From Alaska to the big stage, Dora Jar’s debut album channels grief, joy, and wild imagination. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.
Words: Alex Cabré.
Not many emerging artists find themselves opening arena tours for A-list pop stars and rock bands before their debut album even has a title, but Dora Jar isn’t your average one to watch. In the spirit of other single-minded kooks of the moment – Chappell Roan, Magdalena Bay, and Remi Wolf – 27-year-old Dora is blazing a trail from the forest to the stage with an artistic vision that’s hers alone. Far from the bowls and amphitheatres where she performed with the likes of Billie Eilish and The 1975 in recent years, the New York-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter is peering out beneath the hood of a yellow anorak. With an overcast Zoom backdrop brimming with trees, Dora couldn’t look more elf-like if she tried.
“I’m at this guy’s place in Alaska,” she tells Dork, gesturing to a bearded figure who gives a polite wave. “This guy” is songwriter/producer Ralph Castelli, one of Dora’s closest collaborators on ‘No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire’, her eclectic head rush of a debut album that owes as much to losing yourself in the big city as it does to finding clarity in the wilderness. Driven by her innate imagination and playfulness, on it, Dora explores pain and grief as much as the ecstasy of coming of age. It asks, in no uncertain terms, “Who am I?” and in lieu of solid conclusions, rejoices at being a human being in flux. Working with trusted co-conspirators allowed Dora to channel her deepest emotions into a sonic wonderland.
“The first person I show [my music] to is Ralph,” she says. “We feel super curious and explorative together, and I feel totally free to be a freak in front of him. I think that is absolutely necessary in the creation process; you can be really close friends with somebody, but until you’re freestyling off the dome about smelly toes in front of someone… You have to be on that level of [knowing] you can say anything, and we’re going to die laughing. I trust myself to lead the music where it needs to go,” she surmises. “I also trust myself to choose the right people to foster that growth and evolution.”
‘No Way To Relax…’ gives the impression of an artist in metamorphosis. After first taking shape on a visit to Poland in 2023, where Dora has family on her dad’s side, sessions in the likes of London, Los Angeles, and Ralph’s studio in Alaska followed. New York birthed ‘Timelapse’, a tumbling reflection of being a 20-something seeking identity in the big city. There she was, “biking on the bridge when I’m buzzed off one joint”. In Poland, she found solace in long walks, reflecting on “the craziness of the past few years” and feeling “like an outsider”, curious about her heritage and how to connect with it.
One track that emerged from the trip was ‘Behind The Curtain’, a choppy, vulnerable cut that explores sensations of imposter syndrome through the prism of a favourite childhood movie, The Wizard Of Oz. “Behind that little green curtain, he’s projecting this all-knowing, powerful wizard. Really, he’s just a scared little guy pulling levers, trying to make it seem like he has everything under control. I feel like that is just the human experience – that we’re all pushing random buttons and seeing what happens, trying to make it seem like, ‘Yeah, I know what I’m doing’.” Revisiting her demo with Ralph – “he’s so good for mirroring back to me what’s worth following through on” – the two of them transformed it into the “zany and explosive” finished work.
The coolest part, Dora explains, is the robotic voice that speaks the song’s title during the chorus. It was taken from the machine used by her sister Lueza to communicate. Lueza, who had Cerebral Palsy, passed away when Dora was 14. Listeners might recognise it as the same voice used by the scientist Stephen Hawking. “Before I knew anything about Stephen Hawking, that was just my sister’s machine.”
“There’s so much to explore! I love mind-altering substances…”
Dora Jar
It’s not a surprise that grief and processing it weigh heavily on Dora’s creative output. She attributes her love of music to Lueza, who attended the Bridge School for students with disabilities in California, founded by Neil Young’s late wife Pegi. At a benefit concert for the school, young Dora watched Dave Grohl perform “and fell in love”, and she maintains a psychic connection with Lueza to this day.
Recently, Dora and her mum tried a session of ketamine therapy to help them work through their shared mourning with some interesting results. During “a guided sound bath”, Dora began to feel “like a wooden balloon. Which makes no sense, but it was the only visual that came to my head. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I am this expanding wooden floating thing’.” It reflected her interest in opposites, a theme across ‘No Way To Relax…’. “It was kind of a big feeling in my subconscious during the writing of this record – feeling at odds with myself.”
