I discovered The Noisy on GetMusic.fm and was immediately captivated by their dreamy vibe and haunting arragements. Then I started checking out their videos and was completely sold. It’s obvious that the band’s front-person Sara Mae Henke isn’t just a musician but an artist writ large. And the fact that they’re from my home town of Philadelphia was the icing on the cake.

How did the Noisy come together?

The Noisy is the name of my great grandmother’s girl gang in Pittsburgh. They played music together, they were dear friends, there’s a bunch of old photos of them in the 1920s just being teenage girls running around. My first release was with my guitar teacher at the time, Jonathon Rodriguez. We played guitar on the 8 track he had, and recorded it in my bedroom in Boston. My second release I did with my friend Danny Mendelson from college, in his basement in Pleasantville, NY. Danny has always pushed me to play music more, has been encouraging of my singing. I’m lucky for him!! In Knoxville, my fiction workshop classmate Josh Sorrells asked me to play music together. He was way more experienced than me and got me to really take the project seriously. I was being asked to perform in Knoxville before I could really even begin to put myself out there. I wouldn’t be playing music without Josh and that scene. By the time I moved I had become ambitious. I couldn’t imagine a life without music. My first year in Philly was so hard, trying to meet the right people to share the project with, trying to get to know the scene better and feeling sort of useless without the album having come out. My friend Kat Freeman from Larlene played shows with me and was the first person to make me feel included and loved here. I’m so lucky for our friendship. It was such a relief last spring when the debut LP was finally done and out in the world. Now, my main collaborators are Daniel Sohn, who has his own project, and plays in Sunday Evening Drive, another amazing Philly band, and Nate Kim, who also plays bass in Glitterspitter. I feel really grateful for their big brains and their encouragement!!!

The band originally formed in Knoxville, Tennessee, but moved to Philadelphia. What brought the band to Philadelphia, and did the move have an effect on your music?

I hope you can hear both Philly and Knoxville in my music!!! I grew up in Maryland actually, listening to a lot of country music with my parents and dancing at bars on the river. I think I felt really at home in the Knoxville music scene, and it deepened my understanding of folk music, and encouraged me to not be ~too cool~ to do things a certain way. I feel like you get a lot of messaging that someone has to tap you on the shoulder and tell you you’re special. But Knoxville music is all about welcoming each other in and playing together. I remember this amazing fiddler Evie Andrus was watching her friends Kelsi Walker and Labelle play a show, and they just invited Evie up impromptu and she started improvising. I think my lyrics and my way of singing feel born out of listening to Carrie Underwood and Shania Twain all my life, and my friends in Knoxville, who wrote the songs with me, left their mark on the album for sure.

I moved to Philly while the songs were being produced and mixed, and I had grown up loving Hop Along, Japanese Breakfast, The Districts. I think you can hear their influence in a huge way on the music. With “Twos” in particular I kept talking to the producer, Jacob Lawter, about the balance between twinkly production choices and grungy guitar in “I Don’t Know You” by Mannequin Pussy. We were trying to achieve a similar contrast.

You were studying poetry in Knoxville. How have your studies informed your music? 

I feel like this is a central part of my music! Oftentimes the lyrics do come first, or the internal rhyme and wordiness informs the melody. I think a lot about the natural rhythm of language, and the story of the song. The technical things I know about poetry (scansion, rhyme, meter) are my entry point into thinking about the technical parts of music. 

You’ve worked with artists who work in various media—ceramicist Lou Howard, illustrator Sarah Moore, designer Alex Bruce and multimedia artist Em Vieser. Why is working with artists from different fields important to you? Ho do they all contribute to the whole that is The Noisy experience?

I love music because it’s never just one medium. You have to involve fashion (I’ve recently been working with a couple Philly designers for looks for shows and music videos) performance art (stage presence, but for me, also working with drag queens and clowns) music videos and film, and then for building out the visual world of the music, so much album art and merch that brings in other people. I love that my project is not mine alone, but also belongs to so many friends who help me finetune and build out the vision!

Your first single, “Morricone,” evokes the music of Ennio Morricone and the westerns he’s known for scoring. What attracts you to that sound—and, for that matter, the western imagery that pervades the lyrics?

