FEATURE:
Spotlight
Dora Jar
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I am continuing to look…
at wonderful solo artists for these Spotlight features. Today, here is someone who is relatively new to my ears! I am going to get to Dora Jar’s amazing E.P., Digital Meadow (she also released a charity E.P., swirly ditties, last October), as it is a fantastic release. I am going to come to some interviews and pieces around the E.P. to end. First, here is some biography about the American treasure:
“Dora Jar is an artist who refuses to be defined. Despite having only shared a handful of songs, each track the 24 year old has released has been distinctive, endlessly fascinating and, quite frankly, brilliant. From the hammering guitars on "Multiply" to the ominous "Did I Get It Wrong," they exemplify an artist with a clear artistic vision: to be as expansive, honest and unequivocally herself as is humanly possible.
Born in New York and raised in California, Dora's life has always been linked intrinsically with music. Some of her earliest memories are being with her mother, who is an actress, while she worked. "She was in the Titanic show on Broadway," the singer recalls, "and I can remember the very high ceilings backstage." Likewise, Dora remembers singing along to Stephen Sondheim musicals. "There are a lot of thunderstorms in New York, and I can remember playing the Original Broadway recording of Into the Woods as lightning was outlining the buildings. I loved that feeling of spooky darkness."
While she may have been young, the move to California irked her. "My mom remembers me saying, 'I'm not a Californian! I'm a New Yorker!,'" she laughs. However, the move was important. Dora's sister, Lueza, was born with cerebral palsy and, as a priority, her parents wanted to send her to a school for children with special needs. "It was really hard to have a kid in a wheelchair in New York City. There are so many buildings and elevators; there are too many moving parts," Dora explains. "In California, there's this school called the Bridge School that was started by Neil Young, who has a kid with the same disability my sister had, and my family bought a special wheelchair van and we moved so she could go there."
The Bridge School also expanded Dora's musical world. Each year, the school hosted a weekend-long charity benefit concert, and it was here that she was introduced to artists like the Foo Fighters and Regina Spektor. "Where we were on stage was behind the acts while they were performing," Dora says, "so you'd see the whole audience of 30,000 people. The sound is really different when you're backstage: it kind of echoes because you're not hearing the speakers facing towards you. To this day, I prefer hearing the sound from behind. Hearing it bounce off an audience is just epic."
Dora was sent to a religious school where there were around 19 students in her whole school year. While her parents were not religious, the students went to church four mornings a week. "There's something cool about the sacredness of it," Dora says of it now. "You really feel that it's a space of worship. And what does it mean when you're a kid? It's intense. And then the priest is telling you a story about the devil tempting Jesus. I was in kindergarten and I can remember being really scared of that story. My mom was mad that they told it to us that young."
While Dora isn't religious, she does practice meditation. "I think that must go back to just starting every day quietly and with some opportunity for setting an intention," she says. "I didn't realise it at the time, but I think it did instil this notion to not rush into your day right away. We have this moment to be thankful for the dew on the leaves and the birds. It's deep, but that escapes us a lot of the time."
Someone who taught Dora this sense of gratefulness was her sister, Lueza. While the pair couldn't communicate in a traditional manner due to Lueza's disability, Dora says that they had their own language made up of facial expressions and their deep connection. "She just saw the moment in its full realness," Dora says. "She was very much a big sister to me, even though she couldn't be a typical big sister. She just was. If I was being a brat for whatever reason, she would give me this look that was like, 'Really? You're gonna do that right now?' She was amazing."
The pair would watch movies on repeat together, including lots of Rodgers and Hammerstein films. "People make fun of musicals and how everyone breaks into song all at once, but actually life is kind of like that. I feel like there is a layer of life where even if it's just a mundane moment, there's a song going on. If life is a performance for the angels, which I think it is, there's a layer of performance that I think we don't even know that we're doing," Dora explains. "I think my sister really understood that, too. It's why, when someone was taking themselves too seriously, she would acknowledge that they didn't even know that they were putting on this performance. It's kind of like she was meditating her whole life. She was just watching it all and accepting it all. She had to. She had a hard physical life, but I think she transcended it in a way that most people don't get to as a result. She just witnessed and accepted. I'm still learning from that."
