“Pulling Pork and Cranking Hogs”: On the Road With Mannequin Pussy

Marisa Dabice, the lead singer of Mannequin Pussy, is hiding from her bandmates backstage. “I can still hear them in the distance,” she says, crouching over her phone. This is the farthest she’s been from them all day. The Philly-born rock band has just set out for five weeks in one van, to play 30 shows. They’re two weeks in. The name Mannequin Pussy, like the band’s lyrics, edge us toward a sense of discord. On the title track of their latest album I Got Heaven, Dabice confesses: “I want to be a danger, I want to be adored, I want to walk around at night while being ignored.” She’s a bulldog and a tease wondering: “what if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?”

“The person I am on stage is the woman that I had repress throughout my life,” she says a couple hours before their show in Houston. Online, there’s a handful of videos that show Dabice melting against the microphone or screaming, contorted and red. You can’t actually hear her, though: the crowds at a Mannequin Pussy show are rabid and deafening. Last Friday night, we called up the punk singer to find out how she preps for the chaos, why she hates big dinner parties, and how she’s maintaining her “shiny, sexy Pamela Anderson hair.”

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ELOISE KING-CLEMENTS: How are you?

MARISA DABICE: I’m settling into the second week of tour, it’s feeling pretty good, about exactly how I thought I would start feeling at this point.

KING-CLEMENTS: Yeah. And you’re gone for a month?

DABICE: No, unfortunately longer, it’s like a six-week tour. So in like five shows, we’ll be in the middle of it. The first show of tour was in Millersville, Pennsylvania, which is like, out in Amish country.

KING-CLEMENTS: What are you guys traveling on? How are your accommodations?  

DABICE: I would say we’re relatively comfortable on this tour. I don’t know how familiar you are with touring…

KING-CLEMENTS: Unfamiliar. Talk to me like I’m a five-year-old.

DABICE: Okay, so on a first tour you’re in a RAV4, then you get a minivan, then a 15-passenger van, and then you get a Sprinter van with a trailer attached to it, and then after that, there’s a bandwagon, and then you have the tour bus after that. But we decided to do a van and trailer tour so that we can kind of like, pay ourselves the most amount possible. When you work on a record, there’s basically over a year-and-a-half of unpaid labor, so tour is your first opportunity to make a living again.

KING-CLEMENTS: So you’re in close quarters?

DABICE: Yeah, we’re in very close quarters. This is the farthest away I’ve been from my bandmates all day and I can still hear them in the distance. 

KING-CLEMENTS: It’s like you’re on The Bachelor, where you can’t stop thinking about each other.

DABICE: Yeah, I’m like, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” every day. We’re definitely on a journey.

KING-CLEMENTS: [Laughs] Exactly. Have you learned anything new about each other? Or new hobbies? 

DABICE: Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine and she said, “When your hobby becomes your full-time job, you need a new hobby,” so I’m like, “I need a new fucking hobby,” but it’s hard. Being on tour is a tough place to pick something up. I’ve gotten really into personal fitness. I don’t know if that counts as a hobby.

KING-CLEMENTS: I saw the photos of you doing some weightlifting.

 

DABICE: I know, I got 15-pound weights and they’re far too heavy. I will say, I picked them up yesterday and I was like, “Okay, this is actually going pretty well.” I’m very concerned about the mind-body connection, and to tour in this capacity is so straining on the body, so I really have to push to be healthy. Once we’re not traveling, it would be nice to try new things. In a perfect world, I would totally become a homesteader doomsday prepper. That would be so much fun.

KING-CLEMENTS: [Laughs] I was not expecting that.

DABICE: Learning how to grow my own food and whatever the fuck else doomsday preppers do. I love that show.

KING-CLEMENTS: I just watched a video today of you performing. How do you not hurt yourself, or your vocals?

DABICE: Yeah, it’s something I’ve learned slowly and painfully over time. It’s also why I started getting really into exercise. I’ve made sacrifices like quitting smoking, not drinking alcohol, because it dries out your vocal cords. If we have an off day, I usually try not to talk very much, which is hard for me, because I love to talk and assert my opinion. I’ve had to really learn how to just shut the fuck up.

KING-CLEMENTS: Do you go out after a show or just to go to bed?

DABICE: Yeah, we are very much a go right to bed band. There’s so much adrenaline that gets built up in your body after a show that it can take a few hours to parse it out. But we are a band that likes to go right back to the hotel and go to sleep. We’re pretty boring.

KING-CLEMENTS: Do you have any pre-show rituals?

DABICE: Actually, recently, it’s been putting my hair in hair rollers. I kept seeing pictures of it and I’m like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” I finally learned how to make my hair look good.

KING-CLEMENTS: What does good mean?

DABICE: To me, good means like bouncy, voluminous, shiny, sexy Pamela Anderson hair, like Barbarella. But I stretch, do a vocal warmup, pick out an outfit. It’s repetitive, and I’m someone who usually gets a little grossed out by too much routine. On tour, every day is the same.

KING-CLEMENTS: I saw that photo of you with all your bags and I also recently watched Meet Me in the Bathroom with Karen O and it reminded me of you. Can you tell us about your fashion?

