Sometimes you enter a songwriting room completely open to ideas and topics to write about. And sometimes you walk in after a breakup, feeling contemptuous about an old flame who did you wrong.
That was what happened to Dasha on the day she wrote her debut single, “Austin.”
“I was in a session in LA and we were writing this completely different song,” Dasha recalls to ABC Audio. “I was already writing this album, What Happens Now?, and I knew I wanted this upbeat, scorned woman song. I was going through this kind of gnarly breakup at the time, and I was pretty upset with this guy. There’d been a lot of excuses and I’d been mistreated very much so.”
Dasha wanted to let art imitate life, but she didn’t want a sad, woe-is-me ballad.
“I was like, ‘You guys, no. This is too slow. I want my scorned woman song. I’m pissed right now,”” Dasha recalls. “I had so much fury inside of me about this guy. And so we restarted and then we started playing the chords for ‘Austin.’ And literally, the first thing that came out of my mouth was like, freestyle, ‘Did your boots stop working? Did your truck break down?””
“Everyone’s like, ‘What’d you say?’ And I was like, ‘Did your boots stop working.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah. No, that’s it.’ And so we wrote the song in less than an hour, and it was just like pure magic in the room,” she shares.
“After I wrote the song, everyone on my team was like, ‘Yeah, girl. This is gonna be the one that puts you on the map,”” recounts Dasha. “So the whole roll out to the album was around pushing ‘Austin,’ and it worked.”
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