30 year old singer-songwriter Dorothy Clark has been sharing pieces of herself online since she was a child. In a bit-crushed 144p video, a 14 year old dodie stands in an open field in her hometown of Epping, England. Next to her stands her childhood best friend Alice, and they sing a vague song of heartbreak – the exact kind you'd expect a 14 year old to come up with. They giggle in between verses, eventually devolving into the two taking turns riffing "yeah yeahs" and impersonating Michael Jackson just days before his death. The description reads "more randomness! this is my song i made up so dont steal it. as if you would." She bids the audience goodbye in a southern American accent, baring her braces-laden smile.

"Jeez Louise, I thought I buried that, you did your research," she tells me in the Verve label group conference room. She's wearing a puffy-sleeved, intricately patterned dress with a matching green beret, opting to go shoeless, which she often does on stage as well. Her newly released sophomore record Not For Lack Of Trying is her first on the UMG jazz-leaning imprint, making her labelmates with the likes of Ringo Starr, Brian Eno, and Jeff Goldblum, who appeared in the video for second single, "I Feel Bad For You, Dave".

I spoke to dodie at the end of a day of US press. She'd arrived back to Universal Music Group's Manhattan offices after a shoot for Vevo DSCVR, which itself followed an intimate lottery-ticketed gig the previous night. "It was really fun. I'm really tired. I'm so tired. I'm so jet lagged. And I think I'm getting a tad ill. So I wasn't my best, but it was fun. It was the thing I was most excited about on this trip, actually, because I love meeting these people and playing songs as well. So it was really nice," she says of the show. They had themed cocktails – she tells me the one named after lead single "I'M FINE!" was essentially a Long Island.

The last time I met dodie was almost exactly nine years ago, the day before my 13th birthday (dodie, at the time, was 21). She was playing a show at Beat Kitchen in Chicago alongside collaborators and fellow YouTuber/musician hyrbrids Tessa Violet and Rusty Clanton. Her repertoire ranged from heartbreakingly earnest ("6/10", "When") to cautiously optimistic ("Would You Be So Kind", "Sick of Losing Soulmates") to outright silly ("My Face", "I Have A Hole In My Tooth (And My Dentist is Shut)").

I was so excited for the show that the ticket confirmation email was the wallpaper of my school-issued Chromebook, and following the set I got to give her a heartfelt letter I wrote the night before and a couple loose teabags that I stole from my mom, and in turn she tweeted me telling me how glad she was that I play music.

I was far from the only one like this, though. During her most exposed years in the mid-late 2010's, dodie would meet thousands of fans during her weeks touring or attending YouTube conventions. With a flower crown in one hand and an iPhone with a rolling camera clutched in the other, her fans would pour their hearts out to her with their struggles just as she would to them through the lens of her camera. "You saved my life," they would tell her throughout her early 20s. It was heavy stuff, and the emotional whiplash eventually became too much to bear. She'd cease organized meet and greets in 2018.

She tells me about how she looks back on these experiences:

"I think we all kind of trauma dumped on each other in a way. It would be a long line of people and I'd be standing there for hours and they would be waiting. And then someone would come up to me and maybe cry and maybe like whisper in my ear something very, very, very personal about their life. And maybe that would trigger me and I would think about my own life. Maybe I would cry as well to try and connect or maybe it just genuinely hurt me or I felt really bad and then we would hug, take a picture and then someone else would come bounding up to me with finger guns and ask to kiss them on the cheek or whatever. It was just really weird. Certainly a lot to deal with for someone at that age, but not impossible. And actually, I have so many fond memories of that. I think as someone who was a fan of a lot of people, and still is, I really understood what it meant to be a fan and the fan experience, which is why I felt so much guilt when I felt like I didn't do the right interaction. Especially because I know, for me, I met so many people and I would forget, I would meet people decades later and be like, 'I don't remember meeting you, but you definitely do.' So yeah, I really, I really understood it all. And sometimes it was a car crash and sometimes it was perfect and lovely, but I think you just kind of let it go."

Nobody has written about the artist/fan relationship quite like dodie has. Her first instance of this, "Secret For The Mad" from her 2017 EP You, is a plea to those that share the mental health struggles that she championed online. "There will be a day where you can say you're okay and mean it / I promise you it'll all make sense again" she sings like a mantra in the chorus.

