In Conversation with Sloppy Jane

I must admit it, I was very late to the Sloppy Jane train. I remember the day I boarded incredibly vividly, however: in 2019 a GoFundMe page titled “I WILL EAT MY FAVORITE SUIT FOR 20K” broke up the background noise on my Twitter feed. I was captivated. I had to know more. I dove in headfirst, and have attentively followed since.

Sloppy Jane is a Brooklyn-based rock ensemble fronted by Haley Dahl. Their latest record Madison, released on Saddest Factory Records in November, is a massive orchestral effort and true testament to willpower recorded entirely underground in Lost World Caverns in West Virginia. It’s an emotional journey exploring the truly crazy things we do when we love someone enough — making a spectacle of yourself at a party, fantasizing about faking your death, hauling chamber instruments underground. “Love is loud,” Haley says at the end of the nearly 10 minute long track “The Constable.” This record is nothing but proof of that.

Backward Noise recently had the chance to sit down with Haley on Sloppy Jane’s first tour since the pandemic to discuss how the record came together and what it’s been like to present it to the world. 

Sloppy Jane by Bella Peterson

Backward Noise: You’ve had quite the incredible few months, with the release of Madison, signing to Saddest Factory Records, and making a triumphant return to touring. What has it been like to have the efforts of this project pay off so tremendously and so rapidly?

Haley Dahl: You know, to just be like super honest, it was paying off while I was doing it. Everything that’s happening now is so great, but making the record was like, the most incredible experience of my life and it was like — if we finished it and I died right there, it would’ve paid off, if that makes sense. I’m very happy that it’s out, but it didn’t have to come out. I think that that’s important. When you make stuff, I think that you need to care enough about what you’re doing that it doesn’t really matter if anyone else sees it, you know? And then after that, then you can try to get people to see it once it’s done. I’m just still really happy that I even got to do it, and I’m of course really grateful that things are going well.

BN: That’s a really great way to look at it, is to focus more on the act of making something for yourself, rather than that end goal of people consuming it. 

HD: Yeah, and I always want people to I guess be careful about…I feel like press being the goal, or having these external goals around something creative can be really unhealthy, and I feel like we impose them on ourselves, and then people impose it on other artists, if that makes sense? Where people are like, just like you’re saying right now, “How is it going to have it all be out and you’re getting all this press?” and people are like “It’s so great, it feels so great!” but the reality is just that like, all of that stuff just kind of amounts to staring at your phone and getting notifications. On a truly emotional level, I’m very happy people like it, because no one had to like it. But it doesn’t feel as good as doing it.

BN: I’m incredibly fascinated by the background of this record, which was recorded entirely in a cave. What initially drew you to this concept and why do you feel it was important for you to go through with it?

HD: I wanted to make Madison because I was like, super duper in love with somebody who just didn’t love me back, and I wanted to make a grand gesture in a very old fashioned way. I was working for this woman who played a lot of oldies music in her house, and it got me really into Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound and all the early 60’s pop stuff, and all of that was recorded in echo chambers. I liked that the use of reverb and large instrumentation brought, I guess like, teenage emotions to operatic levels and that was kind of the mindset of that time. I wanted to do something that felt like that in my own way, but I didn’t have access to an echo chamber so I started looking into natural reverb and I kind of twisted down this spiral until I found this recording of this organ called the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns in Virginia. Which is not where we recorded, but I found this old recording of it and I got so obsessed with the idea of recording in caves and I just felt very called to do it.

BN: What were the biggest obstacles you experienced while recording in that space? Was there anything you underestimated about the process?

HD: Everything. (laughs) I underestimated everything about it. It was so hard. We didn’t have any money at all to be doing something like that, like the record should have cost like millions of dollars if we were doing it right. It took years to even be able to do it, just like, in learning how to record in caves and me learning how to write the kind of instrumentation that I wanted to write, going and exploring places and going and rehearsing stuff…It was this really big mix of learning the things that I had to learn, but also becoming the person that I had to be to do it, but also trying to have the money to do it. It was this really big crazy math problem. Pretty much everything was an unanticipated obstacle. The humidity, the climate of caves breaks everything. You’re trying to learn how to do this stuff, but also all of your stuff is breaking. We were sleeping in the car a lot, it was cold, we were really hungry, everything was an unanticipated obstacle.

BN: What was the most rewarding part of it?

