The performance at Rumba Café began with Hailey Dahl’s back to the audience as she conducted an orchestra bathed in blue light with sweeping, theatrical gestures. The orchestral introduction reflects Dahl’s broad musical range and her refusal to be defined by any one style. Throughout the show, she metamorphsized by cycling through genres, costume changes, and intense emotional states that played out across the stage and atop the bar. Before the performance, clad fully in electric blue, Dahl shared her creative philosophy with me.
“I don’t think I could just make one kind of music,” she said. “It’s actually very hard for me not to be totally all over the place all the time, because I really love everything. I have to reel myself in. I never want to do the same thing twice. I even have trouble writing second verses in songs because I find it really boring to return to the same thing again—I’d rather just do something different. Which is something I really love about Mitski. I feel like she never does second verses, and I love that.”
Dahl’s latest work appears in A24’s coming-of-age film I Saw the TV Glow, where she performs her newest song “Claw Machine” featuring Phoebe Bridgers. With tears of blue dripping down her cheeks, Dahl delivers her lyrics in a bedazzled corset and velvet jacket, fully embodying the vulnerability of the song. The film, centering teenage alienation and emotional surrealism, is the perfect match for a Sloppy Jane song.
“I really wanted to write something that had the same depths of teenage devastation as the version of Mad World that’s in that movie,” she told me. “I’d been saving a few of the lines that appear in Claw Machine for a long time—like ‘I paint the ceiling black so I don’t notice when my eyes are open’ and ‘I think I was born bored, I think I was born blue’, and ‘heart is like a claw machine.’”
Dahl enjoyed the creative freedom she was given when working on music for the movie. She fondly remembers filming:
“It was the hottest day ever in New Jersey. It was disgusting. But I feel like that made it more real—it felt more like playing a real show, which is always really sweaty. It was funny because we had such a short amount of time to write and record the song, so a lot of it wasn’t fully done. We were planning to redo the strings and other parts. So I had to give this full, intense performance to a kind of empty demo. It felt uncanny, but it was really fun.”
The scene cuts between Dahl and Bridgers performing the track on stage, underscoring their long creative history. Sloppy Jane was the first band signed to Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, but their history goes on long before that.
“I’ve known Phoebe since we were kids, and I think we’ve always had a lot of mutual admiration,” Dahl explained. “We hated everything in high school together, which I think is like being war veterans or something—we have a forever bond from that. I’m just very proud of her in general. It’s been amazing to watch her very, very deserved rise.”
More than any specific genre, Dahl is known for the immersive depth of her performances. One of her most well-known projects is her studio album Madison, born out of what she describes as “an insane heartbreak” in 2017.
“It was totally unrequited, unrequited love. I was, like, so obsessed with this person. He fully didn’t care, but I kind of just decided that I wanted to really dive into it. Men in the Renaissance era got to have muses and be super weird and pine over women. I wanted this to be like a mused situation. Like, I wanted to just be super weird about this. And so instead of kind of pushing it down or processing it in a healthy way, I found a suit in the trash and I wore it for a year and didn’t wash it and let myself really simmer in this heartbreak until I came up with the idea for Madison. It came from this mix of being inspired by Phil Spector, Wall of Sound and also opera and very dramatic revery stuff. I had the idea to make a record in a cave and I thought that the image just seemed so obvious to me that I was sure it had been done a lot. But then when I looked it up, I found that it had never been fully done and that really excited me because my favorite ideas are ones that feel super obvious, but somehow missed. I decided that I just wouldn’t stop until it was done.”
Dahl and her friends drove across the U.S. doing mini sessions in caves before landing in Lost World Caverns in West Virginia. The toy horse on the Madison album cover? A gift from the man who inspired the album.
“It became this whole thing,” she laughed.
While searching for the perfect recording site, Dahl was introduced to Brent Underwood’s Ghost Town Living project in Cerro Gordo, a 19th-century mining town in the California desert. Inspired, she began building her own studio there.
“It’s a really slow process. The town’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s northeast of Los Angeles, three and a half hours. It’s hard to get people or supplies up there. But I’m doing it slowly. Brent’s a good friend—he’s lived there alone for five years. I started doing cave recording experiments in the abandoned mines and just built a really strong relationship with the place and community. I actually lived there full-time for a year and a half, then part-time for another half year, but I moved back to New York because my band is there.”
Dahl’s performances often take the form of theatrical fever dreams. She recently completed a three-night residency in New York, each show themed and costumed, with audiences invited to participate.
“That was one of my favorite things I’ve done. I had writer’s block and wanted to play shows, so I created a residency where every week had a different band version and theme. We did a chamber band wedding, a cowboy country band, and a rock band as a corporate motivational seminar. We had weird activities at all of them. But at the wedding one, we did a cake eating contest, which was disgusting and so fun. And I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life than watching that happen. I just wanted to see if somebody would get married at the show since it was a wedding show. Actually these two, like the most precious people that I’ve ever met, this very young, gay couple from Salt Lake City flew out and got married and they made everyone cry. In my head, I was like doing it to commit to the bit, and then it was like the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever seen and everyone was sobbing. And they’re having a wedding now that their families are going to see. They invited me to their wedding this year and they’re coming to see us at Kilby Block Party. I can’t make it to the wedding, unfortunately, but I really want to. It’s just really sweet, and now I feel like we’re, like, friends for life.”
The color blue is featured in most of Dahl’s work. The Rumba stage was illuminated in blue light, and Dahl performed in a deep velvet blazer with sharp, villainous shoulders, matching cape, and knee-high boots.
“I made that outfit with my friend Amber Doyle. This cycle is ending, so I’ll change it up soon. But I’ve wanted a suit like this since middle school—my vision of a rock star suit. The cape has holes for the spiky shoulders. That might be my favorite feature. Blue—I’m just a very committed person. When I get into something, I go all the way. It simplifies things—shopping, decorating, dressing. And blue is infinite. I’m not the first artist obsessed with it—the color has so much depth.”
Her inspiration comes from many places, but nostalgia plays a big role.
“Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of music I loved in middle and high school. I’ve gone all the way back. So right now it’s all My Chemical Romance. I also love Hole—they’re the best. I listen to all kinds of things. When I was working on Madison, it was a lot of Scott Walker and experimental orchestral stuff. I always go back to the Beach Boys too. So musically, I’m all over the place, but I really focus and try not to listen to too many things outside of what I’m writing. If I’m working on rock, I listen to rock—because if I hear classical music, I’ll think that’s what I should be making.”
About the future of her work, Dahl left me with this.
“The next record feels much different than Willow. But it carries some of the same theatrical elements, there are things that I think are signature to my work, but I don’t think that a genre is part of that. I’m just very excited by everything. I think that a true fan of this project is a fan of not knowing what they’re gonna get next, because I think that it’s always going to be evolving.”
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