Jammerzine has an exlusice interview with Dubh Lee. Dubh is a unique musician in every right possible, to be quite honest. She is one of those who stay with you and become a part of your repertoire, and deservedly so.
Having said that, since our initial First Listen of her latest track titled ‘My Poor Boy’, she has since dropped the music video for said track (embedded below).
With a sound and style that features a world-endearing sound while keeping her vivid Irish roots, Dubh Lee could be one of those ‘once in a generation’ types of artists, mixing poetry and music to create an audio-artform as memorable as it is mesmerizing.
In this interview, we talk about her latest single as well as her insights on the indie music scene and where she is taking her music.
Check out our other features with Dubh Lee HERE.
About Dubh Lee
Dubh Lee is an Irish guitarist and singer-songwriter who emerged on the Dublin music scene in 2018 with her lively residency in The International Bar and has since entertained countless audiences across Ireland. With wide-ranging influences from folk, blues, and rock and an unadorned, honest vocal style, she writes songs that examine excess, ennui, heartache, and womanhood.
Dubh Lee has performed at festivals and events such as the Ruby Sessions, Electric Picnic, Fuinneamh, and All Together Now, as well as intimate shows opening for acts such as Alabama 3, Jerry Fish, and Bagatelle. Her song ‘To My Sisters’ won the Night and Day song contest in 2023. She supported jazz band Jimmy’s Cousin on their Irish tour, which included performances in The Set Theatre in Kilkenny, Dolan’s in Limerick, and The Sugar Club in Dublin. Not afraid of experimenting with genre, Dubh Lee’s vocals have featured on the tracks of hip-hop and drum’n’bass artists, and her live shows are dynamic, with earnest acoustic folk tunes building up to intense, electric-guitar driven bangers. In 2020, she released Carousel, a blues-rock stomper with a psychedelic music video and themes of debauchery and despair.
Dubh Lee’s debut EP, Animals and Friends, came out in May 2023. The 4-track EP explores the artist’s internalized misogyny and romantic misadventures, with old and new sonic influences from Aldous Harding to The Band. The release was accompanied by an acoustic Irish tour, with 9 shows across multiple counties in April and May 2023.
‘My Poor Boy’ Video
“My Poor Boy was written two years ago, in 2023, as I was driving home from a date that went poorly. I was looking out the window of my taxi ride home and thinking about various poor choices I had made recently with regards to romantic encounters, and as we drove down Cork Street towards Crumlin (in Dublin city), I incorporated words from different signs and shop fronts into the lyrics.
I had been listening to Marvin Gaye a good bit around that time, and I tried to capture some of the yearning you can feel in his music, in the melody of My Poor Boy. It probably doesn’t sound much like it anymore, but a lot of the initial inspiration for the melody and chord progression for the track came from Heard It Through the Grapevine. When blended with my usual Travis-picking and folk leanings, I ended up with this mellow, lonesome soundscape. My Poor Boy was initially just the working title, but the phrase inspired lyrical ideas around dog imagery – ‘throw me a bone please’ and ‘curl up at your feet’, etc. At the time, I was in the middle of a love triangle with my ex and a new guy who turned out to be a total narcissist. I felt pathetic, and the lyrics are trying to get at that type of feeling, like a dog that has been kicked.
I came up with the western-y electric guitar motif that happens after each chorus on the spot in the studio. I knew I wanted something like that in the interval between verses and choruses, so I drew from the likes of the Fistful of Dollars theme; there’s also a great modern example of that type of guitar tone in Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey. Once that was in, the song started going in this desert/dusty direction, so I invited trombone player Oran O’Neill to lay down some lines. The percussion is simple – just a shaker and a tambourine.
I knew I wanted that type of organ you hear at baseball games, so my co-producer and studio engineer, John Leader, helped me write the organ line. He also played bass on the track and wrote the string arrangement that gets introduced from the second verse onwards. I love a short song, and it comes in at a tidy 02:46. My Poor Boy is the second track (but the first single) from my upcoming EP, which is called FUFO. The EP ties together folk, rock, and psychedelic elements and is darker overall than my previous release. The cover art for the EP is a collage I made, whereby each quadrant represents a song on the EP. The quadrant for My Poor Boy is the bottom right (which is a picture of my dog Sam, who is now deceased).”
Dubh Lee
LINKS:
https://linktr.ee/dubh.lee
https://dubhlee.bandcamp.com/
https://www.tiktok.com/@dubh.lee
https://www.facebook.com/dubh.lee/
https://www.youtube.com/@DubhLee
https://www.instagram.com/dubh.lee
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7Bu1aoXYEAs9SaqDaN19o4