New to Spark Radio this week:
Eliza & The Delusionals: You
Warpaint: Lily’s HBO “Made For Love” Cut
Jorja Smith: Bussdown (Feat. Shaybo)
The Black Keys: Poor Boy a Long Way
Sleater Kinney: Worry With You
Winnetka Bowling League: barcelona
Moxyblossom: All Hands on Deck
Ambar Lucid: Get Lost in the Music
Spotlight: Lady Dan: Paradox
If you’re of working age, unless you’ve got a trust fund, inheritance, or another benefactor you’re most likely amongst the 62% of us who are working stiffs. If you’re a musician, you could add a record deal to that list, but come on, those things aren’t floating around, you gotta have a real gig or two or six. Tyler Dozier, who records and releases music under the moniker Lady Dan, is not unlike most independent musicians — she has a couple of gigs that pay the bills and afford her time to make music. Dozier has a background in photography and graphic design that not only keeps the lights on but also informs her music. In a 2020 interview with Honey Punch Mag discussing her debut EP Songs For The Soulless she said “I love conveying similar themes that I write in my music: Boredom, melancholy, anger, frustration, spite, restlessness. But visual, you dig? I’m big on color and sass. Gotta have sass”.
Raised in Dothan, Alabama she was immersed in punk, country, bluegrass, and psychedelic rock, but didn’t see a career in music as an option. Quite the opposite, she moved to Birmingham and enrolled in Christian Ministry school, but circumstances conspired to take her back to Dothan to take care of her father who had cancer, and after his passing, to Austin, Texas.
On her first full-length album, I Am The Prophet, Dozier delivers a set of songs that reflect a hard-earned perspective. She told Earth Libraries, “I learned how to show my strength, my truth, my self through music. This is my one place to be a bitch if I want to be a bitch. So many of these songs, at their core, are about me reclaiming ownership of myself.” To make the album, Dozier decamped to Nashville and the home studio of producer and musician Jeremy Clark who bought in pedal steel guitarist Eddy Dunlap, Juniper Berries’ Josh Stirm, and drummer Aksel Coe, where they set about building the songs off of her acoustic demos.
There is a depth of space in the recordings, with the addition of violin, cello, horns, synthesizer and piano, the songs shine brightly, providing the perfect bed for Dozier’ssilvery voice and personal lyrics “I took a step back, looked at my life, and detoxed it,” she says. “I started creating my own moral compass because I realized it had previously been made up by men in my life–pastors, boyfriends, people who didn’t care about my best interests. A lot of these songs are me processing and shedding all of that.”
New on my playlist this week is a track from the album, Paradox. Dozier’s lyrics sit perfectly amongst the pedal steel fills that drive the song forward as she confronts a relationship that isn’t meeting her needs “And I’m not a fan of giving up/ I just need convincing/ A paradox, a woman of stone/ To want to be loved and left alone,” and later: “And I just don’t sleep much at all, these days/ It’s like I’m waiting up to hear someone say/ “The truth doesn’t need convincing.”
With a collection of deeply honest and forthright songs sublimely produced by Clark, I Am The Prophet catches a young artist addressing life on life’s terms and, most definitely on the rise.
