This week’s issue of The New Yorker has an unexpected cover star: Sadie Dupuis, the poet and songwriter behind Sad13 and Speedy Ortiz. The piece, “Sun-Dappled” by Nicole Rifkin, is on the cover of the August 22 issue and it features Dupuis reading outside. How exactly did Dupuis come to appear on the cover of a magazine that doesn’t traditionally feature portraits of indie rock mainstays?

“I was asked to develop this cover originally to be for The New Yorker’s fiction issue,” Rifkin told Pitchfork over email. “I thought that Sadie, who is a friend who also always has about 10 books on deck to read a week, would be the best person to ask to be in the drawing.”

Dupuis and Rifkin have been friends for a few years, and, before that, the two admired each other’s work. “She’s very involved in an extended Exploding in Sound community and has illustrated some of my favorite show posters and album covers, especially for my friends like Mister Goblin, Bethlehem Steel and Pile,” Dupuis wrote via email. “She illustrated an issue of Wax Nine’s journal and did the cover of the Adam Schlesinger tribute compilation we helped co-release, too—very lucky us!”

“Speedy Ortiz was and still is a really big deal to me,” Rifkin said. “I remember seeing them open for the Breeders at Webster Hall and now I get to text her stuff randomly like ‘hey how’s Lavender’ or ‘hey can I draw you into a New Yorker cover?’”

Dupuis confirmed that it was a text conversation in May of this year where Rifkin asked her to model for a potential New Yorker cover. “The idea made me exceedingly anxious but then I remembered it’s Nicole, who is a masterful artist, whose past drawings of me have made me feel cooler than maybe any other visual representation,” she said. Dupuis continued:

I sent some timer-shot selfies in a pose from her reference drawing, and then a couple days ago I found out this cover was a go-ahead, and was psyched to finally see it and discover all the easter eggs (which Nicole is very good at)—including my dog, Lavender, on the back cover of a fictional Wax Nine issue. Plus Dan Ozzi and Thursday by proxy and Imogen Binnie, and a little shout out to Shea Stadium and Death By Audio!

Rifkin noted that putting Dupuis on the cover of The New Yorker is a tribute to a friend whose records have meant a great deal to her over the years. “I feel like her songwriting has given me so much over the years that I wanted to give something back,” she wrote.

Françoise Mouly, the art editor at The New Yorker, also shared a statement with Pitchfork on the August 22 cover. “I was so glad when Nicole Rifkin sent her references for the cover (everything at TNY, including covers, gets fact-checked by our fabled team) and I found out that Nicole had posed a musician friend, Sadie Dupuis, for the image of a woman relaxing and reading in the stiflingly hot city,” she said. “It’s a wonderful homage. So many artists are musicians themselves (Nicole Rifkin, for one) or inspired by music. It may be that both forms of expression, art and music, are non-verbal and draw from the intuitive and emotional parts of our brain. Drawing is manual labor and for many, it’s best done with music.”