It takes a very special blend of skills and talents to make music that tells you something important about the complicated business of living while also encouraging you to sing along, loudly, and dance your ass off. The text of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” (“How could you just leave me standing / Alone in a world so cold / Maybe I’m just too demanding / Maybe I’m just like my father / Too bold”) certainly doesn’t read like it would make you want to move. You could say the same about “Patterns,” the profoundly introspective and effortlessly funky title track of the debut album from Jessica Ott’s project Whoa Dakota: “I’m not really sure of anything at all / Ooh, it was a role I made for ya, your truth ain’t necessarily mine,” she sings over a bubbling, syncopated groove.
Ott, an Arkansas native who’s lived in Nashville since 2013, covers a broad sonic territory on Patterns, which she released Aug. 17. Collaborating with her producers, she borrows from traditions like R&B and Appalachian folk, in which catchy melodies and infectious rhythms work in harmony with keen lyrical observations. Ott’s lyrics showcase a deep self-knowledge and insight into what makes myriad kinds of relationships work: romantic ones, ones with family, ones with friends and your relationship with yourself. As Ott tells the Scene in a phone conversation, songwriting has over time become the way she processes challenging situations in her life — sometimes while they’re still going on. “Patterns” began to take shape when a close pal abruptly cut off their friendship.
“I was very confused and very frustrated,” says Ott. “I remember just thinking … like, ‘What is wrong with you? Open up. Stop shoving things down that you don’t want to talk about. If there’s something going on, by all means, I’m your friend, let’s discuss it. You’re going to continue to repeat this unhealthy behavior until you change it.’ And then I realized halfway through writing it, ‘Pot calling the kettle black, girl. If you would just let this go, you could move on, and open yourself up to a different relationship. It’s clear that this one’s not going to go any further.’ And so I think, in a lot of ways, songs teach you something about yourself, as long as you’re willing to just sort of, like, open up the channel, and let it happen.”
The thread that ties all the elements of the album together is Ott’s authorial voice, which remains in control even as she weaves in other voices through short spoken passages between the songs. In some of them, she’s reading from Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman. The author correlates societal constructs of femininity with the personalities of Greek goddesses, which Ott says helped her identify parts of her own personality and decide which gets a seat at the table. Other interludes are recordings of key people in Ott’s life, including her late grandmother Hattie Jo, whom she knew as Nanny.
Nanny was an important role model, if not a perfect person — “a placeholder for me feeling like my most powerful self,” Ott says. Finding the balance between respecting Nanny’s influence and recognizing where Nanny pushed her to learn her own life lessons has been a critical part of Ott’s personal growth. Ott visited her grandmother’s room the day she died, and among her things was a photograph of Ott’s late aunt. On the back was written: “Mother, I smile for you. I live a life for my heart, my soul, my spirit. May this life be the one that brings me to the garden.” Halfway through Patterns, there’s a reprise of the opening song “The Blue Light,” which features an array of women reading that quotation, their voices overlapping until they become indistinguishable from one another, and then Ott’s voice comes back into focus on top.
“When I wanted to do this middle-of-the-album moment, I thought about having all different types of female voices, from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different ages,” Ott says. “What I’m learning more and more is that the majority of art, the majority of personal growth, spiritual practice, whatever you color it as — you can say it’s gardening, or songwriting, or you’re just a hardcore Christian. At the end of the day, whatever’s making you vibrate at your highest frequency, it’s all the same stuff.”
Ott feels the pull to shape her music in a way that’s easier to market — say, to write some simple, upbeat songs that would be easy for audiences to digest. But she’s determined not to let that influence the way she works, and that’s what gives her music staying power.
“Because I know myself, I’ll more than likely never just write a song like that,” she says. “I think I sort of feel this weird pressure to maybe go that route. Or at least I did. Or I feel, ‘You’re a little too poppy, so the Americana world isn’t going to like you.’ … I think a lot of people, a lot of artists in particular, you get this self-doubt sometimes, where you think, ‘Nobody understands what’s going on with me, because my genre’s out of whack, and I don’t fit in this world quite yet — or maybe not ever — and I don’t really fit in this [other] world.’ So I think I’m still sort of on the tail end of putting that to bed. And just doing what I do. And not feeling bad about it, and not worrying about it.”
