By Leah Martindale, Third year Film and Television
'The smooth edges of Dodie’s music allow troubled young girls to find something soft in a world of rough edges and sharp surfaces', Leah Martindale celebrates Dodie on International Women's Day.
As we turn the corner into March, and sidle up onto International Women’s Day, I had a little look back over my music collection and was shocked, and slightly embarrassed, by the scarcity of female voices in my carefully curated shower song line-up and cooking choreography. With musicians spanning decades, cross-continental releases, and hundreds of voices, the overarching voices were majorly men.
This realisation is slightly shocking, especially as I like to taut myself as a modern feminist actively seeking to uplift women’s voices. One voice who managed to slip through the net and fall into my collection, however, is Dodie.
Dodie’s most recent single release, Monster, revived in me a love for her sweet, soft voice, and obscurely bleak lyrics. The lyrics are creepy and sad and relatable all in one, with a sweet tune behind and Dodie’s forest nymph tones trailing over. Dodie’s Human EP has a particular place in my heart, with painfully honest lyrics, like the bittersweet chorus of Not What I Meant:
‘I'll do it if I have to
Hoping for an inbetween
Not what I meant when I said that
I wanted to be seen’
Dodie first rose to prominence as a YouTuber, with her vlogs, original songs, and musical covers raking in over 1.8M subscribers. Her music channel, DodieVEVO, amassed over 11.8M views. However, unlike other popular YouTube artists whose music has been tolerated by swathes of tone-deaf fans, Dodie’s music stands on its own feet. With three EPs, all charting in the UK top 40’s, her’s is a voice people are clearly getting behind.
At only two years older than myself, Dodie’s honesty and lyrical candidness betrays a life spent on camera. YouTube fame is a strange phenomenon, a self-enforced public inspection, that one assumes lends itself naturally to introversion or introspection. Thankfully for all of our ears, Dodie lent towards the latter.
Openly bisexual, many of Dodie’s songs and music videos feature women as love interests. She and Sick of Losing Soulmates are gaspingly raw, written poetically and sung in Dodie’s trademark high register. Accompanied by minimal acoustic instrumentals in many of her songs, the pieces are reliant on the elements’ strengths over spectacle. These songs, while powerful in their own right, are also exemplary in collections with her male focussed songs as examples of women-loving-women relationships being comfortably slipped into the zeitgeist.
Dodie’s music speaks unabashedly of mental health, speaking as simply as to say ‘Oh, I’m afraid of the things in my brain.’ If I’m Being Honest expresses clearly the mental obstacles that come with searching for love with a mental block:
‘Could you love this?
Will this one be right?
Well, if I'm being honest
I'm hoping it might.’
As the strings rise, a more solemn tone takes on the song, with Dodie expressing the sadly relatable:
‘It's all so quick, and I feel sick
I’m used to being a joke.’
A Secret For the Mad is perhaps Dodie’s most touching song, with an uplifting message finally hidden in one of her most candid of songs. She encapsulates universal experiences into earworm ditties that you will catch yourself humming all day.
Her music is reminiscent of countless other artists. You could be slipped into Eliza Doolittle’s self-titled 2010 album, Would You Be So Kind could be a Regina Spektor b-side, and I Have a Hole In My Teeth (And The Dentist is Closed) and Life Lesson come straight from an alternate universe where Darwin Deez writes bizarre Kate Nash ditties.
Dodie has toured, mainly as support for other YouTube musicians, headlining for the first time in 2017, where she was joined by the equally talented and lyrically shameless Orla Gartland as her guitarist. Regularly performing at YouTube centred events, it is hard to catch Dodie without a Summer in the City pass and a tolerance for being swarmed by teenage fangirls.
To me it feels a waste, as Dodie’s heart-wrenching musical and mental clarity has the potential for Hozier or Florence and the Machine level fame, while consisting with her indie musical stylings and morose lyricism. It is rare, in my experience, to find a singer-songwriter at Dodie’s relatively young age with such clear passion and range of lived experience so tangible through the simplest of songs.
In just three years Dodie has fired out three exceptional EPs, each stronger than the last, while maintaining her trademark style. The exponential growth of her body of work has drawn interest and criticisms alike, with The Guardian’s Damien Morris three star review describing her music as ‘nudged into blandness, rough edges sanded off’. Maybe under a cursory listening, but perhaps Dodie is not for the middle-aged. Perhaps the smooth edges of Dodie’s music allow troubled young girls to find something soft and understanding in a world of rough edges and sharp surfaces.
This International Women’s Day, I am glad to listen to a woman who made a space for herself. A woman with three self-released EP and a fanbase established on talent and likeability. A woman with beautiful songs that make pain a little prettier, life a little jollier, and awkwardness a little less awkward. Cheers, Dodie.
Featured Image: Bethany Marris/ Epigram
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