Immerse yourself in Debbii Dawson’s peculiar pop fantasy

Debbii Dawson has always been at home inside her own head. Her earlier releases felt like rooms with the curtains drawn, intimate spaces filled with hushed melodies and quiet revelations, built from the solitude of watching the world from a distance. These days, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter is easing open the front door and letting the light spill in, trading whisper-soft confessionals for songs that shimmer with ABBA and Dolly Parton-inspired grooves.

Her recent singles twinkle in different shades – ‘Chemical Reaction’, all glitter and rush, and ‘Gut Feelings’, a sleek pulse of synth and intuition. It’s music you can dance to, even if she’s still more likely to write it propped up in bed next to Frank Ocean, the tiny preserved shark she keeps in a jar of formaldehyde on her nightstand. She discovered him at a garage sale, and now he’s equal parts muse and mascot. “Frank’s a genius,” Dawson tells NME from her home in Los Angeles, near “where Cher got mugged” in the 1995 film Clueless.

She speaks in a tone where you can never quite tell if she’s joking or dead serious, a quality she explains simply: “I think it’s universally known that humour comes from trauma.”

After wrapping a run of shows with Role Model this spring, she returned to the Valley and barely left home for weeks – not from disengagement, but to recharge, to sit in the quiet that still shapes her art. In her world, creative breakthroughs might happen in the studio, in bed, or while hanging upside down just to see things from a new angle.

Her first two EPs, 2023’s ‘Learning’ and 2024’s ‘How To Be Human’, feel like chapters of the same story told by a chronic overthinker. The debut album she’s working on, she says, is “continuing to reflect where I am… this person stepping out of the house they’ve been stuck in, experiencing life for the first time, and just trying to understand it”. That growth comes with its own challenges. “Shifts can feel uncomfortable, but I feel them reflected in my art and in everything going on in the world right now. Everything is so heightened. As an artist, you feel all of those things – the outward and the inward – and they feed into what you create.”

“Music is a gift, it’s meant to be shared. Sitting on it started to feel disgusting, like pond water”

Growing up in rural Minnesota as a first-generation Indian-American, Dawson learned to measure music not by the words, but by the way it made her feel. It’s an emotional compass she’s followed ever since, whether she’s curled up on her bedroom floor writing in the middle of the night or stepping into the glow of a crowd.

Dawson’s sense of in-betweenness started early. Her family moved often, sometimes every few months, shuttling between the Midwest and Switzerland. “I always felt a little weird,” she says. “A little, strange person.” In most places they lived, she rarely saw anyone who looked like her. To classmates, she was “the Indian girl”, a label that felt both too big and too small.

The constant moving meant school was a patchwork. She dropped out in fourth grade to be homeschooled, a decision that came with a loosely followed curriculum and an unconventional education. “My parents taught us how to teach ourselves,” she recalls, a skill that would later serve her well as a self-directed artist. When she rejoined public school in seventh grade, fresh from Europe and struggling with spelling, she found herself placed in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes.

That outsider perspective, straddling cultures and constantly adapting to new environments, would become a quiet throughline in her songwriting: always observing, always learning the contours of a place before deciding where she fit within it.

If the constant moving made Dawson adaptable, it also made her retreat inward. “I was deathly shy,” she says. “I couldn’t handle people looking at me and still have a hard time with it.” But from a young age, she was comfortable arranging harmonies for her musical family, although she didn’t fully “sing-sing”, as she puts it, until she was 16 or 17.

There was even a period where she abandoned music entirely. “I didn’t play piano, nothing, for like two years,” she recalls. But when her mental health dipped, she found her way back through composition – first as whispered classical instrumentals recorded alone in the basement, later with lyrics she never intended to share. Eventually, keeping those songs to herself began to feel wrong. “Music is a gift,” she says. “It’s meant to be shared. Sitting on it started to feel disgusting, like pond water.”

That belief pushed her to perform despite the anxiety it caused. Nearly a decade ago, she resolved to pursue music seriously, not just as a craft but as a personal challenge to get comfortable around people, to make friends for the first time, to push at the edges of her comfort zone. By the time she relocated to Los Angeles, she’d begun expanding her threshold for connection both in life and in her music – a shift captured in her 2022 America’s Got Talent appearance, where she told judge Simon Cowell: “The dream would be for this not to be a dream and for it to just be my reality”.