DABICE: Yeah, I mean this tour has been really fun because the last couple years, I’ve had not a ton of money, but just enough to splurge on certain pieces. I am approaching fashion more from a collector’s standpoint now. I’m very obsessed with beautiful things, not in a superficial way, in a divine way. Beauty that’s the product of artistic talent and dedication. I really wanted to lean into more hyper-feminine looks because I’m really enjoying looking very sweet and angelic while screaming in people’s faces for 45 minutes. It feels like a thing many of our ancestors couldn’t do. I really like things with a hard edge and then a softness. 

KING-CLEMENTS: I really love your lyrics. Are there any lines that change the crowd when you play them?

DABICE: I’ve actually been so surprised, I’ve had a few friends who come to shows and they all say the same thing, that it’s deafening in the room with the fans just screaming along to every lyric. Even in some videos I’ve seen, you can’t even hear me, you can only hear the audience, which is phenomenal. There’s the lines that you expect. I knew, “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” was going to go off in that context, but I didn’t expect how deafening the crowd would be. Even the song “Softly,” the audience is going for it, allowing themselves to scream so loudly and so passionately, and it’s really obvious that there’s this cathartic release that’s truly needed. It feels really special. 

KING-CLEMENTS: That’s so nice. I’m so excited to go.

DABICE: What show are you going to go to?

KING-CLEMENTS: I’m trying to go to the one in D.C. with my friend Charlotte who showed me your music. 

DABICE: Okay.

KING-CLEMENTS: She’s a lesbian but she went on a date with this guy and he brought her to a show you guys were opening for and she hated the band, but she loved you all.

DABICE: Who was it?

KING-CLEMENTS: She described it as three white guys or something.

DABICE: [Laughs] That could have been so many people.

KING-CLEMENTS: What’s on your riders?

DABICE: The fun things are a dog to pet, if friendly and available. So far, there’s only been one dog named Leo. He was very cute. We have a pre-rolled joint if it’s in a state that is a real one. We have a bar of chocolate. We’ve started splitting up our rider so some days, we have sandwiches, fruit, wine, and others we’ll have a rotisserie chicken and hummus.

KING-CLEMENTS: Do you have a pre-show meal together or do you just start things down?

DABICE: Everyone’s on their own waves before the show, so we very rarely get to sit down and eat all together. But also, a group meal is one of my least favorite things in the world.

KING-CLEMENTS: Really?

DABICE: To me, hell would be having to go out to dinner with seven people every night.

KING-CLEMENTS: Is it the eating or is it the talking?  

DABICE: I think it’s the talking. When there’s so many people at a table, who the fuck do you talk to? You’re limited with who you get sat with. 

KING-CLEMENTS: A stage keeps the conversation at bay.

DABICE: Exactly. A dinner party sounds great to me, but going out to eat? Hellish.

KING-CLEMENTS: Have you had any fun fan interactions?

DABICE: I used to meet people after but it’s smarter to hide away and do a vocal cool-down after the set. One of the worst things you can do for your voice after a set is talk to people. I’m slowly amassing a pig collection, though, which I’m absolutely loving. 

KING-CLEMENTS: Do you want to talk about the pig? Maybe we’re pressed for time.

DABICE: No, you’re totally good, I don’t have to play until 9:00. There was some tour where everyone in the band was just so horny and we were making these pig jokes about pulling pork and cranking hogs, as one does, and in the studio with John Congleton, he made a pig joke in a way that was so pleasing to us. For the rest of the sessions, we called him Hog Father and we were his little piglets. Then, for the visual world of the record, that feralness and the domestication of animals and the violent relationship that exists between human and pig was very present in my mind. We just went with it and did Smithsonian-inspired album art.

KING-CLEMENTS: Your music videos are bucolic and you’re like, this feral monster woman. Are you inhabiting a character when you perform or does it just come naturally?

DABICE: It does come a bit naturally. The person I am on stage is the woman that I had repress throughout my life. It’s allowing yourself to be so put together and so unhinged at the same time, and have them coexist. 

KING-CLEMENTS: What makes the kind of show where you walk off like, “Yeah, that was incredible”?

DABICE: It’s definitely the energetic exchange that happens between us and the audience. When I look out and see that cathartic joy on their faces, when we feel like we’ve really given the audience what they’re there in search of. My favorite show of all time is one we just played at Thalia Hall in Chicago. Every now and then, you play a show and you just feel it’s a legendary moment in your life. I’ve actually felt that way at a lot of the shows on this tour. There was one show in 2021, after we had all of our equipment stolen in Ohio, and we played in Philadelphia at Union Transfer on all borrowed equipment. Before we were like “How the fuck are we going to do this?” Then as soon as we were out there, with the crowd’s energy and being in our own hometown, and without us even instigating this, the Philadelphia crowd just started a “Fuck Ohio” chant. It just felt like everyone had our backs. It was really special to feel that energy, especially in a hometown setting.

KING-CLEMENTS: I’m really excited to see your show. I hope it goes well tonight and don’t talk to anyone afterwards.

DABICE: Okay, I promise I won’t.