
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