INTERVIEW: British breakout star DYLAN talks her music and deluxe version of 'The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn' mixtape: 'It gave me a huge reminder of who I wanted to be and why I wanted to do it'
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Lillie Eiger
The UK’s Dylan (real name Tash Woods) is quickly becoming the hottest new artists in pop after an incredible breakthrough year in 2022 which saw her tour with Tate McRae, Bastille and Ed Sheeran and score a top 20 UK album with her debut mixtape The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn.
Dylan’s music mixes electronic pop with indie and rock. She first released music in 2019 with her debut EP Purple, which was followed by two further EPs, Red (2020) and No Romeo (2022), with her songs attracting streams in the tens of millions. After supporting Ed Sheeran in 2022 she was signed to major international label Island Records, with her eight track mixtape The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn dropping in October last year.
The collection showcases Dylan’s musical versatility with multiple genres and moods. ‘Girl Of Your Dreams’ is an electronic-pop track with a speedy, insistent beat that sweeps you up in a rush of joy. ‘Blue’ is a power ballad that switches between pared back verses and a full blooded chorus. ‘Lovestruck’ is another melting pot of sounds, with downbeat, almost ethereal electronica verses, that transforms into a frenetic rock chorus. ‘Treat You Bad’ is a guitar heavy, pop-rock track, white the mixtape ends with the gorgeous, acoustic ballad ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’.
Kicking off 2023, Dylan released a deluxe version of The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn which features seven live tracks recorded at Koko in London, plus brand new song ‘Every Heart But Mine’. The single is an empowering song that sees Dylan take back control from men that like to think they can control everything, including the women around them. “Walks around like he owns the place / He's got a black suit on, killer smile on his face / And all the girls scream when they hear his name, but not me…I guess I play the game way better than he can,” she sings.
Some of the UK’s biggest young stars, Cat Burns, Rachel Chinouriri, Mae Muller, Sody and Beren Olivia contributed vocals to the chorus after Dylan spoke to them about the message behind the song.
“I have been waiting for this song to come out forever because for me, it is the biggest confidence booster of a lyric,” Dylan says. “I think the song has many meanings behind it. I see it as a reference to love, as a reference to career moves and as a 'you have no idea what i'm capable of' feeling. I felt like there was something missing in the track, so I invited some of my favourite artists that I'd been hanging out with - who all happen to be incredible women - to sing harmonies and backing vocals on the song. It was everything the track needed.”
With less than four years of releases under her belt, Dylan is proving she is an artist who deserves serious attention. She creates music with the skill and confidence of an artist many years into their career and with her insightful, humorous and relatable lyrics she is quite simply the full package - everything you could possibly want in a pop star. Touring across the US with Ed Sheeran in May and June, Dylan is on the cusp of becoming an international superstar. We recently sat down with her to chat more about her career and music.
Hi Dylan, so lovely to chat with you today. Firstly, you are very tricky to Google because of the Bob Dylan thing, and I want to go straight into the fact that you just did the best thing in the world for someone that came to your show in London thinking they were going to see Bob Dylan.
I tell you, it was the nicest story. I've done two headline tours in the last six months, I did one in November and then one in February. At the February show, this guy called Andy bought tickets for his father in law, who had entrusted him to find Bob Dylan tickets, because they were huge fans. They showed up, and obviously wrong gig, and I don't think we could be any more opposite me and Bob. I love his music, but you know, it's very different to mine. And so Andy came, and then he tweeted about about it afterwards, and it made me laugh so much, because that's not the first time that someone's shown up expecting to see Bob, which I find very, very hard to believe, because it's very obvious when you're buying tickets. Like, there should either be a photo of me or Bob Dylan. Unless Bob Dylan's having a serious moment in time, I don't think that he's going to be a 23 year old blonde girl! Andy ended up enjoying it so much, he said that he bought tickets to come see my February show. And I knew he was coming with his father in law and their whole family because they liked it so much. So I decided to play him a little cover. But I tell you, that entire February tour was hilarious, because people just kept showing up expecting to see Bob, like, there was a moment where one particular couple even managed to buy merch. They went up to the merch stand, they bought some merch and then they went stood in the crowd and they suddenly looked around and went, ‘Oh…’ And then they asked for a refund, which I found really upsetting because I wanted them to stay!
You sung ‘Knockin’ On Heaven's Door’, which I think is beautiful, because it's a great song. I hear you grew up with some of the greatest rock whalers. Tell me about your musical journey as a child and how you became the songwriter and guitarist that you are now.
