“If it was illegal to sing, I just would not even care to be around anymore,” says Dora Jar. For those uninitiated to her steady rise in music, the 28-year-old is a bedroom pop singer-songwriter who is known for her subversive and bewitching world building and has somewhat of a cult-following. Her latest single, “Lucky,” is out today. “My inspiration behind the song was the relieving feeling—when I realized that my heartbreak wasn’t just painful, it was also full of gratitude and a total surrender to the power of the heart,” she says.
The songwriter originally crafted the melody to “Lucky” back in 2020 and had written the chorus, but didn’t have verse lyrics for the song until 2023. “It clicked when I knew exactly what story I wanted to tell—which was that of a relationship that had ended.” The release follows her 2024 studio album, No Way To Relax When You Are On Fire, which is a spellbound body of work that thrusts listeners into a cauldron of Jar’s existential crisis. Sonically, the album is airy, experimental, and offers a dreamy childlike account of the world around her with an acoustic guitar and swoon-worthy, ambient house production.
Jar is levelheaded, giggly, and warm in demeanor as she Zooms in from London, jet-lagged and fighting to stay awake in-between rehearsals. Starting on February 9 in Madrid, Spain, she’ll open for Gracie Abrams’s European leg of The Secret Of Us tour. Abrams personally asked Jar if she would be her opening act. “It’s usually a very mysterious thing—how you get asked to open for things, this time, it wasn’t. She just DMed and asked,” Jar shares sweetly.
Soon after it was announced that Jar would open for the tour, a Change.org petition was made by someone under the name of Dexter Morgan, calling for Jar’s removal from the tour and demanding a replacement. The now-deleted petition read, “Many fans, including myself, are baffled by the recent announcement…We are perplexed as we do not recognize her, and with less than two weeks till the tour, it’s virtually impossible to familiarize ourselves with her slow-paced songs.”
Abrams quickly came to Jar’s defense, calling the petition “so wildly uncool and bizarre.” Jar even posted to Instagram joking, “as if I didn’t survive middle school, welcome new lovers and haters.” She swiftly received online support from fellow pop artists such as Ash, Maggie Rogers, and of course, Abrams in the comments. Mind you, Jar has previously been an opening act for Billie Eillish, The Neighbourhood, and The 1975.
“I’ll be honest, I wasn’t hurt,” says Jar, genuinely unbothered. “I was more tickled by it—everyone knows an opener is not the audience’s decision. So, it’s like—okay, sweetie pie, go buy merch when I’m playing—you don’t have to listen. But also, why not see something you don’t know?” she says playfully, without an ounce of spite. She also notes that, petition aside, most Gracie Abrams fans have been super welcoming and supportive of her joining the tour.
![billie eilish tour sydney, dora jar](https://cdn.statically.io/img/hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/dora-jar-performs-onstage-during-the-happier-than-ever-tour-news-photo-1738943148.pjpeg?resize=640:* "Billie Eilish "Happier Than Ever" Tour - Sydney")
For the upcoming shows, Jar plans to go fully acoustic with a live band. “I have been known to really rock out on stage and scream and jump and do all sorts of wacky things,” she says “Like most artists who go on tour, they have a backing track, extra vocals, extra instruments. With this tour, there won’t be any sound playing that isn’t made by me and my live band.” She even recently bought a brand new guitar in preparation for tour and ran into a fan on the street who told her they love her music and covered one of her songs two years ago. Before hitting the stage, Jar has been rehearsing arrangements with her close friends, mostly practicing in their living room, with the goal of exuding that raw and stripped down-to-earth energy during her performances. “I hope it feels cozy and inspiring that way,” she says.
When she’s not performing, Jar spends a significant amount of her time in coffee shops, people-watching and observing, walking around and looking at strangers—it’s a part of her creative writing process. “I replay things in my mind over and over again like a washing machine. Just like things from my childhood and sounds and patterns really stick,” she says, touching on her lyrics that reference nursery rhymes and well-known phrases in songs like “Debbie Darling” and “Bumblebee.” “I have a lot of fun shape-shifting with sounds.”
Jar has sporadically lived in California, New York, London, and Poland. “I’ve moved around a lot,” she explains. “My dad is Polish and I grew up with the Polish language. Sometimes people ask if I have an accent. I sort of mimic my dad and sometimes I mimic my mom more.” But the biggest inspiration to her music and artistry is David Lynch, the iconic filmmaker who recently passed away. “He encouraged me to be open to the strangeness of reality and look a bit deeper into what may seem normal on the outside, but if you stare a little longer things will shape-shift.”
A slightly more unexpected muse of hers is Mary Poppins; she used to watch the movie on repeat as a child. “She’s always got a trick up her sleeve. She appears one way, opens the door and it’s a whole new thing like jumping into a chalk drawing and it’s a whole other world.”
A particular scene from the film sticks out to her: “When the smoke is coming out of the chimney, she pokes it with her umbrella and it becomes a staircase they walk up—that is the direct influence of my album cover,” Jar says. In a way, that’s what she strives to attain within her craft: to embrace her inner contradictions and optical illusions. And maybe walking on smoke isn’t too far-fetched of an idea. After all, Jar is already doing it with the sounds and lyrics she seems to conjure out of thin air.
