Q&A: Dominic Dailey’s passion for music rings through new singles
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY NINA KUDLACZ ☆
MAKING MUSIC FULFILLS DOMINIC DAILEY’S SOUL—The 23-year-old from Montana only began making indie pop music about a year and a half ago, but has already made strides in his career.
With a large and consistent social media presence, Dailey is an example of how upcoming artists must focus on promoting their own work as the music scene evolves. Since releasing songs doesn’t guarantee streams, Dailey has to balance the workload of both producing and promoting. It’s important for him to stay true to himself and stay passionate about the music and the promotion. Then, people can find it and it's special to them in their own way.
In December of 2024, Dailey decided to post every single day for as long as he can. He hasn’t missed a day since. Luckily, his hard work is paying off. A few of his TikToks have even gone micro-viral, reaching just under 24,000 views.
If you’re looking for music to listen to while driving with the windows down on a road trip or at the lake with some friends, Dailey’s music is perfect for that. A few of his inspirations include Frank Ocean, Post Malone, Goth Babe and Dominic Fike, who he named his artist persona after.
It’s not often that Dailey sits down to write his songs. Rather, his unconventional writing style is somewhat sporadic. But when it happens, he enters a flow state. He wrote his song “dirt” while dog sitting for a professor. He stumbled across the beat for the song on YouTube, grabbed his notebook and the song came together in about 15 minutes. Now, “dirt” has over half a million streams.
If a melody comes to him while driving or out at a social event, Dailey will pull out his phone and mumble it into his voice memos or write lyrics in his notes app. A recent single, “cool whip,” was written half in his car and half while stocking shelves at Walmart. The song was mostly recorded on a work break next to a glass of red wine.
The inspiration behind cool whip is an alternate version of Dominic Dailey, who is cool, wears mink coats and creased jeans and sips decade old gin. The second verse dives into deeper themes like having a lack of relationship with your family. The lyrics describe the realization that despite being cool and moving up in his life, he left everything behind and is going home to a house that is cold and empty. One of his goals is to move to Oregon; anytime he works on music, it fuels that dream and gets him a step closer.
Aiming to release one song every other week, Dailey is staying on top of the grind. Read below to hear about Dailey’s music making process.
LUNA: How did you first start making music?
DAILEY: Last March, I dropped out and I wanted to be a writer. I was writing this story about this guy who records music in his dorm room. To be a better writer about it, I wanted to do it myself.
So, I bought this stuff off of eBay and I just started messing around with it a little bit. I made my first song in a night and I got a pretty decent reception from that. I just kept doing it because I started having so much fun, and here we are.
LUNA: How has your sound changed over time?
DAILEY: I've gotten a little bit better at mixing. I've made it more based on how I feel than what I think will sound good to other people. I just released a song called “cool whip” and it's totally different from what I normally do. My stuff's really upbeat, kind of summery; and then I got some songs that are a little more emotional.
LUNA: What is the songwriting process like for you?
DAILEY: I find these beats and I kind of just know which one it'll be based on how much I like it. Obviously, I'm only gonna make a song that I really like and want to listen to. Then I'll kind of listen, and usually I just start pacing back and forth and walking around. I took a ton of walks around the neighborhood and I'll hear the tempo in my head, and I know what it needs to be.
LUNA: What’s been giving you joy lately?
DAILEY: I started working out a lot more recently and I think that's been really good for dopamine release. I've been putting my phone on airplane mode. I post five times a day, so between my posts, I started putting my phone on airplane mode, so I can kind of lock in a little bit more. And then taking walks, having moments of silence, and kind of de-stimulating myself a little bit so that I can just be more present.
LUNA: You are very consistent with your promotion on social media, did you expect some of your videos to blow up?
DAILEY: The biggest thing that really helped me was once I got back [from studying abroad in China], I started posting more every single day. That made a huge difference. Because I was so passionate about the music, and I was making all these songs, and right now I have like 25 songs released, but I wasn't doing anything to promote it. 90 percent of my songs were under 1,000 streams. They were getting two or three listens a day, nobody cared and nobody knew about them.
LUNA: What do you want people to know about you as an artist or as a person?
DAILEY: Honestly, it's a lot of suffering, doing this music all the time. Listening to your voice, mixing it, failing; I fail every single time I sit down to do this. It's the biggest struggle in my life, and it's completely optional. So that’s kind of cool that basically it forces me to grow as a person every time I do it. I would hope that people can maybe find something more in themselves if they see someone else growing and following their dream, maybe they can start to follow their own.
LUNA: What are you working on now?
DAILEY: Today, I'm working on a song called “the smell of rain.” I really, really like this song a lot. It's just super duper chill. I'm having a good time doing it, trying not to overthink it, overstress it, anything like that. When I'm not spending that much time working on the music, when there was no attention on it, I could really get into my own groove. I was so zen, because I didn't have to worry about any of the TikTok views because it all just goes up and down. I really try not to get caught up too much in that. At one point, I completely quit making music for like two or three months pretty recently because I was so focused on TikTok. Then it really took off, but it was like the most miserable that I've been. I'm trying to step back and do this part a lot more, because this is more fulfilling for my soul. But if I want to survive and pay bills, I got to do the promotion part too.