Me and my dad didn't have much in common and [music] seemed to be the only bonding time other than playing Call of Duty, he trained me up to do that when I was about seven years old. He used to travel a lot for work, but that was our prime bonding time whenever he came back, he used to whack on these classic dad rock anthems and put me and my brother on the table with our plywood guitars that he'd built us. I was allowed to paint mine which has sort of run through my whole life now because I still paint all of my guitars. But they had rubber bands for strings and little guitar straps and we were there going for it most school nights. I think my mum was a little bit upset about it because she was really into musicals and like Barbra Streisand and Nina Simone and Michael Bublé, and dad was rock and roll. It was just such a huge, huge part of my life, and playing Guitar Hero was a huge part of my life. My first love was air guitar, I wouldn't say it was normal guitar, it was purely air guitar.
On stage, in your music videos, and everything you do, it's almost like I'm watching a movie of someone do it very well, you are so good at all of this. It’s like you have been doing this your whole life and you're only 23. You've got so much confidence, it's incredible. Is that you just going ‘this is exactly what I should be doing’?
I was in various bands as a kid. I had a band when I was 11, called Clueless, and there was five of us. None of us could really play and we couldn't read music and took too long to learn other people's songs. So we wrote all of our own stuff. And they were awful. Don't get me wrong, my voice was awful as well. But oh my god I had the time of my life being in that band. When I hit 13, I got a huge thing of stage fright, and just not wanting to perform in front of anyone. I had zero confidence. And that kind of continued right up until I was about 20., when we went into lockdown. So the few gigs that I did before we all went into lockdown, I was terrified. I used to be sat at a piano and I wouldn't look at the audience, and I would shake the entire way through it. A completely different person to who I am now. When we went into lockdown, and I basically relived my childhood, but with like a lot more wine! We were all up on the kitchen table again, we’d do it two nights a week and just have these huge dance parties, the four of us. And we just go absolutely crazy with our air guitar solos. It kind of slammed me back down onto planet Earth and gave me such a huge reminder of who I wanted to be and why I wanted to do it. Coming out of lockdown, I had a show with Yungblood in London, which was my first support slot, and it just changed everything. I remember standing on that stage for the first time being like “Just do it like you're doing it on the kitchen table.” Since then there's not really been a worry in the world, I love every second of it.
That's such a nice story and it's so good to hear. You have the most hardcore fans I've seen in a while as well and you've got quite an online presence as well. Does that as well help that confidence and running at your music was such integrity because you know that you're hearing constantly back from the people that listen to you the most?
Yeah, I instil confidence into myself through a lot of different ways. When it first came to starting the whole social media thing, it was really a question of just getting over myself and how much I wanted this. It was actually something my dad said to me because I was doing a whole lot of ‘I don’t want to be on the internet, why can't I do it like The Rolling Stones did it and just play live the whole time’. He just went ‘how much do you want this?’ and I was like ‘more than anything’ and he went ‘well then you better get cracking.’ So it took a long, long time to actually feel confident in front of the camera and just be able to just sit there and make a video. It's still hard now, I don't think it's ever gonna get easier. I've noticed recently that a lot of the confidence that I install into myself is by writing confident anthems, because it's almost like manifestation in a way, installing the self belief. I think what's so nice about having the fandom family that I'm slowly building is that I met a lot of them maybe a year ago, and the confidence change in them over the last year, compared to the February tour, seeing what they were wearing, screaming the songs and meeting them before and afterwards, their confidence level has gone up as well. So it feels really nice. The confidence is just enjoying everything that I'm doing. But there's still a deep level of insecurity at work!
Everyone's got that. It's that ultimate rockstar, I don't know how long this star will burn, but I'm having the best time. You spoke about manifestation and I want to talk to you about ‘Every Heart But Mine’, because this was already an anthemic, pull your bootstraps up, not today, song but then you gathered a series of some incredibly kickass women to join you on it. Talk to me about this beast of a song.