Her similarly titled memoir, Secrets for the Mad: Obsessions, Confessions, and Life Lessons, utilized her internet-older-sister stature to personably teach and give fans anecdotes about grief, bullying, sex, love, and everything in between, much like the ones she'd share in her videos. Many of them are now unlisted or have been taken down from her two channels (doddleoddle and the less formal doddlevloggle), but their salience has remained in the hearts and minds of thousands.

"I think it made me feel special because a lot of people were praising me and being like, 'you're so authentic.' I really enjoyed that praise and I really enjoyed being the authentic one because it felt so easy for me. I often said, like, I grew up with little boundaries in my family life and that clearly made its way to the internet as well," she says of her deeply personal digital footprint. Clark was the middle of three children, with her younger sister being a fixture of her earliest videos. For every makeup tutorial and lighthearted Q&A, there were deeply vulnerable videos about depression and heartbreak in its various forms – it was her job for all of her late teens and early 20s.

The most direct song about her experience having an audience is piano ballad "Burned Out": "But they love you / Over and over they love you / Thousands and thousands of eyes just like mine / Aching to find who they are," she reminds herself in the chorus. I told her my recollection of a member of her fan community insisting the song was about me in particular. "I can be a little spicy sometimes, especially having an audience. And sometimes there would be resentment if they assumed things," she confesses. "I remember at the time people were like, 'I really relate to this song.' And I think I was like, 'how? It's about having an audience. You can't relate to it,' which is so mean because everyone experiences burnout and pressure in some way. I think it took me a while to be like, 'oh, wait a second. Hold on, Dodie, calm down.'"

While YouTube has taken a backseat in the wake of her constantly evolving music career, the passion for it has never waned. "I have been tiptoeing back into making more videos because I miss it. I love the whole process of it. And also with music, everything's so slow, you have to wait years before you can share. Whereas with YouTube you can slave away all day and then upload it and immediately get feedback and you can talk to your community and that's been really fun," she explains.

The downsides, though, sometimes make the effort not seem worth the trouble: "I don't miss the occasional comments that like really get under my skin and prod something that hurts because I forget just how much that can change me internally and damage my viewpoint of myself. It's unfortunate. But it really, yeah, they still have the power to do that, I think."

She tells me how she often gets recognized by people that tell her they used to watch her. Where others may take that as an ego hit, for dodie, it inspires curiosity. "I never feel offended by that because life is really long and people drop off or whatever, but I'm always so curious as to who I am in their lives," she says. She continues to rattle off all the questions that come to mind upon leaving those encounters. "Like, am I a YouTuber? Am I a musician to you? Am I someone from the past? Are you still a fan? If you say you used to watch me, would you call yourself [a fan]? Do you listen to my music? Am I a scary person? Has all of that parasocial stuff melted now because we're all grown up and we realized that we're all just normal people? I don't know. But I love talking to people who know of me or knew of my past or even now or whatever, or have known me in any way, because I always want to be like, 'what's that like?'" she asks.

The way dodie fostered parasociality with her audience is much less calculated (and, if it were up to her, much less present) than the likes of Taylor Swift, who she happens to keep releasing music the same day as (with this new record, and in 2023 with her indie pop group FIZZ). "This time I'm like, 'whatever.' I'm just glad people will be able to remember the date more because Swifties are so on it. If I can get in on that, go ahead," she admits.

FIZZ was the collaborative project between her, Orla Gartland (who has been her touring guitarist since 2017), Greta Isaac (who appears on Not For Lack Of Trying single "Darling, Angel, Baby"), and Martin Luke Brown. The latter two live with dodie in their London flat, but the friendship amongst the foursome inspired the project to begin with. The music was grandiose and maximalist with no shortage of whimsy, which would remain just as present in the handful of live performances they supported the album with. Their stage design featured giant lollipops and magic mushrooms with a backdrop reminiscent of the board game Candy Land. They could get away with being in their late twenties and shooting bubbles out of a toy gun with clown makeup on because it was so clear their hearts were fully in it.

