As Dead Gowns, Maine songwriter Geneviève Beaudoin navigates between folk-rock, alt-country, and indie with a certain, weather-worn intimacy. On her second album, Vegas, she turns bright lights and dark waters into an exploration of quiet ruptures, blurred memories, and grief, guided by a voice that anchors even as it unfurls.
Dead Gowns ALBUM RELEASE SHOW w/ Helenor
Fri 10/23
7pm doors/8pm show
21+ | $15 adv./$18 day of
Remembering it over and over again: the way it happened in Vegas, the way beginnings spill over onto endings. Geneviève Beaudoin, the Portland, Maine-based songwriter, went to Las Vegas to help a close friend move and start a new life there. But buried within that newness, there was an old and gradually widening fracture—and in that city, the friendship ended.
On a certain level, we anticipate strain and rupture in a romantic context. But we don’t as easily expect or extend that same kind of awareness to close friendships, which cut just as deep, and hold up just as much of our sense of belonging and mattering. Feeling raw and unraveled, Beaudoin realized these were songs she needed to hear, as much as she needed to write. Back home in Maine, she began crafting her second full-length album as Dead Gowns.
Recorded in a farmhouse at the foot of the White Mountains with Beaudoin’s long-time partner Luke Kalloch, and produced by Sam Kassirer and Colin Lester Fleming, Vegas is a series of raw, smoldering songs that suddenly gape. It is an album that watches grief move, point by point. Every track blurs place and time, as memory and self, seed and fruit, “hardcore and wellness” become refracted and indissoluble.
The result is all bright lights and dark waters, every instrument a response to the ache of Beaudoin’s voice, a voice which increasingly anchors the album as it unfurls.