“There’s horrible stuff going on, but I hope what I’m making contributes some light”

Dawson’s sound is rooted in the eclectic soundtrack of her upbringing: a mix of retro sensibilities and contemporary storytelling that resists easy categorisation. One weeknight might have been spent around the table with her family singing old bluegrass songs in three-part harmony, instruments in every hand. The next, they would be belting gospel standards she learned growing up in the church, or performing for tight-knit congregations at Congolese, Nigerian, Korean, Indian, and Mexican churches.

Those experiences weren’t just musical; they were cultural immersions, each one deepening her understanding of how community and sound intertwine. “It’s a really good way to experience a culture,” she says. “You get to be part of their traditions, and the music is so tied to that.”

Her influences stretch beyond those church halls. She grew up listening to American, Spanish and Italian oldies, classical compositions, religious hymns and old country music. These days, she’s been diving into Japanese city pop and Italian disco, sometimes through hours-long YouTube deep dives. She doesn’t track the Billboard charts obsessively – in fact, she admits she rarely listens to much current pop, which may be why her songs avoid the trappings of trends.

Instead, she treats every element, from chords to production, as part of the storytelling process. “Even if the lyrics are gone, I want the song to still portray the emotion I’m trying to get across,” she says. The studio, she adds, is her playground, a place to be meticulous and experimental, where a track might be stripped back to its essentials or layered until it shimmers.

For Dawson, the true measure of a song has nothing to do with genre or trends. She judges music by a transcendent quality that’s hard to put into words. “The magic is that feeling when something reaches through the speakers and touches you,” she says. “Or makes you smile. I’m always chasing that.” It’s what drew her to the aching ballad ‘Back At Your Door’, her 2024 collaboration with Orville Peck, whose own brand of cinematic country felt like a natural extension of her storytelling instincts.

Her touchstones are as varied as her influences: Whitney Houston for her undeniable, unreplicable presence; the sweeping drama of Hans Zimmer’s Lion King score; James Horner’s romantic swashbuckling in The Mask of Zorro. Film scores were an early lesson for her in how to evoke emotion without words, a skill she now brings into her own songwriting.

When she talks about music, it’s with a mix of spirituality and playfulness. She describes it as something elemental, “like electricity” – a force that existed before humans and was discovered rather than invented. Writing a song, then, is about “tuning into the station” with like-minded collaborators, catching the wavelength that already exists. That process, she says, works best when approached with a childlike spirit: curious, open and always willing to play.

“There’s horrible stuff going on, but I hope what I’m making contributes some light,” she adds. “If someone can listen and feel like they’re not alone, that would feel magical.”

“That feeling when something reaches through the speakers and touches you or makes you smile: I’m always chasing that”

With another opening slot on The Beaches’ tour ahead and more music in the works, Dawson is still learning to balance solitude with connection. The new songs carry that evolution – bolder grooves, brighter melodies and an openness she couldn’t have imagined a decade ago – but she has no interest in rushing the process. “I’ve seen my thresholds expand,” she says. “I can go out more, be around more people, and actually enjoy it. But I still need that time to recharge, to come back to myself.”

She knows that for her, growth isn’t about abandoning the quiet; it’s about finding ways to carry it into the crowd, then back home again. Sometimes that means company in unexpected forms – like the blue-eyed mannequin head she spotted on the street on her way to a concert. Her best friend named him Fernando, and now he travels with her, tucked neatly into a road case. “He’s usually hanging out during rehearsal,” she says, holding him up to the camera. “He has a secret Instagram page. The fans found out about it. They think it’s me running it, but it’s really Fernando.”

The door to her house may be open wider than before, music drifting out into the street, but the space inside is still hers. A reminder that even in this more outward-facing chapter, Dawson will always make room for the strange, singular details that make her feel most at home.

Debbii Dawson’s latest single ‘Gut Feelings’ is out now via RCA Records.

Listen to Debbii Dawson’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Crystal Bell
Photography: Carianne Older
Photography Assistance: Maggie Overbaugh
Hair: Antoine Martinez
Makeup: Ghost
Styling: Gareth Peck
Suit Jacket and Skirt: MARRKNULL
Shirt: HommesGirls
Tie: Vintage via BTS Thrift Store
Jewelry: PEARL OCTOPUSS.Y and assorted vintage pieces from Gareth’s collection
Headphones: Koss

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