Paul Dally: I’m Going to Be a Pretty F*cking Big Deal, Even If It’s Not in My Lifetime

Paul Dally pours himself a cup of McNulty’s peppermint tea to get his day started in his one-bedroom Midtown apartment. Dally’s apartment is simple. All necessities, no indulgences. “This is basically an approximation of my childhood bedroom. I got my guitar, I got a TV to watch movies, I got a mini fridge with beer in it. Like what more could you ask for?”

After pouring his tea, Dally goes on a walk around 11am with an audio book playing. Today, it’s Thomas Mann’s Royal Highness in his headphones. Sometimes he strolls through Central Park, or makes a quick stop at the MET or, as he puts it, a dérive, for instance: “a Paradiddle through the city.”

Paradiddle, a word I had to look up later, is a rudiment of drumming consisting of four even strokes played in the order of left-right-left-left or right-left-right-right. This is a key insight into how he operates. There is a rhythm to his day rooted in music. Almost all of these excursions into New York City are by himself. “There are plenty of days I am the only person I see… I like being alone.” This solitude works for Dally as it gets him into the creative headspace he likes when writing and recording his songs.

This particular Friday, Dally peeked into the MET for a visit to the Mertens Gallery for Musical Instruments where he studied each section carefully, giving each the strings, the drums and the percussive instruments all a respectful gaze. His reverence for the history of music is palpable.

After strolling through Central Park, he returns to his apartment where he will create music, music and more music. “Every song you’ve ever heard from me was recorded with equipment in this apartment.” But before Dally was signed to R&R and Big Wave, performing with artists like Dijon and solely focusing on music, he was just a kid from Washington State with big dreams.

Raised on Vashon, Washington, an island the size of Manhattan, he started experimenting with music as a young teenager. His father gave him a Tascam 4-track and Dally was hooked. “I might have an idea for an arrangement. I would play that on the drums and then add guitar, keyboard [then] I might just sing the vocal live if I had run out of tracks when bouncing down to two track.” As a high schooler, Dally traveled over two hours a day to get to the Tacoma School of the Arts. Passing Mt. Rainier as the sun rose, he used a car, bus and boat to get there.

Dally had many musical mentors growing up, including Daryl Redeker and Paul Eliot who he met as a teenager. Both of them gave him feedback on theory, arranging and recording techniques. He also frequently listened to the likes of The Velvet Underground, Suicide and Bob Dylan. Lou Reed especially gave him new stimuli to hone in on his own guitar playing and lyrical style while drawing him to New York.

In the fifteen years that Paul Dally has lived in New York, he has done construction worker, driven box trucks, worked in bars and restaurants, done set design, and sold mid-century modern furniture seller, to name a few of his eclectic side hustles. As a bartender he worked from 4pm to 4am, but even with this challenging schedule, “I always had some songs cooking.” At this time, he turned his kitchen into a home studio to record a couple hours a day before the long night ahead and that studio setup stuck with him. “Every song is a kitchen recording from one of my apartments.”

After years of playing a part in a couple bands, Dally decided to go solo in 2018. This realization came when he was back in Washington State, experimenting with different synthesizers and reverb sounds. Dally was impressed enough by his own sound that he ended up releasing his 10 song album “New American” at the end of the year.

Paul Dally’s songs are rooted in fictional storytelling that he says could be placed in the pop genre “but in a cheeky way.” His music deals with love and memory, layered with synths like the Korg M1. Aside, he told me how the M1 reminds him of the timbre of a Memphis hotel he once stayed at where “the discomfort is a part of the appeal.” All of this coalesces in an esoteric sound that is distinctly Dally’s.

As he tells me, his “sound is to inspire a story, rather than using it specifically because it sounds nice.” He goes on to say “I like the way fucked up shit sounds” which is not a detriment in terms of the quality of his music but a stylistic choice. “If something sounds off, it’s probably on purpose.”

In his latest single ‘Back of a Cab,’ released in 2022, you can see these themes at play. He describes traversing New York City with big dreams. “A NYC ab is a great metaphor of the journey and the destination being the same thing… And that idea of how you are already where you need to be, but you still get to go somewhere else.”

Recently, Paul Dally got to perform his songs live in New York and Los Angeles when he opened for another R&R artist, Dijon. Dally humbly brushed past the fact he is the only artist to have opened for Dijon and noted how “in the conversations I've had with him, there's been a lot of harmonious understanding about practice and music. We both admire each other as people who fuck around with music.”

Dally described his feelings toward live performance in this way: “When you have a song that has a beginning and an end, you're framing a moment. And then you're sort of just decorating the air with the music in the air. Creating that decoration that people are observing and reacting to… people sing along. Music has things like rhythms so people dance or clap, like they're actually like communicating with you in this really special, limited way that is probably more intense than any recording experience could be.”

Dally does things his way. He has the confidence, creativity, thoughtfulness and talent not just as musician but as a human to make it. He is set to release more singles this year. “I plan on being a pretty fucking big deal, even if it’s not in my lifetime.”