I wrote that song, maybe a year and a half ago, over Zoom with a very long term collaborator. I actually had heatstroke on the day, it was after lockdown, but on the one hot day that we've ever had in London, I managed to get heatstroke because the sun does not like me! We ended up having to do it on Zoom because I was going to throw up every 15 minutes. I sat on it for a really long time, thinking this is everything that I want to do, this is my rockstar anthem. But it wasn't quite the right time when I wrote it, and I didn't really have enough of that stuff that I could embody it. And then it felt like the right time at the end of last year, I was like ‘I just love the song, let's finish it’. So we finished it, I did the vocals and I was like it's such like a bad bitch anthem, it's so one for the girls and I really wanted to harness that power and put more of it in it. I was very lucky that I've met some incredible female artists who are now very good friends of mine. They're all so strong and so incredible and I've learned so much from them. It's so great to have them as friends because we're all navigating this at the same time. I was like ‘do you guys want to come and put some vocals on it to give it a bit more oomph?’ It was all of our last session of last year and honestly, it was one of the best days ever. We had so much fun, and I think it's really made the track what it is.
Absolutely. It's one to play in the car, in the headphones, in the kitchen on the dining table with Guitar Hero in the background. It's such a great song. And I love that we've made it onto The Greatest Things I've Never Learned live deluxe edition. Obviously, there are performances there from your KoKo headline shows, tell me what was it about those performances that you were like, ‘they can't just stay here in this room, they need to be on a mixtape.’
As an artist, you have strengths and you have weaknesses and I think one of my stronger points is playing live. Because that's when I just lose all shame, and nothing can come in between me and that show. I really wanted people to be able to experience that again, while you're in the car, or on the train or dancing on the kitchen table and pretending that it's your show. It was important to me to have live versions out there because live music is so different to hearing the recorded version. When you go to a live show, you're going to feel the music rather than just listen to it, all of your senses are heightened when you go to a gig. That's the way that I like to listen to music the most, so having those versions out there, it just means that you can relive it over and over and over again.
100% and I love what you said about you wanted to give someone a song to sing with their hand drawn guitar. Can I ask you, what were your top air guitar songs to play?
An early early one was ‘Since You've Been Gone’ by Rainbow. That was the first one that I can really remember learning all the words too. It was a constant on the kitchen table, that was the set opener. Always. ‘Love In An Elevator’. Oh my god, I love that song, and it's so long and the whole song is just a solo. There wasn't much to it other than a solo and trust me if I could do that now with my music, it would make it so uncommercial, but if I could have an eight minute guitar solo song, I can't wait. Album five, right?
There is a G3 version of La Grange, which is live in Tokyo, which is another reason I wanted to have live versions out there, and I will continue to put live versions out because that's a brilliant live recording. It's just all guitars and I know all of the solos - air guitar wise, not on the real guitar - off by heart, so I can totally pretend that I'm playing them or I could sing them to you, that's how much I love that song. How many am I allowed?!
You can keep going! These are great. And you're so right, we don't get any more the very extended guitar solo and I feel like the only time we get it is when a band is on a reunion tour, and people like Slash from Guns ‘n Roses or Richie Sambora from Bon Jovi step to the front. No one’s doing them anymore, so you've got to do it.
Well, this is the thing, I feel like another very important thing, which is why I say that my first instrument that I loved is air guitar, is because I'm not the most eloquent guitar player because I'm self taught. Because I was too stubborn to get guitar lessons so I'm like not the greatest guitarist ever. One day maybe I will be, I'm not rolling that out forever, but right now, I'm a fake it till you make it kind of girl!
Well, you fake it incredibly well and with so much joy
I couldn’t really yet make a five minute guitar solo, one day who knows? I'm not gonna rule it out.
Yeah, don't rule it out, start giving it a go air wise at home and then see where it takes you! You've had a smashing 12 months, tell me what is coming up for you this year?
I'm touring a lot this year. One of the more notable ones is I'm doing Ed Sheeran’s American tour, it's like six weeks of stadiums. I'm gonna be in heaven because I did his UK tour with him and playing those huge spaces, was just the best thing ever. And when we finished that tour, I had such a moment of despair because I was thinking, ‘Okay, I'm gonna have to work my arse off in order to get into those rooms again, because that is where I want to be.’ Another thing about the kitchen tables as a kid, dad would make us say ‘hello Wembley!’ before we played any songs, so stadiums has always been the dream. And we did that tour and it was literally the best thing ever, and I loved every second of it. And I was so gutted [when it ended] I was going ‘I'm gonna have to wait at least four years before I do that again ‘and then we were asked to do an American leg. And so I am literally ecstatic.
The Greatest Thing I’ll Never Learn (Live/Deluxe) is out now via Island Records. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Dylan you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
