Olivia Dolphin and I met on a Tuesday afternoon, just after I had finished listening to her 2024 album Better. With some favorite songs like “I Don’t Think about You Anymore” and the title track “Better” still whirling around in my head, I was eager to chat with the artist who was to thank. Dolphin began as a classical flutist studying at URI; she had her heart set on a classical career, but as her plans developed, so did her desires. “I moved into more of a writing background, and I used to actually publish a literary magazine called Wizards in Space. I thought I was going to do the publishing thing, and music was kind of over in its own sphere of things. Then one day I took my poetry, my love of writing, and my love of music and tried to schmoosh them together, and that’s what really got me into songwriting,” Dolphin recounts. Dolphin is proud to be a Rhode Island artist, and describes the community and scene as something unique, something that wants to hear from everyone, artist and audience alike. She says, “In the Rhode Island scene, it feels like there’s room for everyone. Even though we’re losing venues, we just try to make the most of what we have. In different communities, you have to kind of carve your own space, but I feel like in Rhode Island, everybody is so welcoming. I think the Motif Battle of the Bands was a really good example of that, yes, it was a competition, but we’re all gonna just cheer each other on… I also think we’re doing a good job at trying to be very adaptive to what people need or want now, venues that are accommodating early shows, smaller bills, multiple shows in a day.”
Influenced by ‘90s greats like Brandi Carlile, Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Ingrid Michaelson, Dolphin has found herself comfortably settled into the mixed genres of classical and “witchpop.” But what is witch-pop? To Dolphin, musically, it is an orchestral rock with grit, something unafraid to lean into the darkness, but spiritually, it goes deeper. “I truly believe that making live music is modern spell casting, and that when we are in a room together, listening to live music or creating live music, then that is true magic. I think it really calls back to the way I approach life in general, which is wanting to be very community-driven and wanting a show to be an experience and to feel magical. I also want to be very respectful of the actual practice of witchcraft and the actual practice that people may have. I try to be very intentional with practicing music as magic. There’s beauty in things like astrology, horoscopes, tarot cards, and engaging with those things for me. They’ve always been a way to understand the world at large and understand our place in the world, something to use as a mirror.I really like bringing those things into my songs, because sometimes you just don’t know the answer, and so you’re gonna turn to the tools we have.” The conversation shifted to intention, and Dolphin offered a fitting analogy, “I want my music to play the role of Big Sister in someone’s life, a thing that you can turn to and listen to when you might need advice or you might need a different perspective on something.” And for someone without a big sister, Dolphin has captured the role quite well. Sisterhood is about perspective. It forces one to be linked to something larger than themselves at all times, which is directly in line with the spiritual aspect of what witch-pop is to Dolphin.
But witch-pop is not where her sound ends. Dolphin elaborates, “I want to write a spooky Western song so badly. There’s something about witchy tumbleweed in the dusk of an Arizona desert that I really want to try to capture in music that I haven’t yet. Our next EP, I’ll say, takes some of the aspects of Better that were really orchestral and dials it up to 11. So in our next project, there’s a whole lot more strings and leaning into orchestral rock and pop. I’ve been calling it witchy Paul McCartney, like, when Paul McCartney uses a big rock orchestra.” When asked about her process, Dolphin says, “It’s never the same twice.” She loves the confessional and personal aspects that come with songwriting, but her favorite part of her musical career is the company and collaboration of her bandmates, Jeff Kidd, Johnny McMahon, Luke Leheny, and Sam Jaksa. “Playing with the band is the most fun I’ve ever had playing music. I’m sure that definitely stems from my marching band background and my orchestral background. I’ll bring them a song and think it’s gonna stay a soft, acoustic thing and that they’re just gonna kind of add accouterments, but they have this ability to take the threads of the orchestral vibe I’m going for, and really grasp that and bolster it in this cool way.”
Dolphin has come out with some re-recordings and alternate versions of her song “Quiet Girls” this year, her reasoning for these alternate versions stemming from a continued desire to capture her music in a way she wasn’t fully able to on the original studio recording. “The hardest part about studio recordings is they really are a capture of where you are in that time at that moment with the people that are collaborating with you, and it really is a snapshot. And when you’re making decisions for a studio recording, sometimes you might have to kill off a darling, either a vocal thing that you loved or an idea that you had. Some of the rerecordings I released, like, ‘Quiet Girls’ with a scream version, has one change. That whole thing just has one change, but I kept thinking about that moment. I just wailed in the studio. It’s nice to not feel so stuck in one recording, too.” Themes of femininity and womanhood are prominent in Dolphin’s work. She reflected on the social roles cast upon her as a young woman and artist, and explained that songwriting is her way of interrogating these roles. “‘Quiet Girls,’ I think, is an excellent example of me wanting to take experiences I’ve had, and kind of work through them in song. The other day, I was saying that this song ultimately is about revenge. Revenge, I think, is a dish best served through song. And that might be the healthiest way to go through some of these emotions.”
Dolphin then explained her desire for connection between not only music and listener, but also herself and her audience. She reflected on the role of hyperspecificity as the key to universality. “It’s like when you’re telling stories and you’re like, ‘This happened to me.’ And they respond, ‘Oh my God, I had something like that happen to me too.’ And that’s what I want the relationship to be. That’s also how we can be in community together just responding to each other’s stories and riffing off of them and adding color to each person’s stories.” Dolphin hopes for music to be something beyond just a listening activity, but instead something that one is more able to deeply connect with through different practices. “I gave my album, Better to Gia, who’s a tattoo artist, and then there was Psychic Serpent, she’s a tarot card reader, and they both came up with different readings or tattoos that were in response to my album. I love a good music bill that’s three bands and then everybody goes home, but what if you got a tarot card reader at your show? How fun would that be? And the tarot card readings might be based on a question that the core of your art is asking, ‘Am I better off than I was before? Am I better now?’”
In our final moments, I asked Dolphin the question that everyone asks successful breakouts – “What do you live by?” And Dolphin delivered the tried and true answer: practice. “Eventually, you just have to trust that you put in the work, that you’re gonna be able to go out there and nail it. You get to a point where you’re about to go on stage and you just say, ‘Fuck it, whatever happens, happens.’ And that, I think, has helped me be a better performer. I can trust myself on stage because I put in the work. It’s not sexy, fun advice; I don’t think people are ever really thrilled with the answer because my answer is very practical: Put in the work, whatever that means to you.” Practice, like Dolphin said, is not a sexy act, but it is a critical one. Practice is the wind beneath an artist’s wings, it is the guiding light to a strong performance. If practice is what makes perfect then maybe we should all practice a little more, dream a little bigger, and give a fuck a little less, as Dolphin directs us to do. •