INTERVIEW: Ruby Dacy of DACY on their debut EP: "The songs are all looking at things for the first time and experiencing relationships, or love, or lack of love. That's what ties the songs together."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Pop duo DACY, featuring brother and sister Ruby and Jack, create warm and romantic indiepop music and have recently released their self-titled, debut EP DACY.
Featuring seven tracks, the soundscape encompasses gentle guitar ballads, indie pop, pared back acoustica and bouncy pop. Third single ‘Alone’ opens the EP, a guitar pop track that switches up the intensity between quieter and passionate moments as DACY sing of the kind of all consuming loneliness that makes you forget how to have a successful relationship.
‘Don’t You Think It’s Funny’ is a highlight on the EP, with its pop sound, jangly beat and delicious melodies. Ruby’s vocal is beguiling as she sings of realising you want a spontaneous, one off relationship to be something more long term: “I don’t really know you, but I know I want to.”
Latest single ‘Paper Planes’ was inspired by the music of Ryan Tedder, and its pared back guitar sound is reminiscent of the music of the early 2000s. Lyrically it is about the intensity of young love.
“‘Paper Planes’ was written about young love, a love that is usually too wild to last,” DACY says. “Those first loves don't always work out, but they're the ones you want to hold onto. We liked the analogy of a paper plane, how you spend so much time putting it together and how quick the flight is over. You don't build it for the flight to last, but the fun of putting it together. It's about wanting to go back to that time and have one more night (flight) with your first love.”
The final two tracks on the EP bring in a quieter, more acoustic sound. ‘Zoe’ relies on just guitar and DACY’s voices as it tells a heartbreaking story of unrequited love, while ‘Those Were The Days’ is a lush piano and guitar ballad that looks back on a love that has ended and wishing you could return to those days.
DACY have created a charming and beguiling debut EP, full of the feels. With the theme of young love threading through the songs, they have expertly created a soundscape that matches the lyrics with music that feels like youth and first love with complete and utter authenticity. We suspect DACY will bowl you over with its magic, and we recently caught up with Ruby Dacy to chat all about its creation.
Hi Ruby, so great to see you. You’ve got your self titled debut EP out, that's a rush, and a trip and a long time coming. How are you feeling?
Really good. We recently had our launch for it at The Workers Club in Melbourne and I feel like I'm still on a high. It was wild, it was so much fun. Like you said it's been a long time in the making, so I feel like it was such a build up to the show, we were so excited. We got to celebrate with all our favourite people in one room at one time. So it was very surreal, but very cool
it's so wonderful. Of course whenever we get an EP or an album, or even a song, there is so much work that goes into one of those and also the amount of songs that are created before the songs for the EP are selected. I mean, you guys must have such a large back catalogue.
Yeah, we've got lots waiting for their time to come. Most of them on the EP are very early songs that we wanted to group together and put those out first before we get to other stuff.
There's some beautiful, beautiful songs on there. ‘Alone’ is just gorgeous. Thematically what were you going for when collating these songs together?
Jack and I, especially at the start, we used to have these big sit down meetings and just the two of us would go out to a cafe or whatever, and sit down and talk about what we want the first bunch of songs to look like and feel like. As it got closer, it kind of came together a bit more naturally than all these planned meetings that we pretended to have! The first single we put out, ‘She Wants To Be Loved’, was written almost five years ago. So some of these are old, and it's nice to look back and you can see we talk about other people a lot in the first bunch of songs, rather than ourselves. That comes from both being quite shy as teenagers and being a little bit scared of life and relationships and things like that in teen years. The first group of songs are all quite naive and looking at things for the first time and experiencing relationships, or love, or lack of love. That's what ties the songs together. ‘Alone’ is the most recent out of the tracks, but again it’s one about those ‘first time feeling’, so it felt like it fitted with these songs.
It's so nice to hear you say that because it always pisses me off when teenagers and their feelings get patronised and put aside, but it’s exactly that - you're feeling things for the first time. These songs are really important and it carries so much weight, which is gorgeous. Let's talk about ‘Paper Planes’, your latest single. There's this whole road trip montage sequence sound to it, which I love - it's a film! This is totally gorgeous.
Oh thank you. This was one of the early songs that we wrote as well. We're big Ed Sheeran fans, so it’s very Ed Sheeran- inspired probably that song. It is more of a Jack song than my song, a lot of the time in writing, Jack will come up with a little idea and then show me and then we'll finish it together and that's how the song started. We liked the idea of the paper planes being quite fragile, and this again is talking about first loves and feeling all those feelings and how, especially when you're young, it feels like everything, but you kind of know that it probably won't last forever but you’re going to do it anyway.
When you're putting songs together like that, I'm imagining you two are bouncing ideas off each other, but do you often imagine how do we build this, production wise? What instruments could further carry this sentiment forward?
Yeah, for sure. Especially with the first group of songs, we wanted to try and use minimal ingredients on them so that we could play them live as well. Me and Jack do a lot of gigs live, so we didn’t want to add too much production to certain bits, but still give it enough that it's just a bit more than acoustic guitar and piano. So in the studio, we always usually start with acoustic guitar and piano because that's what we both play and then add from there.
You come from a very musical family, did you always sing? Did you always want to make your own music?
We've got two older sisters as well, they're quite a bit older than us, and growing up they were super sporty and athletic. Jack and I were just not blessed with athletic skills! So music was definitely just something we naturally gravitated towards more than that. Growing up at home, our dad is a huge fan of music so the whole house is just a bit of a shrine to the Beatles. Dad was in a cover band in Melbourne when he was younger, he'd always played music and then in his 40s decided he wanted to do producing and set up a small studio at our house. So there was always bands in and out of the house when we were younger, and Jack and I were always idly just waiting by the back door being like ‘can we come in, can we sit in the session’ and when they'd leave we’d ask to play on their instruments. It was just always in the house, so growing up we will like we want to do that, that looks really fun.
That's great. I think for a lot of people, I imagine they don't see it and so it feels out of reach, but the fact that it was just around you growing up, it was just a very natural thing for you and Jack to go ‘Yeah, we could do this we've got a studio right here.’
Completely ignorant of how hard everything is! You see your parents so in love with it, and it's their whole life. We have such admiration for our parents and Dad, and how hard he's worked. We always just looked at him like our biggest idol. You just look like you're having the best time and I want to do that too. It's very special to be able to share that with your parents and share that passion. If we were talking about anything else at home, it's like, whatever. But as soon as you start talking about music, you can see dad's eyes light up. It’s a very special bond that we get to have with him.
That's beautiful. I love that. Can I ask you, there's this beautiful romance and thinking of romance and romantic sentiment in your songs, and that is either quite personal or you’re projecting your feelings, you're maybe revealing your desires that are tricky to voice. How do you find doing that with your brother?
It's always an interesting one! At the stare we were both quite shy about certain things and that's probably why a lot of the early songs are about someone else, or about ourselves but we're saying she or he or dance around subjects. Jack and I are super close and always have been since we were little kids. We were always the babies at the family so we always spent a lot of time together. Definitely at the start, it was a little bit harder to talk about honest feelings and this and that, but because we've spend so much time together, we kind of know what's going on in each other's lives anyway, in terms of personal stuff. It's really nice to be able to share that together. If there's certain things that either of us have written and get embarrassed and don't want to talk about, it's probably a good place to start, because it's really honest. It's definitely gotten easier as it's gone along, so now it's nice to be able to go into this year and be like, ‘this sucked, this happened today.’
That's good. And also I'm sure that there's a huge sense of grounding each other because you know each other so well.
Completely. There's a different level of honesty I think you can have with a sibling. We're harsh on each other in a really good way. We don’t have to say ‘That's awesome’, but can say, ‘No, I don't like that, let's do that again.’ And not be offended when the other person says things.
What do you think the staple ingredient in one of your songs is? Is it a certain kind of melody or style? What is it?
We’re big Beatles fan, so I feel like we love quite melodic pop music. Probably the staple for us is simple choruses. Catchy, melodic choruses is a place where we often start. Or there'll be certain lyrics, like an honest line that we'll come up with and build from that.
Something that hooks, something to tattoo on your wrist! Lastly, before I leave you Ruby, what is coming up for you guys?
We are already working on the next bunch of songs for the next EP. I'm going to start hustling and working on those for the next little while. We've been very lucky to do some cool support acts this year and we've got a few more coming up, but they're not 100% booked in yet so I don't want to jinx it! We just love playing live. that's our favourite thing to do so hopefully we'll just get to do a few more shows this year and keep working on the next bunch of songs.
DACY is out now via EMI Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things DACY you can follow them on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
