Interview: Dilly Dally Alley
Too Drunk To Charm: Dilly Dally Alley reminds us what make a relationship so special on Find Out
Dilly Dally Alley is a self-proclaimed Neosoulish, goulish, and foolish collective from Minneapolis, Minnesota in the USA.
Packed with bars, taco bell, and hand holding, this must be one of the most likable songs of the year from Dilly Dally Alley. You sense that this is the kind of single that is hugely relatable, in a world finally moving away from those soul-destroying dating apps. Vocally delightful and with cute lyrics, this is a song to put on loud.
Find Out from the indietronic jazz/pop outfit Dilly Dally Alley is a fresh track that will make many smile and perhaps giggle, as it is real and shows us inside true and imperfect love. It is sung with so much passion and will get hands closer, and lips waiting for a passionate kiss. Just like life should be after all right?
Dilly Dally Alley, we loved your single, Find Out. What inspired you to explore a more indietronica sound palette with this track?
Thank you so much! I remember feeling a little excited and confused when I wrote this tune. I had just moved to the east coast, and I was surrounded by a lot of new kinds of music and that caused some serious shifts in my perspective as both a person and a musician. It incentivized a kind of stubborn motivation to break out of the jazz-fusion box I usually write for the band. I was also just dancing a lot more in my life, and I just wanted to drop a club tune about it. I tried hanging onto the simple hook in the opening line and experimented with as many ways to change that hook up as possible. I stayed in the box rather than turn to my guitar for more ideas, which at the time felt way out of my comfort zone, but in hindsight gave me a lot more sonic tools that I am grateful to now have at my disposal. It has been an extremely gratifying new rendezvous to say the least!
If you could make one positive change with your music, what would it be?
What a thoughtful question! I want people to be braver and perhaps a little cheekier after listening to our music. I want people to feel like they can treat musical performances like a sort of street ritual, where the pomp and circumstance of church isn’t there, but the intention and reverence and feeling a part of something larger is still sincerely there. I always hope people can meet other people at our shows! We’ve had a couple of situations where our fans befriend or even start dating each other, and that feels wonderful to see. We just want to be connective tissue for the communities we’re a part of!
I also want people to love more genres of music, or at least not treat genre as an important way to categorize music. Genres have an arbitrary sort of construction to them that can be helpful, but when taken too far, can also be limiting. We’ve prepared an eclectic collection of works set for release in 2025 that will feature a little bit of jazz, a little bit of electricity, a little bit of dance, and a whole array of textures. We want our fans to love this album in its chaotic entirety. I want people to appreciate a club classic as much as they appreciate a jazz standard, and I want them to hear both of those “genres” in our music
How do you want your audience to feel when they hear it?
I hope when people hear it, they can get DOWN, like in a passionate and beastly kind of way. This tune is about embarrassing yourself in front of your crush too drunk at a bar, after all! It’s about dancing so hard, you lose sense of where you are. It’s also about falling in love with someone because of the funny little oops moments during what one expects to be a perfect courtship. I want people to feel like they have a space to sing about getting sloppy and messy in the middle of a meet-cute moment. I want people to laugh at themselves, or even get laughed at by their friends after moving their ass to this tune.
You’re far more community-orientated than most artists in this era. What would you say to musicians who are less inclined to use their music to be part of something bigger?
While I think Dilly has a lot more to do to be better members of our community, I do think that music generally loses its soul when it's not a breathing embodiment of a community. The whole point of music is to make people feel brave enough to face complicated emotions they otherwise might be too afraid to face. As musicians we are stewards of emotion, just like a therapist or a teacher or a religious leader. It would be insensitive for music to simply express our emotions without considering how those emotions are received by the audience and how they might inspire action. We want our music to be empowering, and we want measurable, tangible, movement that comes with that. It feels good to wrap our music around a cause beyond our own. It always makes our music better, although that is never the expected goal!
What else does the future have in store for Dilly Dally Alley?
We have a record coming out in 2025, and we are ohhh so excited for what it’s shaping up to be! We have a lot more people on our team who are putting good energy into it. That being said, there’s a lot more to do! It just means we’re sending a lot of emails these days and attempting to gather a lot of funds. The project is something we’re so immensely proud to have created after our first release. It just means we care about it alot and we want it to go well, which feels a bit nerve wracking. Onwards and onwards is what we like to say!