Nevertheless, life with a disabled sibling was complicated, and Dora says that growing up she was often avoidant and would dissociate from the realities of her sister's health issues. She describes compartmentalising her life, never letting on to friends about her emotions, and also feeling undeserving. "A lot of people think, 'Why me?' when something bad is happening. But I think I've asked that question from being fortunate in some ways. I wasn't the disabled kid. I have a body that works and I have a voice that works," Dora says. "Am I using it enough? What am I doing with it that can show that I'm not wasting it. It's a pressure that I put on myself."
When her sister died in April 2011, Dora decided that she needed to get away, heading to a boarding school on the east coast. She wasn't particularly academic, instead spending her time in school theatre productions and playing guitar in her room. She also didn't speak about her sister or her life back in California at all. "Holding so much trauma in I really felt like I was living a lie," Dora admits.
It was a process, she says, to become open with herself and others about what she had been through. But there were also the magic mushrooms. "I did a shit tonne of mushrooms and had a beautiful time for the first couple of hours; I saw the animal kingdom and rainbow dots on my ceiling," she says. "And then it was a kaleidoscope of deities coming at me indescribable shit. But the one thing that I can describe is that I kept on seeing the word 'okay.' It would shift in a good or bad way. I was asking myself, 'Am I okay? Am I not okay? I don't know.'"
Dora had been doing music all through high school, writing songs that she's glad no one can hear today. But after feeling compelled to go to college only to drop out, she found herself babysitting and wondering whether she was squandering her time. Ultimately, she ended up moving to Poland, where her father is from, to stay with her half-brother, who had just had a baby. While Poland was amazing, she was also uploading little snippets of her playing music on to Instagram. One of these videos caught the eye of a producer in London, who said that they should work together. So Dora went to London.
"We ended up making a song together and it was so good," she says. As a result, she relocated to London and began work on her music in earnest. "I was there for a year," she adds. "I'm not a producer, but I know what I want. That was training, I guess, on how to be a boss in the studio and get the sound you want. I also learned how to be efficient with the time because you will have a session with someone and you only have a day. If you want to write a song you can. I guess it was the skill of getting deep fast and getting to the point."
"That whole time in London was me proving to myself that this was what I wanted to do and wanting to know my shit, my vision and take full responsibility for the songs that I write," she continues. In the time since, she has been "finding my people who get it and who I can communicate with," including producer Ralph Castelli and Vron.
The songs that she has released so far definitely demonstrate someone who knows their shit. Her first single, "Did I Get It Wrong," is a claustrophobic trip hop song about doubting your decisions and self-blame that sounds like Portishead meets Mitski. Follow up "Multiply," on the other hand, is the complete opposite, all crunchy guitars and delicate vocals. It's still vivid, though, something that Dora demonstrates again and again on songs like the Fleetwood Mac-esque "Believe" and the haunting "Quiver," which speaks of Dora's first real experience of heartbreak. Demonstrating her innate ability as a songwriter are the tender acoustics of "Look Back," a song that was written nearly a decade ago but which holds its own among even her most recent releases.
"That song is about loss and it sounds like heartbreak, but at the time I had never been heartbroken," she laughs. "So I just wrote what I thought would be heartbreak and really didn't think about that song for five years. When I finally felt that feeling of heartbreak, I was like, 'Oh my God' and I started playing it. I realised why I wrote that song: it was to comfort my future self."
Dora's upcoming project is set to be equally as eclectic. "Musically, the only thing that I want from me is that it's not going to sound like the last thing," she says. "My next project is going to be bonkers. It's nothing like anything I've released. You're not going to get a sound from me. You're going to get me exploring everything I can do. That's my ambition. I want to stay flexible and shape shift."
Part of this is just committing to the first ideas that arrive and being playful with it. "I don't want to say that I'm not taking myself too seriously because I always am. But there is no persona, there is just me," she says. There are also no alternatives. "Nothing really makes sense to me except from making music. There is really no other option. Except, maybe, for babysitting...”.
It is worth getting to some interviews now. W Magazine are among those who have spent some time with the amazing Dora Jar. She talked about a great track from, Scab Song (which was not included on the Digital Meadow E.P.):
“Dora Jar comes up with the best ideas for her songs while walking. If the emerging musician is feeling mixed up, she’ll pop in her headphones and hit the streets. And it was through this process that Jar came up with the “missing puzzle piece,” as she describes it, for one of the songs on her debut EP, Digital Meadow, which blew up on Soundcloud soon after she posted the seven-song collection. A year prior, she’d written the first two verses for “Garden,” a dreamy track with a choir on vocals, but needed one more key component to finish the song. So she went for a walk around the streets of Los Angeles, where she lives. “I saw this dog looking up at this owner,” she says from London, where she’s currently staying in a friend’s attic, ahead of a September 27 show at the West Hackney venue The Waiting Room. “For some reason, it clicked: that feeling of being looked down on. The lyrics that came to me in that moment were, ‘It’s like I’m your puppy love, playing dead obediently. And while you’re up above, looking down on me, you wonder what I’m really thinking.’”
