TREMORS// Sir Chloe is the grunge rockstar with a penchant for Gregorian chants

Dana Foote answers my call from her second-floor apartment in New York, with a backing track of humming traffic and the incessant clank of construction work. Down to earth in a hoodie and a baseball cap, she appears a far cry from her grunge-glam alter ego Sir Chloe – but when she begins talking, the enigmatic artistry inside her spills out.

Foote has a complex relationship with her musical persona, going back and forth on whether Sir Chloe is her true self or merely a creation.
“Sometimes I feel like Sir Chloe does all the cool stuff, and I’m just the lowly servant who writes her songs. We are kind of one and the same – but she gets to wear much cooler outfits!”

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Sometimes I feel like Sir Chloe does all the cool stuff, and I’m just the lowly servant who writes her songs

Dana Foote

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Sir Chloe is the product of a tumultuous lifelong journey through music. Despite growing up in a small town with “no live shows,” Foote’s childhood was surrounded by music, with her father, uncle, and their cousins all accomplished instrumentalists. She fondly describes the music room around which her family home was centred, with a grand piano among the vast selection of instruments on hand.
“I was in musicals growing up, and always really enjoyed both playing and being around instruments. I listened to music obsessively. As a kid, I would discover new music by picking out CDs from the library with cool covers.”

Foote recounts the feeling of being drawn to indie-rock band The Antlers’ 2009 album ‘Hospice,’ with stark white hands on the cover against a red background, and the Pink Floyd classic ‘Dark Side Of The Moon.’ Her father introduced her to a wide range of artists, from Ani DiFranco and Sufjan Stevens to Michael Jackson and Talking Heads. Narrowing them down to find her feet in grunge rock didn’t come until she began studying music at Bennington College in Vermont, where she found herself singing for the first time with her band, Guppy, covering everyone from Carole King to Tegan & Sara. The genre shift came with a change in the direction of her subject matter.

“Before college, I had written folk music with my acoustic guitar, but I found the topics I was writing about were changing a lot. I then started going to local shows in Bennington and was inspired by the bands passing through; there was a lot of hooting and hollering and jumping up and down. It was music that gave me adrenaline. My friends in the music department introduced me to Cage The Elephant and The White Stripes as well. Music had never made me feel that way before.”

A powerful piece of advice from a college friend led to her embarking on a rowdier approach to music-making.
“I started Sir Chloe in my senior year. I had told my friend I wanted to make music I could jump up and down to, and he was like, ‘why don’t you jump up and down while writing it?’ So that’s what I did, in my dorm room, and the product was [my debut album] ‘Party Favors.’”

‘Party Favors,’ released in 2020, was the beginning of Sir Chloe’s major online breakthrough, with the track ‘Michelle’ going viral on TikTok. Despite the benefit of catapulting her to success, the newfound public presence proved to be a difficult adjustment for Foote.
“At first, being known and getting recognised was very scary. But it didn’t feel real online; it was just numbers and comments. It wasn’t a real, tactile experience until the live element happened.”

Sir Chloe’s first sell-out show was at hipster bar Pianos in New York, to a crowd of 130. Her next show, after the COVID-19 pandemic, was a monster Lollapalooza aftershow at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, opening for legendary rock band Modest Mouse. “Pianos felt so huge at the time,” she recalls, “Then I went back a couple of years later and was like, ‘this is the size of my apartment!’ At the Lollapalooza show, I remember thinking, ‘nothing could have prepared me for this.’ It was such a massive jump. After my set, I was so overwhelmed that I called my friend and just cried down the phone.”

Now, though, Foote takes both live shows and internet fame firmly in her stride. “Once you’ve got 500 shows under your belt, it feels great. It’s cathartic to perform my older songs live, like ‘Michelle’; I wrote it in 2016, but still perform it at every show, though of course I’m singing it about a different thing now as times have changed. My songs have always been written with live performance in mind. It’s not difficult anymore; it’s just fun.”

On the latest Sir Chloe album ‘Swallow The Knife,’ Foote has mixed together a cauldron of elements from her unconventional musical past. Rather than the usual essays and exams, Foote’s assignments at Bennington College included attaching mics to a bridge to record passers-by jumping on springs, and transforming the sound of squelching footprints into a song.

“Those teaching styles made me less fearful of making weird music that isn’t necessarily satisfying. It was just me and [sound engineer] Steph Marziano working on ‘Swallow The Knife,’ and Steph is similarly creative in the way she produces. For parts of the record, she recorded drums through a huge garden hose and had me sing through a plastic bag submerged in a bucket of water. You wouldn’t know it by listening to the album, but it’s all in the mix.

“The session musicians are all friends of mine and Steph’s; her husband is on bass, my manager’s friend is on drums, and Steph’s studio neighbour Reece stepped in to play acoustic guitar because I busted my wrist. It was like I was in school again: sitting around making music with friends, experimenting, asking questions and feeling comfortable, just having a voice in the room again. That felt really special.”

A rather unlikely influence on the album came from 11th-century church music. After not getting a place in a class on women in music at college, her favourite professor let her sit in on it purely for fun. There, she learnt about – and fell in love with – the Gregorian chants of history’s first known female composer, Hildegard of Bingen.

Foote has described the album as stemming from a “psychological winter.” The metaphor, she explains, is a way of conveying heavy emotion without prompting a fear reaction.
“Peeking into darkness can freak a lot of people out, so I’ve learnt to use a lot of metaphors since I was a kid. Saying something that sounds pretty is easier for everybody than being brutally honest.”

Before returning to her authentic roots with ‘Swallow The Knife,’ Foote admits she was led astray by the pressure of being signed to major record label Atlantic for her second record, ‘I Am The Dog.’

“I would be brought into the label offices and told by the execs, ‘We hate the album,’ and had to rewrite the whole thing. It took two or three years to make, whereas ‘Swallow The Knife’ took 5 weeks. I am happy with ‘I Am The Dog,’ but by the end it didn’t really feel like the record was mine. It was written to please so-and-so in a suit at the record label who thought the songs were rock ‘n’ roll enough for this amorphous potential fanbase. That took a lot of the magic out of the writing process.

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I am happy with ‘I Am The Dog,’ but by the end it didn’t really feel like the record was mine. It was written to please so-and-so in a suit at the record label who thought the songs were rock ‘n’ roll enough for this amorphous potential fanbase. That took a lot of the magic out of the writing process.

Dana Foote

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“I was lucky enough to part ways amicably with Atlantic. Before being signed to them, I had written ‘Party Favors’ in a personal space, as a self-expression, and played it only to people I loved, trusted and knew very well, so it was nice to return to that with ‘Swallow the Knife.’ I felt like an artist again.”

Sir Chloe will take hits from all three of her records on a major headline tour of the US and Canada this Autumn, with support from Suzy Clue, Telescreens, and Venus & The Flytraps. There’s more good news for her fans across the pond; a two-week UK tour is set to follow closely afterwards, with full details being announced this week. Watch this space.