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Sir Chloe’s Dana Foote talks festivals, making music with friends and smashing cars

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Dana Foote
Photo: Lillie Eiger / Courtesy

In 2017, Dana Foote rounded up her brother and best mates to put on a rock show to serve as her senior thesis at Bennington College in Vermont. A passing grade and the wildly successful Brooklyn-based indie rock outfit Sir Chloe soon followed. On the band’s grungy debut album, last year’s Party Favors, Foote’s songwriting favors the lyrical intricacies of influences like Mitski, while her beguiling, guttural vocals play nice with reverb-soaked guitars.

We caught up with the lead singer in preparation for Sir Chloe’s Life Is Beautiful set (Saturday, 4:45 p.m., Bacardi Stage).

You just played Lollapalooza, and now you’re gearing up to play Life Is Beautiful. What do you enjoy about festivals? Lollapalooza was the first festival I had ever been to, at all. It was also the first festival that we played. And I think the timing is really special. Everyone’s so excited to be able to see live music again and be able to be together. There’s a real sense of community. A festival’s like its own little city. You’re all there for one common interest, which is seeing live music, and it really is magic in a lot of ways.

You also created some magic recently with Sam Austins on the catchy summer track “Joy for Youth.” How did that come together? Sam and I met in LA at a photo shoot. We were partnered up, and we just really connected. … A couple weeks later, he reached out to me and asked if I would like to write a verse on this song that he was working on, and he sent me “Joy for Youth.” … It’s always fun to be able to work with friends, so it was really exciting to be able to get that opportunity with someone I liked so much. I listened to it a couple times, and then I recorded a verse and a little bit on the outro. Then I went out to film the music video in Detroit, which is his hometown, which just felt so special. I really love the way he works with friends. His managers are friends of his. All of his producers are close friends of his and, everyone who worked on the music video was local to Detroit. There was so much love in the project. It felt so authentic. There's so much of him that he puts in the music and in the visuals. It was a real privilege to work with him.

Did you enjoy destroying that car in the video? It was so much fun. I’ve actually always wanted to smash a car window, so I was glad that I was able to do that. And they gave me a black baseball bat, which matched my outfit. The car is actually his first car that he had. They found an exact replica of his old car for all of us to smash as kind of an homage to growing up.

You’ve kept your band pretty tight with old college mates and your brother. Does that closeness make writing easier? Yeah, we’ve kept it pretty close to home. It’s always so fun to work with friends and have that comfort in creativity. We all know each other and are comfortable with each other. There’s a lot of vulnerability in all of it. … And [being able to bring] half-finished songs, or songs that you’re not sure about, to people who you know you can trust makes such a huge difference.

You play a number of instruments, from guitar and piano to the mandolin and accordion. Your brother also plays drums in Sir Chloe. Did you guys grow up around music? Yeah, I grew up in a very musical family. My dad’s a guitarist, and my uncle is also a guitarist, a pianist and a composer. We just grew up playing. We had instruments all over the house. We were encouraged to experiment a lot.

And at my school, we could take piano lessons, and we also had a theater program, so there was a lot of singing going on. I went to a Christian camp growing up, where every morning we would all sing together. That was my first introduction to singing in harmony with people, like hundreds singing in a chorus. It really kind of hits you in your chest when you’re singing with a lot of people at once.

Did you ever have family jam sessions in the living room? Yeah, we did. We would have tambourines and guitars and pianos, and then we would have designated head bobbers as well.

You recently released a stripped down version of your viral song, “Michelle,” about an attractive girl who’s also a “monster from hell.” What motivated you to revisit that song in that way? We were thinking of having a vinyl that we exclusively sold on tour that would have that version, which was how the idea came about. When I first wrote “Michelle,” I was singing it with these two singers from my college. The arrangement was pretty much the way it’s recorded now, where it’s guitar and two vocalists; we didn’t have a piano back then. … But when people were excited about the song, we wanted to explore other ways to produce it to share with people.

The original’s grungier, but this version does a great job of romanticizing the monster a bit more. (Laughs.) Yeah, it was also really great to work with [the bands] Cryogeyser and Gold Child. They’re just really fantastic singers. Gold Child has that really soft, really beautiful tone to her voice. And Shawn from Cryogeyser has a grittier tone to theirs. It was really fun to blend those voices.

Modest Mouse is on the festival lineup, and you opened for them earlier this summer. Any chance we’ll see a reunion? I would love that. We played with them the night before we went on for Lollapalooza, and they played the same day as us for Lolla as well. I’d love to run into them again. They’re all such nice guys.

One of your musical influences, St. Vincent, will also be at the festival. I’d definitely love to catch her show and obviously meet her. We all really admire her as a writer and as an artist and a performer. I’ve actually never seen her live. I’ve watched performances of hers online, and I just love that she just really puts on a show when she plays. So I’m really hoping to catch her set.

What can we expect from Sir Chloe’s LIB performance? We have a cover of “Femme Fatale” by The Velvet Underground [that just came out], and we will be playing that during our set, so we’re pretty excited about that. Besides that, we’re just excited to see Vegas and play Life Is Beautiful. I’m really grateful that we can play this.

Life is Beautiful September 17-19, Downtown Las Vegas, official ticket exchange at lifeisbeautiful.lyte.com

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Amber Sampson

Amber Sampson is a Staff Writer for Las Vegas Weekly. She got her start in journalism as an intern at ...

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