the ugly hug

dog eyes is the lo-fi duo of Hailey Firstman and Davis Leach, who, as of signing to Grand Jury Music, released their sophomore album holy friend last month. This marked an exciting next step for the Oakland-based duo, as they continue to expand their range as well as evolve into their own endearing sound and conceptual vision as a homegrown project.

holy friend is a sonic reverie that flows through full, vibrant and admirable lo-fi production. It is not an album that rejects minimalism, playing amongst a multitude of layered harmonies and textured instrumental tinkerings, but rather one that embraces a process of both trust in the duos collaborative strengths as well as the simplicity in writing what you know best.

The intimacy at which Firstman and Leach perform from feels like the weight of a large and colorful comforter. Hiding underneath one was often what sleepovers were resorted to as a kid – flash light in hand, accidentally blinding one eye at a time, only to keep the party going in forcefully hushed secrecy because you know you were supposed to be asleep an hour ago. Those are the moments that stick to you and dog eyes knows it. As a collection, holy friend is an embodiment of memories like that, the small things; uncontrollable fits of cry-laughing, awkward relational firsts, finally knowing that your roommate’s dog loves you, the last drive in a cherished old car, or simply just making music with your best friend.

We recently got to catch up with the duo, discussing their strengths as collaborators and friends, articulating relationships through unique lenses, defining all goodness through the ‘holy friend’ and obviously, dogs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Shea Roney: Congrats on the release! How has it been going since the rollout? 

Hailey Firstman: It’s been great! It feels really good to have it out there.

Davis Leach: It’s definitely the most exciting release that we’ve ever done. It’s just been really cool connecting with random people who reach out because they listened to it. 

SR: Having worked closely together before on Mr. Marigold and your dog eyes debut, good, proper send off, were there any shifts, not only in your style, but the way you two collaborated that you saw stand out on holy friend? 

HL: Well, we initially started working together on my project Mr. Marigold when Davis offered to help me record it and that’s when we first became friends. I feel like with each new thing we’ve done it’s been a progression of our tastes together, and also a progression of what we like when we’re making stuff together. It’s just really fun.

DL: I mean, all of it is just fun. I feel like, at least right now, this is just kind of our hobby. So you know, we both have jobs and whatnot. But with holy friend, [speaking to Hailey] were you living in the Bay Area at that point?

HF: I was probably halfway through moving.

DL: Okay yeah, so that first album, [Hailey] was living like three hours south, so she would come up, and we would just have weekend-long benders of recording music, and that kind of formed our habits. We’d be up really late every night and on Sunday night she would leave at like 2 AM. But when recording holy friend, there was part of it where she was actually living up here.

HF: So it was a little slightly healthier. Maybe a little [laughs].

SR: The album comes together in such a beautiful collage of sounds and textures that still feel cohesive as an overall project. I am wondering where this collective idea came from. Was it brought out with each individual song to match meanings and expressions or was it decided on prior to recording?

HF: I think that we do something where we both get really into specific albums at the same time, where we can’t stop listening to them. We had a couple like that. So it’s definitely some of those albums mixed with what we feel in the song.

DL: Essentially it comes down to everything we can do to rip off this album [laughs]. But then the thing is, it never sounds like it, just because, you know, we’re doing home recording with a synthesizer and like a weird loop pedal that makes weird sounds, so we try and then something else happens and we end up chasing that.

HF: There were definitely some songs where we knew what we wanted them to sound like. The song ‘fair’ was all on GarageBand and my vocals are on my laptop microphone and I recorded them when I was laying in my bed. True bedroom pop [laughs].

SR: I find ‘fair’ to be such a lovely song that holds a lot of nostalgic value in the way it was recorded and produced. Where do you experience auditory nostalgia, and in the case of this song, how did you manage to capture the expressions involved? 

DL: I was gonna say adding the voice memo stuff is so easy to achieve that nostalgic feel. And I mean, it’s overused a lot, but I like when it’s just barely in there. If you listen really hard to ‘fair’, you can hear Hailey saying, ‘okay, we’re gonna start on…’ and it makes me think of blowing out birthday candles or something. And then I think just trying your best to go either hyper digital to where it starts to sound messed up and robotic, that is a very nostalgic auditory sound for me. Or going the complete opposite direction, fully analog, like we have this busted up tape machine that we use a lot that is an easy way to make those emotions come out a little more too.

HF: Actually, the recording under ‘fair’ is from a completely other song that me and my friend made, and I just autotuned it to be in the key of the song. But I feel like there’s always nostalgia in hearing a random conversation with a good friend, and I also sped up my voice to be a little higher which kind of sounds like I’m a kid. 

SR: I like how the song ‘moment’ feels to be given its very own standout moment on the album, living in this standard pop sound, but also continuing that emotional throughline of nostalgia as well.

HF: Well at first we were very into the idea of our second album being a pop album, like a true pop album. I feel like ‘moment’ is kind of the only actual pop song that came out of our making a pop album [laughs].

DL: But we did try a couple of other ones, but they just didn’t work as well as ‘moment’. That was probably the hardest song for me because it was kind of a pain getting that one done. And then at the end, I feel like we weren’t super happy with it until my roommate Cameron actually started mixing it.

HF: We have certain songs that we call “Hailey GarageBand songs” at first, where I just kind of get crazy with GarageBand or Logic. I wrote ‘moment’ while I was also producing it, which is kind of unlike a lot of other songs I write. But I just remember being very excited when I wrote, “if I could hold this moment in my hands”, and I had to check to make sure no one else has written that yet [laughs].  It can go both ways, it’s earnest and could not be earnest as well, and yeah, kind of hearkens to that early 2000’s cheesy love song, but it’s truly how I felt.

