When Dora Jar meets Rolling Stone in New York’s Madison Square Park, her basket-like purse rests on her leg. She keeps what’s inside a secret. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” the musician quips while digging through the bag to pull out her phone. The 28-year-old might be gatekeeping her What’s in my Bag haul, but her music library is fair game as she kicks off the latest episode of Rolling Stone’s Song Shuffle.
From the first song Dora shuffles, it’s clear that she keeps her finger on the pulse of new releases. Sasami’s “I’ll Be Gone” has only been out for a few weeks, having arrived on the musician’s third album, Blood on the Silver Screen, in March. “Sasami, I have admired for a very long time, and then we met by chance in Vancouver and we just ended up talking for the whole night and dancing,” Dora says. She describes it as a soundtrack for trying something new and unconventional, “like putting purple blush on your nose and dotting your face with white freckles.”
Speaking of unconventional, the shuffle takes Dora from Sasami to Yoko Ono, whose nearly 17-minute-long record “Mind Train” barrels in with progressively bizarre sounds. “I let it play while I was driving in the night,” the singer-songwriter says. “I listened to the whole thing. It was like a trance. I was totally hypnotized.” She’s briefly pulled from her trance in the park when her shuffling is interrupted by a call from her mom, whose dog Leo is the lock screen on her phone. The call drops, dropping her back into the shuffle with Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” and “Earth Intruders” by Björk, an artist Dora says “has definitely given me some kind of spiritual permission to search for the strange imperfections.”
Dora has some music of her own, she hopes makes its way into someone else’s unpredictable shuffles. She recommends “No Way to Relax When You Are on Fire,” partially because people have already taken to it. “This song has surprised me as one where people know the words, and they sing along, and they do these dance moves that I don’t even know when they came up with them, and it totally brings me out of myself, which is such a relief,” she explains. She performed the record each night on her recently concluded opening run with Gracie Abrams. “Her voice surprised me and opened my heart every single night,” Dora says. “She could do it anything she wants.”
As she approaches the kick-off of her own headlining tour throughout Europe, Dora isn’t interested in thinking too far ahead. “I’m excited about right now and today and whatever’s coming that’s okay, like I’ll get ready at the last minute,” she says. It’s ironic when considering that Crayons’ “Ijo (Laba Laba)” coming on shuffle prompted her to declare: “This should be my funeral song.” She might not be following any specific structure, but she is following a feeling. “When I listen to it, I feel like I’m on the brink of something, and I feel like death can be that way,” Dora explains. “I’ve had a lot of death in my life and I have learned to celebrate life, but also just to party.”
