How does one cope with the pang of desire? It’s the tender, sometimes volatile question that confronts and transforms Genevieve Beaudoin on her debut full-length as Dead Gowns, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow. With a yowl, a whisper, or a candid, conversational affect, Beaudoin’s potent melodies and moody, varied arrangements invoke a story of dissatisfaction, intimacy, and transition throughout the record’s twelve songs. 

A deft lyricist with a sweeping range of poetic color and texture, Beaudoin paints her story in dark romantics. She presents a woman in the high summer of adulthood deciphering life’s capacity to fulfill desires or let them go painfully unmet. These cravings – to be touched, to be known, to have just one more encounter with someone lost to time – are a lacuna that Beaudoin prods at with the curiosity of an artist only satiated by the full expression of a feeling. 

Tracking for It’s Summer,... began in the early years of the pandemic, coming together across a patchwork of sessions that spread out over the following years as the band also recorded, released, and toured the 2022 EP How (and its 2023 Vinyl Me, Please extended edition). In the album’s final form, we find the unique sounds of the Maine locales that hosted those sessions – a desacralized church on coastal Deer Isle, an old gymnasium on Peaks Island, and various home studios – and the hands who shaped the record, including Beaudoin’s longtime collaborator and co-producer Luke Kalloch and a tight circle of East Coast instrumentalists. 

Though never named outright, Beaudoin’s home in Maine – and its ragged, granite-strewn coastline – is an evocative character inhabiting the album, a force even more implacable than Beaudoin’s emotions. Also present is the acute awareness of time passing – the album swelters between seasons, taking the proverbial sweater on and off as the months change and experiences, relationships, and versions of Beaudoin bloom and wither. 

The first season of It’s Summer,... opens with the question, “How Can I?” where hand-plucked, meandering guitar voicings widen into a vast, vernal landscape. Punctuated by percussion and an urgent wall of electricity and guitars, Beaudoin dredges through the mud, withholding truth from a loved one and feeling the relationship rot in turn. On the second track, “Wet Dog,” there’s a marked change as Beaudoin fervently pursues what she wants, careening through the feeling like “a horse cut from the carousel” while a walking groove simmers with the loose tinge of psych rock.

“There’s a sense of freedom by starting in an autobiographical place and then expanding into fiction,” Beaudoin says of her approach to writing about lived experiences. “I learn so much about what has happened by exploring what could have been.” On side B cut “Swimmer,” the track opens with a phone call between two people transformed by time and memory, who later are “burning indigo” on a rocky beach. “It’s raining and they’re like dogs,” Beaudoin says of those hopeless lovers. But as her lyrics reveal, the scene on the beach never happens because the phone call never went through. “While many of these songs can read like scenes between two characters, it’s ultimately one-sided visions,” she said. 

Autumn arrives as the record progresses, and Beaudoin’s perspective on desire matures, expanding outside the boundaries of romantic love to a more nuanced perspective on family and community. In “Brother,” there is a sleepy, breezy call for reconciliation that stings with the feeling of estrangement, while in “Burnout,” Beaudoin quietly reflects on her maternal lineage. Tempering regret with nostalgia, she recalls idyllic summers spent and perhaps squandered in youthful preoccupation in the urgently paced “Kid 1.” “I want to feed stale bread to swans / when love was a daydream in her lawn,” sings Beaudoin over a spacious arrangement of loose, airy drums and the grassy swells of guitars. The response in “Kid 2” is a distanced reverie, a sun-soaked dream recorded during a December snowstorm, a stark juxtaposition captured in Beaudoin’s gripping vocals over a cold, dampened piano accompaniment.  

As if you’re watching a photographer change a lens, you can feel Beaudoin widen the scope of her introspection as time passes. She candidly maneuvers through the isolation of chronic illness and loneliness and reveals another part of herself on the tender, languorous “See People,” inflected with pedal steel and the swooning, cutting admission “I need to see people / I live on my phone.” Then there’s the assured edge of “Bad Habit” and “Maladie,” where Beaudoin tries to stave off preoccupation by creating distance. Even still, her desires are never assuaged; they burn under the surface with a thinly veiled intensity. As Beaudoin cries at the upper reaches of her brightest register, “You know what I want / and I can’t have it / it’s a bad habit,” her desire revealed again after an attempt to conceal it.

There’s an uncanny well of power behind her willingness to inspect, reveal, and, at times, submit to her desire. The record is a stirring compilation of raw, passionate folk-rock that calls to mind the music of Cat Power, PJ Harvey, and Big Thief. Pulled from a segment of Eileen Miles’ poem, ‘Shhh,’ the album’s title, It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow, evokes a feeling of disorientation and the inevitability of change. External and internal forces charge Beaudoin, her inner world shifting much like the dizzying change of the seasons. “We get swept up in the blizzard, and then we are set down in the hot salty haze of August,” she says, remembering the Maine winters of her childhood. 

While we can’t change the weather, we can soften the blow of change, and Beaudoin resolves the record with the sparse, warm sprawl of “Sand Plumb.” Inviting breath and reflection, she asks, “How do I become the water?” –  revealing a desire to dissolve and flow freely through the seasons, the months, the years. In the hum of a solitary electric guitar, Beaudoin holds her longing in the balance, no longer overcome but embodied. By its end, the album resembles the coastal pull of Beaudoin’s childhood. These songs will pick you up and put you down again, transformed, raw, and satiated.

Photos by POND Creative