Elena Dakota is an Australian musician who creates lo-fi folk songs imbued with a plainness and clear emotional sincerity. Dakota sings of the mundane and small moments, made big by magnification.
There’s something equally disorienting and comforting about Dakota’s newest single “Women in the Air.” The main theme created by the acoustic guitar plays with your ear. Its syncopated rhythm creates a sense of a more complicated time signature while the harmonized vocals are delivered in a more familiar, satisfying manner. The lonely trombone layered in adds a welcomed quirkiness to the introspective seriousness of the song. As the vocalists depart from each other towards the end of the song there is a sort of round that forms momentarily that creates intensity without the need for extra volume.Â
“I had done the Nullarbor, driving between Perth and Adelaide a few times that year. There is a lot going on out there, a lot of openness. To me, the song is spinning and tilting, a bit like how it felt to fall asleep under a very wide and starry sky with shadows dancing from the fire against the swag and the car and the shrubs. The song is a message I was penning to myself, in the hope of one day understanding what I meant, about the importance of desire, sensuality, and intuition, and unclogging these things from the shame they often get dragged through,” says Dakota.