PHOTO CREDIT: Isy Townsend for W Magazine
Being present, a hugely popular idea among the Gen Z set, is of the utmost importance to Dora, who doesn’t make rigid plans when it comes to songwriting. “That’s a huge truth in creation, is leaving a lot of the connections to be made later and just trusting,” she says. The same ethos can be applied to her trajectory as a musician. Dora’s talent and crystal-clear tone of voice is homegrown—she didn’t attend music school or spend time in a fancy conservatory. She was born in New York City, where she spent the first four years of her life—her mother and father then moved to Northern California's Bay Area (Berkeley and Burlingame, respectively,) which did not sit well with a toddler-age Dora. “My mom told me that I said, ‘I’m not a Californian, I’m a New Yorker!’” Dora's mother was a theater actor and constantly sang show tunes around the house; her father, on the other hand, whistled to no end. “He whistles Puccini and Madame Butterfly, all of those classics. He doesn’t really like music that isn't The Beatles, opera, or jazz,” she says. She honed her vocal skills on road trips between Northern and Southern California with her mother, with whom she made up songs based upon what they saw on the road. As a result, an airy quality to her songwriting persists, which matches the ethereal sound of tracks like “Opening.”
Dora Jar’s sharp musical acumen makes it hard to believe she just released her first single in October of 2020—a time when she was trying to figure out the industry on her own, while friends and family members (her father included) wondered why she wasn’t putting out any work. “I was just so hungry, and I knew that when I started, things would fall into place, but the anticipation of releasing is such an uncomfortable place to be,” she says. “I taught myself to have faith when no one else could see. Then I realized that faith really transcends moods, and if I was in a bad mood and having a moment of self-doubt, I just remembered the bigger picture and that helped me work on a song”.
Prior to getting to more coverage about the E.P., a deep and extensive interview from Lyrical Lemonade grabbed my focus. It is interesting learning how this magnetic artist first caught the bug and started to foster this passion:
“Sam: So, talk to me…Where are you from originally? What was your upbringing like and how did music fit in to all of that.
Dora: Okay, yes. I was born in New York City and then I moved to California when I was 4. There’s a home video of me somewhere saying “I don’t want to be here, I’m a New Yorker”…and I was 4, which says something about me and my personality; But, I don’t know, I feel like the energy of New York just downloads into whoever you are. When you’re born in New York, it’s like, I’m New York…This is who I am.
Sam: Well that makes a lot of sense too, because your melodies are incredible. With that, when was the moment where you maybe picked up a guitar for the first time or you realized that you wanted to do music?
Dora: Yeah, so when we moved to Northern California for my sister, the school she went to had a benefit concert every year…naturally, because Neil Young started the school with Peggy Young and so he would open this two-day, weekend long huge concert at Shoreline Amphitheater which is a big tent outdoors. 30,000 people or something came and he would open the weekend playing acoustic and I’m like 4-years-old at the first one and the crazy thing was, I would push my sister up this wheel chair ramp, well I guess my mom did the first year, because I was too small; But I would stand behind the wheelchair and watch Neil young from behind, looking out to the whole audience and that was the craziest feeling ever and I knew that it was crazy even being that young. I was like “woah, I know I’m behind the stage right now.” And then it started raining and Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters came out and everyone had to play unplugged and Foo Fighters is usually electric guitar heavy, but he’s playing all of the Foo Fighters songs acoustic and in the rain and I fall in love and I’m four and that was when I was like, I have to find out how to do this; and that’s when I started learning guitar.
Sam: Okay, so now, take me to what it was like transitioning from having fun with music, to moving into a space where you wanted to make it a career.
Dora: There are so may lanes to go in. So many people say, especially when they’re an artist, they say “the only thing I can do is this” and I really feel that. I love babysitting. Thats’s another thing I feel really good at.
