Dodie is a very modern kind of famous: a megastar to some, a nobody to others. The singer-songwriter first began uploading her music to YouTube in 2011 when she was 16; her ukulele covers, short self-written songs tackling big, taboo topics, everyday messing about and easy familiarity had Gen Z subscribing in their droves.
On YouTube, where she goes by doddleoddle, 1.95 million people subscribe to her channel. On Instagram, she has 1.1 million followers. Looking through celebrity accounts often feels like your eye is up against a grimy keyhole through which you can see an oasis of privilege and beauty, but younger stars who have grown up filming their every move tend to have accounts that are an extension of themselves.
Dodie has used her platform to come out as bisexual (in song), share bouts of poor mental health, answer fans’ questions – some searingly personal – and generally lark about. But having been so open for a decade – “I just didn’t have any boundaries” – she is starting to reckon with what she wants to keep private, for herself.
Your guide to what to watch next – no spoilers, we promise
Dodie – whose full name is Dorothy Clarke – grew up just outside London and now lives with two musicians in a flat in west London. She began experimenting with YouTube with a friend, and her early songs are either quiet and emotional or bedroom beats finding silliness in the mundane – a 40-second track on her first EP is called “I have a hole in my tooth (and the dentist is closed)”.
As she has grown older, dealing with the lineation between the self and the screen has become an ongoing project. Aged 25 when she wrote her first album Build a Problem, which is out on Friday, she was dealing with a lot: family issues, her diagnosis of dissociative disorder (an unsettling condition that leaves you feeling not quite present in your body) and just being a young woman finding her way in the world.
She worried she had shared too much of herself and wasn’t sure what was left behind. She worried about her trauma being turned into something someone might mindlessly whistle as they walk down a hallway. Now, she says, when we meet over video chat, she has let it go.
“Having sat on it for a while, I’ve realised that I’m further away from where I was when I wrote it. That’s a bit of protection.”
She is 26 now; she geared herself up for release early this year, but the album was pushed back, then pushed back again, by vinyl manufacturing delays. It was tough.
“I felt like I couldn’t really move on from that time. It ties me to the past when I’m so used to trying to give something love and… blowing it away.”
Build a Problem is a gorgeous album. Full of sweeping orchestral arrangements and intimately sung confessions, in places it feels almost primal. It is staggeringly accomplished for a woman who has previously been thought of as “a YouTuber with a ukelele”.
Pizzicato strings meld with swooning violins to create a kind of distant storm effect, and deep harmonies contrast with Dodie’s quiet, conversational vocals.
She wrote and conducted the string sections herself – sometimes through tears, as the sheer magnitude of what was coming together in front of her was overwhelming.
“That was one of those moments in life where I was like, ‘Damn, I’m on the right path here.’ Like, I don’t know how this happened but I’m so glad and grateful that I managed to get here, because this is exactly what I want to be doing.”
It is easy to get wrapped up in adoration when you receive it daily – endless social media likes and a million-strong community with its own in-jokes and buzzwords built around you just being you. We all get an addictive dopamine hit every time someone interacts with us online; imagine receiving admiring messages from millions of people you don’t know.
In Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana, she talks about how she measured her self-worth in terms of applause and adoration and how ultimately that became a very unhealthy way to live. It is something to which Dodie can relate.
“So much of my mental health is entwined with what people think of me,” she says. “And that’s not great when that number [of people] is so big. And I think, with every number comes everyone’s life and baggage and opinion. It’s just impossible to carry. I’ve had to sort of ignore that for a while and work on myself.”
A lot of Build a Problem delves deep into her psyche via tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments. “Hate Myself” unravels an argument over nothing that spirals into something major. One folds their arms, the other tries to fill the silences and makes things worse. A night out gone wrong, and her constant tripping up of her own relationships are frequent subjects: she was going through a bit of a crisis when she wrote it.
There is a devastating trio of tracks in the middle of the record – two instrumentals named after punctuation marks that sandwich a song called “Four Tequilas Down”, on which she sings hauntingly about drinking too much and making bad and hurtful choices in her relationships. She feels particularly nervous about sharing it now.
Talking about it, she explains, gives her “a rumble of apprehension”. That is the danger of being a songwriter in 2021: you want to explore a moment in your life, then everyone who hears the song wants to dissect it, too.
“Sometimes, it feels like my life is looked at through a magnifying glass,” she says.
“I don’t think I want to look at it like that: I just want to present the songs and walk on by.”
It all sounds very serious and heavy, but Dodie has a lightness to her that finds the absurd in her trauma. Never seeming to be watching herself or worrying about what her hair is doing, she has a light, conspiratorial air that I imagine turns most acquaintances into confidantes with little effort, like the girl you meet in the toilets a few drinks in, who instantly becomes your best friend.
Her songs aren’t all doom. In fact, many are upbeat (not least the irresistibly catchy single “Hate Myself”) and lyrics are littered with jokes and asides. She is someone who is seeking out the weirdness in life – after our call, she says, she is going to make a video where she and her housemates harmonise with their electric toothbrushes.
The next round of Dodie songs might be stressful to release in a very different way. After a long year of lockdown, there is one topic stalking her current work: “God, all my songs now are so horny! They’re all about wanking or people I miss, touchy-feely
stuff. I’m clearly just very lonely, because it’s coming out subconsciously in my writing. You can always tell what is bubbling in your subconscious, because it will just sort of rumble up in your dreams and your songs.”
She likens writing in lockdown to the delightful image of “a cat shitting”: you have to let it happen naturally. If you focus too closely on it, it just won’t go.
Although Build a Problem has built its own problems in Dodie’s mind, it is fulfilling in a way that her earlier works haven’t quite been. She mentions that she wishes she could have called this album “Human”, a title she already used on her last EP, in 2019, an accomplished album that felt quite safe both musically and thematically.
“I think this is the first time I’m really going to put something out there and be like: this is me. It feels truly like, me, and my life and my music.”
The problems may not all have been solved – lockdown has been tough to weather, mentally – and she may still have work to do on herself and her relationships, but when I ask whether she’s happy, she thinks for a moment and says: “Right now, I’ll say yes. I feel very proud of myself. And I’m happy with who I am. But then ask me again in two days and I’ll be like, oh goddammit!”
If she is looking for a marker of normality, I think she might have just found it.
Build a Problem is released on Friday