The members of FIZZ were all solo artists looking to musically challenge themselves in a carefree, collaborative setting."It was really nice to step into a completely different world where I didn't have to be serious about anything," dodie explained. "Like, we wrote a song about strawberry jam – no one knows what it even meant – I don't think it meant anything. It could be about drugs and friendship or whatever, but that whole project was us trying to leave our personal projects at the door and write with no ego. And certainly ego like found its way in, because it always does, but the process of writing it was so fun and so freeing. I think taught me a lot about how easy songwriting can be."

Before dodie had the agency to do side projects at will, there was a point during her career where she asked her audience for forgiveness due to the amount of brand deals she was taking on to support her family. Her longest-running contract was with Coke TV in 2016 for a YouTube series where dodie (among other guests) would take on various out-of-the-box experiences.

I brought it up to her playfully. "Yeah, what the fuck was that?" she asks me rhetorically after a hearty laugh. "I'll tell you what it was," she continues. "It was 30 grand when I needed it, but it also was really fun. Some of the shit I did, [I feel] so lucky about. Like, I went skydiving. It was just some corporation trying to be YouTubers, except not. It was so weird. But the team was lovely. And I got to do loads of random things and invite my friends as well. So that's cool. But yeah, God knows."

I ask about her other work from before YouTube became lucrative for her, including a corporate internship for a now-defunct company called Hive. "I had very low expectations for my life," she admits. "I actually really enjoyed working in an office, I thought it was kind of fun. That was around the time where I'd just come out of school. I didn't go to university. I knew I wanted to live in London, but it was very expensive and YouTube wasn't giving me too much. I was like, 'okay, time to get a job.' So I did. And it was very interesting. I learned a lot of things, but to be honest, I was going to be down for anything as long as I was enjoying it. I worked in Lush for a little bit, I liked that as well. And I think my plan, if I really was very lost and wasn't sure, I would probably go into teaching because I love teaching and school felt like where I belonged. So that was always a sort of backup plan. I honestly never planned to do music. I feel like it was an accident, but luckily it was the right thing because I feel like I was born to do this. That sounds so dramatic, but it's true."

She wouldn't have taught music though: "I actually would have loved to teach drama. I think that would have been really fun. Before all of this, I wanted to be an actor, which I don't want to do now at all. I think at the time when I was planning my career, music felt like work because I loved it so much. I took it in school for GSSE and A level. In my A-level, the one that you take when you're 17/18, I got a C, and I was so disappointed. But I found out it was because in my coursework, I just refused to write in the guidelines. There were a lot of things that you had to put in, like different key changes or different things. I thought 'well, it's not a good song, I want to make a good song' so I made a good song thinking I would be rewarded but I was not. Luckily, I realized that music was a part of me and it's my job and now I know that there's no one right way to make music or do music. But I think academically I wasn't really suited for all of those rules." 

The music on Lack Of Trying, though, is compositionally robust, working between the margins of music theory to make something uniquely hers. Take the track "Smart Girl", ridden with orchestral flourishes that swell at dodie's command, her cries of anguish floating atop. In their absence, underscored by light pizzicato strings, she reckons with the ways in which her insecurities careen themselves into her daily life. "Practice in the mirror / Smile's a little crooked / I'll give back her haircut later / 'Cause I already took it," she sings with a wink in the final verse.

In between her two records, dodie worked on the score for the third season of the animated TV show Final Space, honing her prowess specifically in string arranging. However, it took her a while to gain the confidence to incorporate it into her music as extensively as it is on Not For Lack Of Trying. "I think it was really fun and important for me around the Build A Problem era to work with strings," she says. I still felt like I couldn't call myself 'proper musician,' even though I knew I could do it. It just felt like I wasn't allowed because I wasn't doing it properly or whatever. So that was really important for me to do, to learn the lesson that there's no one right way to do things. But it is hard to score it properly because I'm so lazy and I wanna do things quickly. So my scores are a bit messy to play too, but I always give it to my string players and I'm like, 'sorry, we'll figure it out as we play.'"

