In real life, Sloppy Jane’s Haley Dahl did work as a dancer in a strip club. But while that inspired a series of videos from Sloppy Jane’s debut album, Willow — the latest two of which are premiering exclusively below — the events are mostly fictional.
In these two clips directed by Mikaela Lungulov-Klotz, “King Mitis” and “In the Future It Was Me Who Burned It Down,” Dahl’s Willow character dances for an elderly, oxygen-snorting man who unexpectedly dies during a lap dance. The latter clip finds Willow and a friend, dressed as a lion, piling his body into a car and eventually dumping it into the ocean.
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“It’s based on a lot of truths — but I was never carrying a dead man in my arms,” Dahl tells Billboard. “When you’re working in those kinds of places, there’s a lot of compartmentalization within yourself that has to happen. I couldn’t cry for years…but the feeling is very real, the true emotional burden of absorbing other people’s loneliness and being a vessel for that. So when you’re trying to become free of that kind of stuff and find yourself, it’s not only your baggage you’re having to get rid of — and that’s really where it gets heavy.”
Dahl adds that the four videos in the series, which also included “Kitchen Store” and “Bark Like a God,” are not intended to be judgmental. “It’s not an opinion one way or another on the idea of dancing,” she explains. “It’s just about an emotional experience — the weird, big cathartic feeling of finding your way back into your own body and being. You’re sort of happy to be there but also having to all of a sudden assess whatever damage you weren’t necessarily feeling.”
With this part of the narrative wrapped — Dahl says future videos will “all sort of tie together and tell a bigger story” — the 11-piece Sloppy Jane is hitting the road for a 10-date West Coast with Better Oblivion Community Center starting March 8 in Tucson, Ariz. Meanwhile Dahl is working on a new album, with no title or release date with, which she’s been recording at caves in several states, including New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Utah, New Mexico, Tennessee and California.
“I’ve been working on it for the last year and a half, me and a small team of friends, bringing a real piano and chamber instruments — all of these cool orchestral heads we’ve met along the way,” says Dahl, who plans to do more recording during August, adding a children’s choir to the mix. “It’s going to be a very massive, extremely melodramatic record. Playing a real piano in a cave is really special stuff. It’s different to what I did on (Willow), but I think everything I do will be different like that, from one thing to the next.”
Sloppy Jane’s upcoming tour dates include:
3/8 – Tucson, AZ @ Rialto Theatre
3/9 – Las Vegas, NV @ Bunkhouse
3/10 – San Diego, CA @ Music Box
3/11 – San Luis Obispo, CA @ Fremont Theater
3/13 – Los Angeles CA @ Teragram Ballroom
3/14 – Los Angeles CA @ Teragram Ballroom
3/15 – San Francisco, CA @ August Hall
3/16 – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir
3/17 – Seattle, WA @ Neumo’s
3/19 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Metro