E.D. Sedgwick is Sick of Wearing a Dress All the Time

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Full disclosure: I hate music reviews. I’m a musician, and something about distilling music into esoteric words from a Thesaurus makes me nauseous. It’s like taking your favorite song, scraping out the feeling, and replacing it with cold, slimy, sock vomit. That said, the Washington, DC-based dance-punkish band E.D. Sedgwick has a new album out that I’d like you to know about. So to solve my moral conundrum, I won’t tell you what to think. You can do that for yourself. I believe in you! Start by streaming the track, “It Wasn’t Me,” here, and listen as you read.

E.D. Sedgwick is the project of Justin Moyer, a musician and journalist for The Washington Post. (He doesn’t like writing music reviews, either.) Founded in 1999, it has in the past consisted mainly of just Moyer, with or without the backing of guest musicians. Now there are three other official members—Jess Matthews (drums), Kristina Buddenhagen (bass, vocals), and JosaFeen Wells (vocals)—giving the group a refreshing gender ratio amid today’s Indie-rock brodeo. The band releases its albums on Dischord, the seminal DIY label founded by DC punk legend Ian MacKaye, best known for his groundbreaking bands Minor Threat and Fugazi. Moyer has been involved with Dischord for more than a decade via both E.D. Sedgwick and his previous bands, El Guapo and Antelope.

Moyer tells Mother Jones that the latest album, We Wear White, is “the first record I’ve made with a specific group of people. It’s a document of our time together.” The band, which in the past has also been a one- or two-piece, went on a performing hiatus in 2001 when Justin was diagnosed with epilepsy and could no longer drive a tour van. But the project came back with a vengeance in 2004, when Moyer started performing as his transgender alter-ego Sedgwick—a Warhol scenester who OD’d on barbituates.

But he eventually grew “tired of wearing a dress all the time” and decided to give the band a fresh start.

“Everyone wants to change the name of their band every time they get a new drummer. I don’t really believe in that,” Moyer says. “It’s cool to stay connected with who you are, but move forward.”

From Dischord’s E.D. Sedgewick “one-sheet“:

E.D.’s lyrics have drifted away from the pages of People magazine and toward topics relevant to the here and now—retro-fetishism, gentrification, and why it was totally a mistake for you to get that DC flag tattoo. It includes Moyer’s first ever song about smoking marijuana (full disclosure: Justin Moyer has never smoked marijuana).

Moyer adds that the new record is “more organic…raw, simpler, less electronic.” 

According The Washington City Paper‘s Joe Warminsky, the album shows that Moyer has “obviously been suppressing or subverting some serious rock tendencies during his time as a Dischord Records guy.” Bobby Power of Foxy Digitalis says the record “Mixes blue collar power pop of Ted Leo and scruffy DC post-punk of Q and Not U” and this is “yet another bizarre gem in Dischord’s crown.”

You can read some disparaging remarks in those reviews about hubris, schtick, kitsch and urban socioeconomics if you’re so inclined…or better yet, listen to the album yourself. It comes out on Tuesday and you can buy a copy here.

E.D. Sedgwick is kicking off a European tour on November 23, so if you’re in Berlin, Wroclaw, Hradec Kralov, or any of these cities, go check them out, whether your favorite record is Fugazi’s Steady Diet of Nothing or Kesha’s Animal. As the band signs its emails: “Thanks for your time. Good luck in life. PEACE BE UNTO YOU. Edie loves you.”

Click here for more music coverage from Mother Jones.

Correction: A previous version of this post included a Gif that incorrectly identified Moyer. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate