INTERVIEW: Dora Jar releases new single 'Bump': "It has been a cathartic thing to get rid of this cognitive dissonance of feeling like I needed to pretend I was fine when I really wasn't."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Erica Snyder
New York born, LA based singer-songwriter Dora Jar has been releasing music for just over a year but has already shot to the top of the most influential ‘ones to watch’ lists. Her warm indiepop has brought her a burgeoning fan base and streams in the millions.
She has just released her new single ‘Bump’. It is an eclectic and hypnotic song that kicks off with sounds that evokes medieval folk music before introducing electronica and indiepop. Dora’s voice floats over the music, ethereal yet commanding before closing the track with a whisper.
“I wrote ‘Bump’ when I was living in Poland and for the first time in my life I didn’t really know anyone in that city except for the family I was staying with so I wasn’t bumping into people I knew anywhere,” Dora says. “This song felt like a prayer to encounter a meaningful coincidence and eventually it began happening, not with people I knew, but I would see images from dreams manifest in real life, and it sparked this feeling that life had been waiting for me to take note of all the little details because they are leading me somewhere. I drank a lot of black tea with family during this time & became obsessed with teapots. I had an image in my brain of a long human with teapot feet.”
Currently supporting superstar Billie Eilish on her Australian tour before embarking on her first headline North American tour in November, Dora Jar is rounding off 2022 on a career high. With more music to come soon, she is only going to become bigger in the coming years with music that enthrals and works its way into your soul. We recently caught up with Dora to chat more about the creation of ‘Bump’ and her music career to date.
Hi Dora so great to chat to you today. Talk to me about your latest single ‘Bump’. Sonically, it's not so much of a throw someone across the dance floor as it is a complete spine tingling, physical melt.
I'm glad you describe it that way. I feel the same. It's probably one of the more surreal songs I've put out, definitely a wider landscape and a longer song than then most of them.
There’s something almost meditative about it, without it being meditative you know?
Yeah, the chorus especially is like this stream of consciousness. I felt this tingling thing happening when I was writing the chorus where I was like, ‘Oh, I feel like steam’. I had been doing these meditations by this woman named Tara Brach who always talks about feeling the inside of your hands, like from your palm to the back of your hand and feel the sensation of your cells, and feel it going from ice to water to vapour. I was in that mindset, writing it, but the song really came about in 2018. I wrote the guitar and the first and second verse when I was living in Poland and I was in a new, unfamiliar place. There were no people that I knew other than my family. Coming from New York City where I run into people every day, it was like this, wishing and maybe praying for some kind of synchronicity and meaningful thing to happen. So that was the genesis of ‘Bump’.
That's a beautiful thing, and it resonates because we've all been there in our lives when you start to look at strangers, and they look like your friends from home because there's only so many faces that exists on the planet.
I feel the same! That was definitely happening and instead of running into people, there were moments when I'd be listening to a song and a word in the song would appear on a sign that I was walking past. So there was that aspect of like, ooh, something's magical, but it's not necessarily the magic that I'm used to so it's even more profound. I don't know if it's a dilemma in my life, but it's definitely a compulsion where I'm always looking to make a connection or make my confusion means something. Because I'm confused all the time and when something makes sense, I'm like, ‘whoo, what, is it me?!’
Can you talk to me a little bit about your approach to songwriting, and how the music you listened to when you were growing up informed your songwriting?
Foo fighters were kind of the big one, the first music that I was like, ‘I need to play guitar so I can be like Dave Grohl, or at least get him to like me.’ I would learn Foo Fighters songs and write my own things over it. Amy mum brought into my life more of the musicals, by Stephen Sondheim specifically, we loved listening to Into The Woods, and Sunday In the Park With George. He had so much fun with rhyming, and like strange rhymes and unexpected rhymes and that was sort of the juice of my lyrical orientation. I remember the first time I understood what a rhyme was when I was like four listening to Stephen Sondheim on the steps of the palace that Cinderella would sing.
As a songwriter, you have this incredible way of using catalysts of character within your songs. There's this definite shift of perspective and making it relevant for an audience. Have you always experimented theatrically with character when it comes to writing?
Yes. I think that comes a lot from listening to musicals, and feeling the drama of the music and understanding that what makes something dramatic, is also what connects us to it. And brings out our own obsession with our own story, finding the meaning in whatever our lives are. I remember feeling bored as a kid and then trying to trick myself into having fun. It was coming out of the age of playing make believe alone and I was like, ‘maybe I'm being watched right now by angels, and so then life is just a performance for angels’. Then, if I wasn't feeling very productive, or I was just kind of noodling on guitar, I'd remind myself with that thought of ‘I'm performing right now’. I would actually connect to the moment more so that that was helpful. Performing on stage feels a little bit more familiar and comfortable, because I can be like, ‘these are the angels that I was practising performing for my whole life.’