HD: We had been in the cave for like 14 days, and we finished the record and then we shot the music videos…the last moment of finishing everything where everyone was in there together, I just started sobbing. I realized we were doing the last take of it, and it was so many years of working on something and just knowing that as soon as I finish this take it was gonna be the end of making it…I felt really, really afraid. But in a good way. I don’t think I’ve ever been as emotional as I was in that moment. And then it finished, and everyone was sobbing.

BN: What was it like to coordinate a smaller scale live show from such a massive scale project?

HD: The instrumentation is kind of cut in half, there’s a lot of doubling on the record so we just don’t have that present live. We also added guitars, which, we didn’t have guitars before. The live band has always — well, not always-always, in the last few years — been ten-ish people, and so I just rearranged it for that. We’ve played some shows in New York and LA where we’ve gotten to have a harp and a little bit of a larger horn section, and I love that, but we just don’t get to have it. The band’s still pretty big.

BN: There’s a very interesting dichotomy within Sloppy Jane that’s this theatrical, over-the-top character you put on paired with the most brutally honest and personal lyricism. Do you feel as though it's easier to be the most vulnerable version of yourself when you are inhibiting a persona?

HD: Definitely. Well, and I don’t even think — I mean obviously it’s a persona because I’m not sitting here on this couch doing a backflip, you know…

BN: Thrashing around in the green room.

HD: Yeah, I’m not just sitting here thrashing around all the time like a dying fish. But I think that like, it’s not a fake character to me, like it feels like when I’m doing stuff in Sloppy Jane both live and a project like Madison, it’s just me trying to be completely in use. It’s like I’m taking everything that’s true about myself and turning the volume all the way up. 

BN: It’s you but elevated.

HD: Yeah. It’s very cathartic for me, and I do feel like it’s easier for me to be vulnerable in that way. Anybody who knows me in my personal life, I’m not a particularly warm and fuzzy person. Not in a mean way, but I’m not touchy and I’m not super eye contact-y. But onstage, I feel like all of the feelings that I have have a purpose and place and they make sense, and I like that.

BN: I feel like from a listener's perspective it’s almost, like, more uncomfortable to be delivered such blunt lyricism from this very “on” version of you, and I feel like in a way it maybe, like, prompts you to explore the way you do that yourself. The characters that we all put on.

HD: Definitely. The whole thing for me with making Madison was like, I have these really big feelings for this person but I’m not the kind of person that…it felt so small, and so ugly, to just go up at like, a show and tug on someone’s sleeve and be like, “Hey can I talk to you for a minute?” like, “Why are you not calling me?” That’s just not the kind of person that I am, I’m not interested in people very often and I have a lot of anxiety in those ways. I needed the stakes to be so high for my feelings to feel justified. I need to be in a cave with an orchestra where I dragged the piano in myself and it took years and then I can tell somebody that I miss them. It’s hilarious and cartoonish, it both is a persona and is true of me, that is what happened there. Someone was ghosting me and I couldn’t just block them or go talk to them about it, and instead I did this crazy thing. It’s the same with onstage. I’m not very comfortable trying to get people to like me socially, I’m not good at that, so instead I go make a spectacle of myself. So it’s the truth of me that that’s how I express myself. 

BN: I feel like you’ve done a great job world building within the context of Sloppy Jane. The project feels like stepping into a picture book, or a dream, or a movie. Does creating this universe of your own come organically, or is it something you put a conscious effort into constructing?

HD: A little bit of both. It’s like I find the things on accident, and then it’s like you step in it and can’t get it off. Me and Mika [Lungulov-Klotz] who made all the Madison music videos were very partnered in the visual worldbuilding and have a very similar perspective on stuff. You’re always just making the same thing over and over again. Part of doing Sloppy Jane stuff is like, there’s this world but everyone is just me and everybody plays every character eventually and it all just kind of starts to melt into itself. I don’t know, I don’t know if that made sense. A little bit of both basically. It definitely is the way that I like to make continuity. All that I’m ever trying to do is make sense of everything to me in my life and world, and I’m trying to make my own life make sense by creating a heightened, very saturated story of it. 

BN: I would love to go into depth specifically on the track “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor”, this epic, haunting, 8 minute long piano ballad that for lack of a more graceful phrasing completely obliterates me. How did this song come together?

