It feels like yesterday that we were walking down the halls of our high schools texting friends, ignoring everyone around us. Things have changed since then, of course, as we’ve grown up and begun texting friends at work, ignoring everyone around us.
Such is the subject matter addressed by Bar None signees Rose Dorn, whose single “Champ” sounds exhausted by the prospect of the distance requiring correspondence by phone—which, for the band, has since been remedied. “The lyric ‘All my friends are in my hand / The computer that I continue to hold on’ is specifically about the time when [bandmates Joey Dalla Betta, Jamie Coster] and I were just starting to become close friends,” notes vocalist Scarlet Knight. “I’d walk around school texting them all day, head fully in my phone.”
Somber yet upbeat, the three-minute bedroom-incepted lullaby channels the frustration of struggling to fit in—something the video’s director, Julia Ling Kelleher, tied to the debut of Australian film director Jane Campion, Sweetie. “Similar to [Sweetie‘s] main character Kay, Scarlet is isolated in this big suburban house, where she’s trying to get all the words out but no one’s really listening or paying attention,” the director explains.
She continues: “I don’t remember why, but I was on Wikipedia reading about the term ‘domino effect,’ and read that the converse of this is ‘an event [which] is impossible or highly unlikely’—the one domino left standing. I had never heard of the term being used in this way. Domino lines and Rube Goldberg machines are very complicated in nature for no real reason or reward. So I guess it’s just one big metaphor; she’s giving up so much of herself but for nothing directly in return. The dominoes feel like they go on forever, and it’s something she just has to watch go by.”
Rose Dorn’s debut LP Days You Were Leaving is set for an August 23 release via Bar None Records. You can pre-order it here, and check out dates for their first tour below.
Tour Dates:
8/18 – San Diego – Content Partners
9/19 – LA – Zebulon w/ Ex Hex & Seth Bogart
9/20 – Oakland – Starline Social Club the Cavern
9/24 – Olympia – Le Voyeur
9/25 – Seattle – Vera Project
9/30 – Reno – Holland Project
10/3 – Phoenix – Trunk Space