Your song ‘Lagoon’ for this year’s EP comfortably in pain is about a lonely mermaid who craves intimacy. I love this song so much. Talk to me a little bit about this track because so worth a pick apart for anyone that hasn't heard it yet.
Thank you. ’Lagoon’ is one of the unique songs that I didn't bring in a guitar part first. Most of my music starts with me on guitar, and then I'll build it from there with melody and the lyrics always come after, because it's the hardest part. But with this one, my friends, Jared Solomon (Solomonophonic) and John DeBold, built the whole song basically, minus lyrics and melody. We were going to have a session and they were playing that before we started. I was like, ‘Wait a second…’ because literally, the whole song was in my head already, the lyrics were right there. Just the sound of the guitar that Jared was playing and John's drum kit that he had had in his garage, it was so visceral. In my head was a mixture of the mean mermaids in Peter Pan who were pulling Wendy's hair, and then also, there's this Moses Sumney video for the song ‘Lonely World’ where he saved this mermaid and she ends up killing him. There was one writer's block moment, I was like, ‘what am I saying here?’ And I looked back in my notes from years ago, and there was this note that said, ‘my mouth is like an open wound’. And that was like, ‘okay, that's the lyric’. That's something that's been very helpful over the years, treating songwriting or writer's block as this collage of time. Using this element of chance, like when you open a book to a random page and the first word that pops out - how is that relevant? I use that to finish the blank space.
I think that's beautiful. I imagine that must have more than elevated your songwriting when you had your lonely time in Poland walking the streets, you have books, memories and music. Sorry I’m projecting here!
No, that’s beautifully succinct and true. The alone time is really where it happens, for all of us creatives. We come together to finish, but we need time alone to begin and have our own inner worlds, which I think is something that is not valued and very neglected in today's society. We don't really encourage people to have their own inner worlds and inner meanings, which is a part of you that no one will ever know but it's what makes your life enjoyable. At least for me, to have like my secret mysteries and projections and know that it's all a story I'm telling myself, but I need to have that to have an imagination. The alone time is really where that all happens. People think a song is written in like three hours, but really it's like five years of just wondering.
The honesty and the metaphors and the nostalgia in everything that you're putting out, is what we've all been missing, which us why you're blowing up. Do you feel the music you are making now was the kind of thing that was missing from the music you were listening to growing up?
Maybe. Something in my own music that took a while for me to get to was this vulnerability of admitting my own wrong. Because there's so much shame in the world and we all feel shame. It's a very…I hesitate to say useless emotion, but I really do think it is useless to feel shame, unless you're reflecting in a productive way. With my song ‘Garden’, I'm saying, ‘I'm living inside a demon’ in that song. I'm talking about a time when I was less conscious about how my life influenced the people I loved. I had trauma from my sister passing away when I was 14, and all these things that I didn't really deal with for many years, until I had this revelation that brought everything to the surface and showed me’ you're lying to yourself about how you are, and therefore lying to everyone else’. So I think admitting those things in the music has been a super cathartic thing to get rid of this cognitive dissonance of feeling like I needed to appear a certain way and pretend I was fine when I really wasn't. Because when you pretend you're fine, and you're not, you are also making someone else pretend they're fine, and then there's no room to connect and what's the point of that? It's so easy to be like, ‘they're toxic, and this is bad, and I'm good,’ but that's not true. We all have these things we need to work through and connect to other people through that so that we can all get better and heal.
I think that's a bloody brilliant answer and a really good insight and I wholeheartedly agree with you! Dora we've got ‘Bump’ we’re melting physically and mentally listening to it. Tell me what else is coming up for you?
Well, I'm in this moment in time where I feel like I've shed a lot of skin and I've kind of gone through the cycle of like, I've released my first year and a half of music. I’ve thrown a lot of curve balls, every song sounds pretty different and it's like this fun house where every room is decorated totally differently, but it's all in the same house, you know? And I think I'm like moving into a new house. My first show was a year ago in London in The Waiting Room for 150 people, crazy. I'm seeing how certain songs that I wrote translate live and there's this really fun unhinged bandiness to them that I'm like, oh, I want to bring that in from the beginning. So that's where I'm headed, writing with people in a bandy way!
‘Bump’ is out now via Made Of Elves/Island Records. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Dora Jar you can follow her on Instagram and TikTok.