SR: More often than not, when we think of a relationship album, we are prone to think of romantic love or heartbreak. But what I admire so much about holy friend is I can jump from a song about losing a childhood friend to losing a cherished car, and yet it’s still a universal and relatable feeling that is just put through a different and unique lens. Can you tell me about your experience repurposing what a ‘relationship’ album can be?

HF: I think I am just very interested in relationships of all kinds in general and how people fall into patterns. Sometimes even when I am writing a song to understand an experience, even if it’s not an experience I’ve necessarily had before, it’s something I enjoy. Almost like writing a book about something that you’ve never done and putting yourself into a character or experience. You can feel it and you know it. It helps to process my own things.

DL: Yeah, I guess writing a breakup album, you know, happens a lot, but while recording holy friend I was really into thinking about platonic friendships and a lot of the rights and wrongs that can happen in those relationships as well. You can have a love song about a friend or a breakup song about a friend too, and that’s kind of what I was thinking about the whole time. 

HF: That’s true, I mean, Nora my car, that’s also a relationship I had. I actually want to make a playlist with all the songs that I’ve written about my car now. But Nora had moss growing inside because there was a little leak in it, so when it rained, the fabric on the top would get wet and it started growing moss, like a free filtration system. But there is something about a big old car that is very emotional, and now I have my mother’s cube car, which is nameless, because it’s just not as cool. 

SR: When expressing the idea of the ‘holy friend’, you described it as a perfect being. Can you tell me a bit about where the holy friend comes from and did its presence shift at all while the album was coming together? 

DL: At the time I had a lot of friends and people close to me that I either felt I was wronging them or vice versa. I kind of struggle socially sometimes, so I was just thinking about all these different relationships that I have and friendships that I have and I guess I was just kind of combining them all into one person. 

HF: [To Davis] I remember when you were first telling me about it, you said it combines the best qualities of them, so it creates an ideal being.

DL: Yeah, now that I think about it, it’s kind of religious. I’m not religious at all, but it is kind of like a God thing. I don’t know.

HF: Like Jesus [laughs]. 

DL: Yeah, like Jesus [laughs]. I can’t really speak much about religion or anything, but it was kind of like the goodness in all of my friends, and thinking about that makes me feel really good. 

SR: Did constructing the holy friend through writing these songs help put your own personal relationships more into perspective? Especially when walking this fine line with such nuance and consideration when writing about them.

DL: Actually, yes, like majorly. When I would start thinking about all of my friends, I’m like, ‘man, how can I be like that?’ I know my friend would always do this, why don’t I do that for this other person and just try to be positive and work on my relationships and actually be intentional. I feel like, right now, I’m kind of in a place where my closest friends are my housemates and we’re all actually moving out at the end of this month, so now I’m having to learn how to be an actual active participant in a friendship, which sounds insane, but that’s where I’m at. 

SR: Were there any types of relationships or emotional connections that you found were particularly difficult to articulate? 

HF: For songwriting, I’ve realized over the years that there’s kind of a sweet spot with timing with where I’m at emotionally about a situation. If there’s too much emotion, it becomes kind of muddy, like if you’re thinking about painting and there’s too many colors, it can all start blending together. Sometimes it feels good, and I need it to happen to write a song, but it doesn’t always make my favorite songs. The romantic ideal, the romanticism, or the powerful emotions recollected in tranquility, I feel like the sweet spot is once I’m at peace with a person or a situation is when I’m able to collect the nuance, like as you were talking about, and even make it kind of funny, too.

DL: I feel like there’s a lot of humor in some of your songs [to Hailey]. Like ‘firsts’, some of those lines are really funny. 

HF: Yeah, and letting it sit for a little bit, or sometimes I’ll write half of a song and then months and months later I’ll finish it and get even more tranquility from it.

SR: You guys do manage to combine humor with sincerity very well. I especially like the line “I don’t exist outside of his big ears” from ‘rusty, my dog’ because it deals with this universal sense of placement and belonging that many different types of relationships have, but so adorably told through the eyes of a dog. 

DL: Being perceived by a dog just melts me completely. I’m specifically singing about my roommate’s dog. His name isn’t actually rusty, but you know, that’s off the record [laughs]. I love him so much and I find myself just wondering, ‘what does he think of me?’ I always read these articles of people talking about how you need to pay attention to your dog because you are their ‘everything’, so I was thinking what would it be like to only exist to my dog, and nothing else. It’s a funny song, and it’s cute and sweet because I got my housemates involved, but it can be weird the more you think about it. I mean, we do have a lot of dog related stuff, I mean the name dog eyes, but there is so much beauty in dogs.

SR: Do you have a dog, Hailey? 

HF: I don’t. I actually didn’t grow up with any animals because my mom is allergic. But I’ve lived with a dog and that’s when I started thinking about dog’s eyes. I was gonna say that one time I was Googling dog eyes, as one does, and this article popped up that was titled something like “Seeing God in your beloved dog’s eyes”. I didn’t read it, but I really liked the title [laughs].

SR: Do you guys have anything coming up that you are looking forward to? 

HF: We have a lot of songs we are looking forward to recording! We have a shared notes folder of the songs that we’ve each written or songs we’re writing together, and we just keep them all there for a while and simmer with them. It’s pretty giant, which is a cool problem to have, but this is the longest pause we’ve ever taken between albums and I think that’s good. 

DL: Yeah and again, at least for right now, this is just a hobby for us. But with the signing to Grand Jury and having a lot of people listening, like way more than ever before, we’re definitely thinking about recording our next record, playing a lot of shows, or maybe doing a small tour. But at the end of the day we just really enjoy making music because it is just very foundational to our friendship.

holy friend is out on all platforms now as well as a limited edition deluxe cassette of holy friend and dog eyes’ first record good, proper send off.

Written by Shea Roney | Feature Photo by Hector Franco