Sam: Wow, I have so many questions for you, I want to just pick your brain all day long. But, tell me about “Multiply”. I’d love to hear about that song.
Dora: So its in my dad fad tuning which is one of my faves, actually my guitar here is tuned in it now, so it’s an open chord. I found the riff and I was like “wait a second”, and I remember, the first time I played it, I was wearing theses lacy gloves that I found at my cousins apartment and it was really squeaking and I was like “ooooh”. And I didn’t write anything over it for a month. I just had that riff and I kept playing it. Suddenly, the lyric came to me : “When I lean in, you multiply” and I was thinking about my ex and when our faces were close it would get blurry and he’d become 4 different people, but then it was also kind of deep, like when I get close to you emotionally, I see different versions of you; Like I see different sides of you that I haven’t seen before. So I went from that and I think in the past I would’ve tried to stay very specific with that idea, but I’m glad that I kind of just wrote the emotion, not taking the words so seriously, but letting the melody give meaning to the words. So it just fell out from there and I recorded it with my friend Ralph Castelli who is amazing. His music is amazing, but the way he listens and knows exactly what to do. Not too little not too much, he knows the right amount. He knows the right mic to use and then we just did it in 3 hours. I was impressed because that never happens.
Sam: Well that track is so good. It should have like 20 million streams. And I know we DM’ed about it but these last songs that you just put out, you told me that one of them was like 7-years-old, so tell me about these 3 songs and how the reception has been.
Dora: I’m feeling really good about it. It’s always a relief putting stuff out because it builds up with meaning and then it gets to have new meaning when its out of your hands. But, yeah, the last one, “Look Back”, I wrote back in High School and I wrote it before I felt any type of heartbreak that was romantic, but I definitely had big losses in my life and it was at a time where I actually wasn’t looking back at all.I couldn’t reflect on things that were too painful. I didn’t have the capacity or the tools and ti wasn’t really until I had this crazy shroom trip that allowed me to face certain things and become honest about my emotions, not only with myself but with other people as well. Yeah, so I wrote look back and there’s an old video of me on Facebook playing it and it’s private now because I down want anyone to see it, but maybe I’ll make it public now. But yeah then I finally found a real heartbreak this past year and the song just…anytime I was like really upset, I would just hold my guitar and I would play the riff that it opens with and just sing it to myself and I was like “Oh my gosh, that’s why I wrote that song. It was to comfort me now.” Like my past was comforting my present which is funny because a lot of people are saying that we should speak to our past self nicely, but that was the opposite for me. Like, I’m here for you and just remember that I gotchu and vice versa”.
Actually, I want to finish with a feature from Loud Women. They chatted with Dora Jar last summer about my favourite song from Digital Meadow, Polly:
“What’s emerged is Dora Jar’s debut EP, ‘Digital Meadow’ – an assured but remarkably eclectic body of work. The project was introduced by first single ‘Multiply’, which twisted influences of grunge, folk and rawly honest pop to breath-taking effect. Other EP highlights include ‘Opening’ (“caterpillars totally dissolve in the chrysalis before they form into a butterfly; I want to dissolve my sense of every day self everyday so I can fly”) and future alt-pop anthem, ‘Polly’, which is launched alongside the full project today. The results are variously existential – ‘Wizard’ was as inspired by Dora’s Halloween costume from when she was 7 as it was astrophysics – as they are deeply touching: ‘Garden’ faces up to your own toxicity and the search for divinity (“I am an absolute stan for Jung”), whilst ‘Quiver’ is that feeling of someone echoing through you, even if they’re not in your life anymore.
By the time ‘Digital Meadows’ closes on the resounding ‘Voice In The Darkness’, Dora Jar’s status as one of our most exciting new artists is in no doubt – not that she’ll stop there. “I am my truest form when I am changing shape, morphing sounds, and shifting my point of view. This project is an exploration of my impulse to shape-shift. That’s my ambition.” It’s all there, too, in the alias of Dora Jar itself: her Polish family name spliced in half, it leaves (as does ‘Digital Meadow’) a future open to possibility. “I want to leave the door ajar in my imagination. Let light seep through the crack”.
If you have not heard of Dora Jar before, she is someone whose music I can confidently recommend. There are so many different and incredible artists emerging this past year or so. Make sure you add Dora Jar to your playlists and musical radar! Someone who is going to go far, you will want to put this artist’s work…
IS in your ears and mind.
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