Viral country star Dasha drops by the Herald office to discuss overnight fame, Coyote Ugly and how to make a hit.
The Californian country artist and hitmaker behind Austin talks about why her viral song was a long time coming.
The viral country star is on a whistlestop trip to New Zealand – hoping to catch a Warriors game while she’s here – her first time in the country.
“I’ve never been and thankfully I’m here now,” she tells the Herald, and says her Kiwi fans are “so lovely”.
If you think you don’t know her biggest song, Austin (Boots Stop Workin’), you probably do. It’s gone viral with 346 million streams; a viral TikTok dance and an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Overnight success isn’t necessarily the right term for Dasha, though it’s certainly part of her story.
She started writing music at 8 years old and released her first song when she was 13. Fast forward to adulthood and she’s spent years working across country and pop genres to establish a career, “so it took 10 years to get to an overnight success”.
A TikTok video was what did it, sparking widespread fame, and Dasha was thrust into the spotlight when Austin went viral.
She posted a video of a line dance she made up to the song on the app.
“Overnight, like, a million views and I was like ‘whoa, this is crazy’,” she says. “Then I just kept posting like five videos a day and it just soared. Absolutely soared.”
The heights the song has gone to compare to the low point it came from.
“I was going through a pretty gnarly break-up but it was over there, but it was a situationship. So we weren’t even officially together, so that made it even worse,” Dasha explains.
She’d had a career break too, going completely independent and returning to the country music genre.
“I just poured all my savings into making this album and really taking one last bet on myself,” she says. “I wrote Austin out of pure rage.”
It only took a couple of hours to write, and she was freestyling with the line about the boots – the one that’s made the song famous.
Dasha thinks the country music renaissance "says so much about American culture".
Leaving the session, she had a “deep, gut feeling” there was something “magical” about what they’d just created. “Like something, I don’t know what, but something’s gonna happen here.”
And it did.
It’s a common story, the power of TikTok. It can make or break a new artist, or revive an old one.
“TikTok is the most powerful free marketing tool that any artist has right now,” says Dasha, adding that it evens the playing field for artists.
“Before, you’d have to be signed to a label in order for anybody to hear your song in order to have a budget to record. But now people can record in their bedrooms, they can buy, you know, equipment off of eBay for a couple hundred bucks.”
There’s a resurgence of country music right now and Dasha’s riding the wave.
“I feel like Austin came out, blew up and then it became like country is this new thing,” she says. “So I feel like I kind of caught that wave at like the perfect moment.”
Other artists are hugely inspiring she says. She counts Carrie Underwood, Shania Twain and Taylor Swift as icons; Thomas Rhett and Keith Urban; Dolly Parton of course.
She loves country. “I feel like country music is bringing back authenticity in a way because it’s all about songwriting, it’s all about storytelling, it’s all about saying real things about real life.”
Emma Gleason is the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, entertainment, media and more.
