The girl in the video moves her lips to the words of the song in slow motion, closing her eyes as she presses her face to the window in front of her and kisses it, over and over. It’s silly, sexy and a little inspired. But the impetus behind the oddly intimate visuals for Dodie’s “Got Weird” – a broody, seductive song about counterintuitively killing the mood of a date with a kiss – was, at least in part, desperation.
In the run up to the release of her new 4-track EP Hot Mess, the 27-year-old musician and YouTube star needed a new lyric video concept, and fast. The original plan, to film herself skating around a rented hall with the help of her manager Josh, proved to be a bust in post-production. “It just ended up looking terrible,” she says, from her side of a cushiony corner booth in the north London café where we’re having our conversation. “It didn’t work at all, because neither of us is a cinematographer. So, it was bad. And then we only had a few days left.”
“I was on my sofa, staring at the ceiling like, ‘What do I do? What do I do? It’s got to be so easy. So, so easy and budgetless’.” Fortunately, the concept of “just making out with something” came to mind, and thanks to a Cut video (no, not the one affiliated with New York Magazine) that saw a hundred people demonstrating their kissing techniques through a pane of glass, it felt like a relatively well-researched one. “Anyone who used tongue looked really weird, so I was like, ‘Good to know’.”
The results are pretty fitting for a slap bass-heavy song that asks, “Why do karma and girls love to bite me?” The EP also boasts “Lonely Bones”, a characteristically dreamy lockdown-era song; and a whispery, melancholy piano track called “No Big Deal (I Love You)” that closes the capsule out. While Hot Mess is the most recent release to follow her 2021 debut studio album Build a Problem, it’s far from Dodie’s first rodeo – her fourth EP after 2019’s Human, 2017’s You and Intertwined in 2016. But before she became a mononymous indie star, Dodie Clark started making videos on her YouTube channel doddleoddle in 2011: a mix of original songs, ukulele covers and heartfelt bedroom vlogs. As the New York Times put it, she “can’t resist sharing”: her brand is one of easy intimacy that has garnered over two million fans on YouTube, and over one million on both Twitter and Instagram. For better or worse, social media is inextricable from her life.
At the bottom of her YouTube profile is a playlist of unlisted videos that serve as an archive of her earlier life online: a French braid tutorial, miscellaneous ASMR, and an eyebrow video retroactively titled “(I wish I could delete this my brows look awful)”. Today, her makeup is minimalist and evocative. Long lashes, winged eyeliner, and a single black spot under each eye – a beauty signature she playfully refers to as the ‘Dodie dots’.
“I feel very different from the person I used to be online,” she says. “I think I just grew up a bit. I give myself the ick imagining someone finding that person first.” But that’s not to say the archive isn’t precious. “I like rewatching old videos. I have [other YouTuber] friends who’ve privated all their videos, but it feels like a shame — they are so much a part of that time. I miss it, and I wouldn’t want to take that away.”
It’s a similar circumstance when it comes to Secrets for the Mad: Obsessions, Confessions and Life Lessons, the autobiographical memoir that she published in 2017. “I’m just happy to have put all this stuff about mental health out there. I wrote it when I was really in the thick of it — figuring out my brain, navigating severe depression and derealisation — so I’m really glad to have that documented.” She pauses. “There are other chapters though, where I’m like ‘Oh my god, this could’ve just been a very long blog post’.”
After years of occasional oversharing, her confessional impulse has slowed somewhat. “Usually I meet people and tell them everything that’s been going on in my life and my family history. But now I’m much better at realising that people do not need to know my exact state of being,” she says. “You can just say, ‘I’m fine’ when someone asks, if you want to. It’s not a lie, it’s a boundary.” Online, things are naturally more complicated, but Dodie feels like she’s taken a big step back from the internet in recent years. “I still make a lot of things just for me. But the line does get kind of blurred, because then I think, ‘Well, I might as well put it online!’”
When you’re an internationally successful performer, there’s no shortage of things to post. She tells me about a recent trip to Los Angeles – the location being an origin point of the yearning, frustrated emotions found in Hot Mess, and a place she had once entertained leaving her London home for. “Honestly, I think I mostly loved it because I’ve had a few relationships over there. It’s easy to romanticise a place once you’ve been in love there,” she says. The sunshine and the feeling that it was “all happening” charmed her initially, but the magic wore off this time around: “There was a heatwave and I was going through a breakup, so I couldn’t really go out or even take a walk. LA can be a really lonely place.”
In Hollywood, she explains, “There’s a game you can play where you’re looking at everyone with this hierarchy eye: What’s my importance to you? What’s your importance to me? How can we use each other? But removing yourself from that game and just becoming a witness is so fun. It can feel very special to be someone who just doesn’t care about that stuff,” she says. “I can’t tell if it’s healthy or unhealthy. But it is fun.”
Hot Mess is out now. Buy it here.
Credits
Photography Nicole Ngai