HD: It was one of the first ones that I wrote for the record. The way that I like to write is like, everything is one big 20 minute long song and then I expand moments and moments until there’s this full thing. “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor” was a part of that. It was the little beginning melody of “Overture”, “Madison”, “Wonderama”, and “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor” and it was all kind of strung together. Wonderama is just a weird little piano minuet-y thing. But “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor”…I don’t totally remember the process of writing it anymore because it was awhile ago, but it all did come together pretty quickly. I think, like you do with writing, you nip and tuck stuff kind of forever, but the early demos of the song sound pretty much the same as the song that ended up existing. When I was first writing Madison, I didn’t know how to play piano really at all, and so everything I was writing was really really simple. That song only has I think like, two chords in it, and it’s just the same thing the whole time. I spent a lot of time just sitting in my room playing little things on the piano over and over and over again until I came up with something. That song…I don’t know, it’s kind of all of the worst and ugliest feelings on the album, I guess. The instrumentation eventually just swallows it. It’s very melodramatic. It’s just about that feeling of like, rotting in your room, being totally ripped apart about somebody and the way that that turns into everything. It turns into all of these really ugly feelings. Like wishing you were dead so that somebody would miss you, which is this totally toxic thought, and it’s all of those.

BN: Could you explain the plastic horse and why it’s such a key figure on the record?

HD: Yeah! There’s a few things. The main first reason that the horse was a totem for the whole thing is that this person who I was super in love with, we had one brief kind of romantic moment. We lived in different cities, and when I was flying back to where I lived they gave me this little toy horse to remember them by. And so as I spiraled in heartbreak, it was something I stared at a lot as evidence that it had happened at all. It became really centric in all of my writing. But then also me and Mika had this joke about patience, I would be like “I just can’t hold my horses, they’re always running away from me.” And then for Christmas, Mika gave me this little box of blue horses. They were a little bit smaller than the one in my hand, and they were horses that were for holding. I was supposed to just keep them, I kept them in my pocket and wore them for a very long time. Now I just collect them, now every time I see a toy horse I’m like “that’s me.”

BN: Funerals and weddings are frequent spaces occupied on the record - a lot of exploration of grief and marriage and the holiness of both. What made you keep coming back to those themes?

HD: I just think that they’re things that symbolize the idea of forever, which I like a lot. I also just like the drama of them. I like lyrics that are just so heightened that it’s almost funny, like I think the first line of “Jesus and Your Living Room Floor” I love so much — “when I finally die won’t you bury me in the same suit that you married her in” — it’s an ugly thought but it’s really overly dramatic. Weddings and parties and funerals, it’s all of this stuff that’s about social anxiety and wanting to show up to a party and start screaming and crying and apologizing to everyone, you know? Those are the places to do that. 

BN: Are there any non-musical influences found on the record?

HD: This isn’t like, non…I guess it is a musical, but there’s a musical called The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, hugely influential on the record and everything that I do. It’s this weird musical that Dr. Seuss made in the 50’s that no one liked. But it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, and if you watch it you’ll see that I copied a lot from it. And then I feel like environment was the biggest influence on the record.

BN: I can see that! What’s the biggest lesson you took away from this album, and what is something you hope listeners took away from it?

HD: Mostly just that you can do anything. I know that that sounds cheesy, but if you focus on something you can do it. 

BN: I don’t think its cheesy, especially in the context of this. 

HD: It’s a little bit “live laugh love” to say you can do anything, but I mean it in a very literal way. You can do anything.

BN: What’s next for Sloppy Jane? I’ve heard some talk of space.

HD: They never emailed me back. I’m starting to think that that program was a scam, ‘cause they never announced who was actually winning. So…fuck that. I’d still go. What’s next for us…I mean, I think we’ll be touring this record for a little bit. Especially because of COVID, touring is weird. It’s not like you just tour a record for the first like 8 months after you make it, because touring’s bizarre now so you schedule stuff way out. I feel like I’m gonna be touring this record like, I don’t see an immediate end. We’re talking about stuff in May of 2023 that’s still for Madison. So I’m partially still staying in that. I’m working on a side project of Madison that is this plug-ins project where I’m making the kick reverbs, a line of reverbs that are the sounds of all of these caves that I collected. And then I’m writing new stuff too. We’ll see.

BN: Cool! Well, that’s all I have for you, thank you—

HD: Oh wait, I wanna make an amusement park. Sorry, I feel like I need to voice it. I like, forgot.

BN: You should speak this into existence.

HD: Yeah, I need to speak it into existence. I wanna buy like, a bunch of land in the desert, or a ghost town, and I wanna build an amusement park that’s like, for recording. And I wanna have a recording studio, I want the main like regular live room to be in the body of a giant dinosaur statue. And I want to make these merry-go-round things that do stereo recording. And I wanna build a big marble echo chamber under the ground. That’s it. (laughs)