The clarinet has also found itself delivering melodic motifs on the record. dodie learned it as a child while in school, but put it down as soon as she could because of social scrutiny. "I, as a nerdy clarinet player, wasn't the coolest," she recalls. "But the skill never left me. I never forgot how to play it. So when I realized it could be cool, I brought it back. It feels very much a part of me and my sound now because it It sounds very similar to my voice, I think – especially when I play in the lower register, kind of husky and warm. I love layering it with my harmonies." She has come to worry people will mistake her for Clairo, saying "she [also] has a fringe and a one word-name and plays the clarinet and makes soft music. So..." she trails off, half jokingly, as my eyes trail to the clarinet tattoo on her arm.

For the plurality of dodie's career, though, she was the poster child of the ukulele, inspiring thousands of young girls to channel their emotions into music by picking up one of the most accessible instruments. I asked her if she ever felt limited as an artist by that association. "I think at first, no. I was just following my nose and doing what felt right. I think the way people viewed like girls who played uke was really frustrating. I was like, 'I'm so much more, I swear.' But I never resented it or hated it. I still loved the uke, although I moved to baritone because I think it sounds a lot nicer. But for me, I'll always champion the uke. It was like such a great way to get into playing like strumming, like guitar, because I'd never done that before. I learned it was smaller and four strings, four fingers. Yeah, I'll always cheer for the ukulele."

Frustratingly, the association still lingers in her perception from the media. The bottom of Far Out Magazine's review for Not For Lack Of Trying reads "A concluding comment from Dodie’s old YouTube fans: 'Where’s the ukulele?'"

Some of the young girls inspired by her vulnerable songwriting have become quite successful themselves. Indie pop star Lizzy McAlpine's first tour was opening for dodie on the US leg of her tour at the top of 2022. At the time, she had one album out with her breakout record five seconds flat on the horizon. McAlpine has been a longtime fan of dodie's citing her as foundational inspiration for her music, and at age 20 wrote in a letter to herself (inspired by the videos that dodie makes quinquennially) that she hoped to tour with her one day. The respect is absolutely mutual, with dodie going onto gush about Older [McAlpine's 2023 LP] deluxe track "Pushing it Down and Praying" and McAlpine's work ethic. "She's just so driven" she says.

Not For Lack Of Trying is dodie's first record made after restarting antidepressants. She had tried them before but felt like her emotions were neutered by them, but this time, she feels a heightened since of clarity both in her daily life and her music. "The only thing antidepressants did is make me stop thinking about death every 10 seconds, which was actually kind of annoying when trying to write a song," she says. "So if anything, it's lifted that lid. I'm able to think about other things now and write about other things because when writing this album, I was so angry with myself at how many times I just sat down and I wanted to sing about how depressed I felt."

We chat about our weed preferences and how it helps with anxiety and depression, something she alludes to outwardly in lead single "I'M FINE!". "Big stop sign in the mind now / Roll it up, smoke it out," she sings in the altered second chorus. Her internal battle with derealization, while invasive for her, is something she pleads to not affect her social life. A flurry of strings harmonize with her titular echoing cries.

Later in the record, she likens her mental struggles t0 the horseshoe theory. "The Answer" sees dodie chop up a sample of her laugh to accompany shuffling drums; it's the record's most sonically interesting cut. "I think the answer / It looks like a horseshoe / So dig your own grave and there's sun on the other side" she sings matter-of-factly. She explains what allowed her to arrive at this metaphor: "For people who go through mental like cycles and circles, I often find that I make breakthroughs. I need to come out through the same end that I started – I wanted to like convey that in a funny way."

Despite her openness, aversion to online speculation causes dodie to keep some of her cards remain close to her chest: "I could be a little looser with boundaries because all the themes are hidden in the lyrics. There's a song called 'The List', which is literally a list of people I had romantic flings with, and I changed all the names. So that was really fun to put out... It's like a letter."

While there is no particular central message in Lack Of Trying, dodie wants her fans to know where she's been and where she's at. "I don't think I ever really have an intention when writing [music] like that. It's more just like an update, you know? This is where I've been for the past 2 years," she explains.

In the interest of giving her fans the best experience possible, dodie allowed them to help curate it, asking on Instagram to tell her which songs from her back catalog they'd like to hear most. She went as far as to leak the tentative setlist at the end of one of her recent, but increasingly rare YouTube uploads. She'll be hitting the US for the first time in four years after the turn of the new year, and with her socks planted on the stage, she'll bear her heart to those thousands of eyes once more.

Not For Lack Of Trying is out now via Decca Records.