“Safe and respectful” substance use, she explains, can be a powerful catalyst for channelling emotion into art. “I love it. It’s fascinating forever to me. I don’t believe in using drugs as a crutch to access parts of your brain that would be impossible without them, but it can be helpful when used with intention and respect. So much of the fun we have on mushrooms or marijuana is this ancient wisdom that we’ve lost pure connection with because we’re escaping something instead of diving deep into… an explorative confrontation with the nature of reality! I don’t know!” she laughs. “There’s so much to explore! I love mind-altering substances… They’re magical spirits that can help guide us to a deeper connection with ourselves and facing truths that may be hard to face otherwise.”
Lueza’s influence perseveres in Dora’s life in other ways, too. The album’s trippy, lilting opener ‘This Is Why’ borrows lyrics from a deck of haikus written by Kirby Wilkins, a friend of her mum’s – “a wonderful poet and someone that I love going on hikes with.” Kirby’s son Jake attended the Bridge School with Lueza. “There’s a line ‘rough water is still water’ that comes from one of his haikus. It’s a pun! I love double entendres; I love opposites.”
“It’s a pun! I love double entendres; I love opposites”
Dora Jar
Dora worked on the track with The 1975’s George Daniel at his flat in London. “We’ve made a few songs together, but ‘This Is Why’ felt like the one that fit this album,” she recalls. “We had this demo for so long that he named ‘Monday Elves’. I was like, what the hell is this? I just leaned into the nonsense of it all. I love George. He’s such a whimsical guy; people don’t really know that about him. He really gets tickled by fantastical things and loves nerding out on the Mellotron. He did a remix of ‘She Loves Me’ too, which will be out soon.”
Whimsy is woven throughout the album, from the soft, breathy keys on ‘This Is Why’ and ‘Sometimes All Ways’ to ‘Cannonball”s Alice in Wonderland-esque melodies. The Beatles’ impact is obvious – they were one of Dora’s foundational musical influences. “I love their absolute confidence in the nonsensical and how much meaning it holds. The first thing that comes to mind is, ‘Sitting on a cornflake / waiting for the van to come’,” she sings, channelling Lennon’s drawl from ‘I Am The Walrus’. “Or ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ – ‘No one I think is in my tree’. It makes no logical sense and yet carries so much emotion and imagination. I love their melodies and how full of surprise they are. Ringo was one of my first crushes.”
“Ringo was one of my first crushes”
Dora worked on ‘Cannonball’, meanwhile, with producer Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Carly Rae Jepsen). “He offered one day, ‘Show me music whenever you want; I’d love to be a sounding board for any thoughts or confusions you have’. So I showed him a bunch of the album when it was 80% done. He really responded to ‘Cannonball’. I was like, ‘Wanna help finish it?’ It was all recorded – all the vocals and my picking guitar, Ralph had recorded cello – then Rostam came in with all these amazing chords. He added guitar layers, little key sounds, and so much texture and movement that made it feel so much more exciting and magical. It kind of reminded me of ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay, but like not! He just gave it this swirling momentum.”
“He also worked on ‘Sometimes All Ways’ with us. Same situation; it was recorded here in Alaska, then Rostam added percussion and some electric guitar in the chorus-y sections. He’s so fun to collaborate with. He’s a unique person to talk to about music, too. I feel very similar to him in the way we converse; I take a lot of pauses, and so does he. Usually, when we’re hanging out, we sit in silence, and it’s so comfortable; there’s never any compulsion to fill the space or perform. Really zenned out. It’s rare to have that patience and allow space in conversation with people these days.”
Above all, it’s the album’s rousing title-track where Dora really comes into her own. Sweeping and vigorous, Dora calls it “a song I’ve always wanted to make. It feels like something I want to listen to with the windows down on the highway.” Its crescendo finds the author at the peak of her power, wraith-like but resolute, vocal demanding, “What about me? / Everything’s changing / It’s gone in a flicker / I gotta get out now.” Dora considers it “emotional. And also it commits to the world it built.”
Mid-sentence, Dora’s smiling face and yellow hood disappear – her phone’s run out of battery, and Dork suspects finding a charger in the Alaskan wilderness might be a challenge. No matter – there’s something profound about her having the last word on ‘No Way To Relax…’. Taking heartbreak and bereavement, experimentation and openness, outsiderdom and self-discovery as spurs to build a place – an album – for herself symbolises what makes Dora Jar a pop prospect above the rest.
Taken from the October 2024 issue of Dork. Dora Jar’s album ‘No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire’ is out now. Follow Dork’s PLAY Spotify playlist here.
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