Dora Jar
about the artist
For as long as she can remember, Dora Jar has been battling the existential. Growing up with creative parents and a special-needs sibling in suburban Northern California, she felt especially attuned to the ways her life stuck out. "Why is anything the way it is?" she remembers asking herself. In 2022, that question returned in full force when her still-burgeoning music career suddenly blew up after Billie Eilish asked her to open on her arena tour. "There was big imposter syndrome. It was a mix of being really grateful and also feeling like I don't deserve this at all," she…
MoreFor as long as she can remember, Dora Jar has been battling the existential. Growing up with creative parents and a special-needs sibling in suburban Northern California, she felt especially attuned to the ways her life stuck out. "Why is anything the way it is?" she remembers asking herself. In 2022, that question returned in full force when her still-burgeoning music career suddenly blew up after Billie Eilish asked her to open on her arena tour. "There was big imposter syndrome. It was a mix of being really grateful and also feeling like I don't deserve this at all," she says. "I felt like [I was] skipping a lot of steps. Now, I feel like I'm coming back and starting over."
This starting over arrives in the form of her long-awaited debut album, No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire, but also a head-first plunge back into the existential waters by posing the question: "Who am I?" It's the query that opens the richly whimsical, dark pop fantasia, a lyric she poofs into being like a smoke cloud exhaled from the wise caterpillar of Wonderland. Over the course of 13 songs, she arrives no closer to one singular answer. But what she does illuminate is her penchant as an artist to delightfully slip beyond boxes, defying the music industry's need for easy comprehension. "It might be the contrarian in me, in light of everyone identifying themselves and others, but I never want to stick to one sound or identity," she says. "I like to shape-shift."
It's a philosophy that shaped the album quite literally as it was recorded over the course of the last two years in a smattering of places: Poland, Alaska, California, and Mississippi (as Dora was in town building a "mud cob hut"). The list of collaborators also runs the gamut with Ralph Castelli (glaive), Henry Kwapis (Dominic Fike, Dijon), George Daniel (The 1975, Charli XCX), and Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Clairo) credited as producers.
All these places and hands give the album the effect of peering at a collage. Songs energetically flit from sweeping folk to rock, to her signature psychedelic pop, to tranquil ballads written during a dark night of the soul. But what ties everything together, pulls it into one cohesive portrait, is Dora's vivid and opaquely surreal songwriting that turns her brain into "a blurry stranger" on the street and spins axioms like, "Rough water is still water, no matter how much it moves." While they may seem abstract on first-listen, she says these songs are some of the most personal she's written: "There's always a meaning in the metaphor. It becomes clear after a few listens and the vulnerability unveils itself."
Notably, Dora plays all the acoustic guitar across the record, her musicianship stemming from her always reaching for her guitar first, no matter how the production ends up.
Much of the record's introspective wandering was sparked after she wrote the album's title track, "No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire." She got the idea shortly after ending her stint on Eilish's tour, a terrifying, career high. For Dora, it also felt like a catch-22. "Being on fire can be an amazing feeling; I'm on fire. I'm so productive. I am confident. I'm hot shit" she says. "And then there's also 'I'm freaking out,' like, I don't know what to do with all of this action."
As such, you might look at No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire as an existentialist's way of processing big metamorphic change. After the fire, she's unsure of what's going to grow but she can nurture the buds of herself that she does understand: Who she was, who she is. She's a ragdoll and a puppet, a depressed witch wallowing in her own feelings, a Wizard of Oz-like figure, directing from and hiding behind a curtain. It changes by the day, hour, and mood, but it's her in the end. "Any way the wind blows, I go," she poetically puts it on "Sometimes All Ways."
It's an ambitious concept for a debut album but if there's one thing Dora's career — which has already drawn admiration from Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX, and The 1975 — has proven, it's that she's not here to take the easy, well-trodden road. "If my music can get people excited about the mysteries in their life, and help people feel more curious then that's a wonderful thing," she says.