There’s a paradoxically perfect union between a broken heart and cowboy twang. Tyler Dozier’s songs as Lady Dan tap even deeper into that sublime intersection where searing pain can reach sublime heights. Her own tale of hurt comes complete with multilayered existential quandaries, of empowerment and restriction, of life and death, of faith and its absence. On her debut album I Am the Prophet April 23rd 2021 via Earth Libraries, the Austin-based musician weaves intensely personal storytelling, poetic imagery, biblical allusion, immaculate arrangements, and crackling songwriting into an irresistible melancholic melange.
Growing up in Dothan, Alabama, Dozier was drawn to the wide spectrum of possibilities that music offered, even if she didn’t find a specific community she felt akin to. “I just didn’t find my people,” she says. “I was listening to country, psych rock, bluegrass, punk, and old socialist folk.” But as she moved to the big city of Birmingham with her then-boyfriend to attend Christian ministry school, she felt that world closing in rather than expanding. Between a controlling relationship, her father’s battle with cancer, and a wavering certainty in her faith, Dozier’s world was changing. She embraced the rebellion at her core, left school, returned home to care for her father as he passed, eventually moved to Texas for a new start, and began working her way toward I Am the Prophet.
“I learned how to show my strength, my truth, my self through music,” Dozier says. “This is my one place to be a bitch if I want to be a bitch. So many of these songs, at their core, are about me reclaiming ownership of myself.”