I liked the too-muchness of spaghetti westerns, and was interested in the caricature of how Italian filmmakers saw American-ness at the time. It all felt like drag. I was always writing songs about desire back then, and I think the too-muchness of desire lended itself to that extravagant, intense backdrop.

“Morricone” helped launch the crowdfunding campaign for your album More Meat. How did your crowdfunding efforts play out, and what did they reveal about the community you’re a part of?

Oh I mean it was wild. We raised our goal amount of $3000 and it is truly because of the people in Tennessee who invited me into the music community. I have moved a ton, and am blessed to have friends and family all over who supported the campaign. But it was amazing how much the campaign was uplifted, especially by queer people in the scene in Knoxville. 

You’ve described it as an album for your queer community. At the same time, it’s an album that anyone outside of that community can enjoy. In a way, I feel like it might even dissolve boundaries between the two communities, or at least underscore their interstices. Am I onto anything there, or is there more to it?

When I lived in Knoxville, there was a lot of legislation being passed trying to ban drag in public, and by extension, make it unclear whether it was even legal to be trans in public. Of course now, and always, there is so much legislation being passed to police trans and queer people, but it felt especially important at the time to be making music videos in and out of drag, to write songs about queerness, to involve queer people in the project. Queerness asks you to be your truest self, as Ocean Vuong put it, to find new ways of being other than the ones that have been carved out for you. I think there is a lot about my project that was forced to find alternative routes. I regularly went to DIY shows when I was younger, I started going to drag shows, and I came up in slam poetry. My approach to music borrows from each. I hope my work cedes the need for those kinds of boundaries, and affirms other artists’ own ways into art making. 

The video for “Violet Lozenge” features imagery inspired by Twin Peaks. (The red curtains are great, but I really love the—I think it’s a stalk of broccoli rabe—sprouting from the seat of a chair. It’s very reminiscent of the Evolution of the Arm!) Is David Lynch an influence on your work more broadly?

I went through a huge David Lynch phase and actually wrote about it in my newsletter here. Here is an excerpt:

In grad school one of my professors said, what is at stake for you is being understood, is legibility. And I think that was the wrong framing for me, because then it swallowed the entirety of my writing. I was too occupied with being understood, rather than pushing past that to everything that was of interest to me.It’s helpful for me to talk through the tone of his work because it reminds me what kind of artist I want to be. I was talking with my friend Josie and we were both saying we’re leaning more towards reading huge honking tomes of books, and I think that feels Lynchian to me. I was realizing so much of my work references other work (inherently gay) but I want to push myself to try and write a new world. References aren’t bad but watching Eraserhead I was like, truly what the hell is this—it was like how Tavi Gevinson talked about Bjork, how can anyone create something that feels so entirely new and surprising??

Laura Dern’s letter to him: “Everything to you was some universal conspiracy to make the art that much more true.”

Were any parts of that video shot at Ortlieb’s? The stage in a couple of the shots looks familiar!

Yes!!! Kyle is very good to us. We played our first Philly show at Lavender Menace Fest, organized by folks from the band Larlene, and that was at Ortlieb’s. Feels like an important part of Noisy history <3

You’re currently working on your second album. How’s that coming along?

It comes in spurts. A year ago I thought I had drafted all the songs, but I keep finetuning my approach and writing more. I am taking multiple clown classes as an entry point into the content and performance style for the album. My role in these songs feels a lot more ambitious and big, as I gain technical knowledge. I was lucky for the expertise of my Knoxville band and producer for the first album, and it’s been important to me to have a stronger foundation going into the second album. I’ve been working with my bandmate here in Philly, Daniel Sohn, to write a bunch of new pieces. I feel really excited to keep growing as an artist, and learning more and more about what my own process really looks like with music. I’m being a lot pickier this time around…

What’s on the horizon for The Noisy?

Deluxe version of More Meat drops later this fall with Audio Antihero 🙂 I’m trying to make my music a sustainable practice for me, instead of shelling out money, running myself into the ground with shows. I want to leave room for the art-making, and not only be in the hustle. I think next year you’ll be seeing some new work from us for sure, one song of which is teased in the music video for “Twos” on the radio…