Chronicles of a Small Town DirtBag: SDC Talks Genre, Touring, and Her New Album
Exploring the essence of SDC’s authentic rise to stardom
Photos by Madalyn Schaller
TikTok sensation and lyrical acrobat Shauna Dean Cokeland is a small-town wonder. Sure, it isn’t the first time a small-town girl has made it on stage. Back in the 2000s we had Britney Spears, and now Chappell Roan is everyone's favorite artist(’s favorite artist). The essential spark needed to command an audience is in all three of these performers — but SDC takes the road less traveled.
Years after blowing up on TikTok with her hit “Moving in Place,” SDC has come far from her hometown bedroom. From traveling to LA to work with producers to playing with notable folk punk musicians like Days N’ Daze, the songstress is now 20 and gearing up for an album release.
Following a short co-headlining Midwest tour with Brye back in April, Shauna Dean Cokeland is now hitting the East Coast with Jesse Detor. Pleaser had the opportunity to speak with her at her second stop: Richmond, VA.
PLEASER: This is the second show of your tour so far. How has it been?
Shauna Dean Cokeland: Touring has been so fun — getting to see different parts of the country I’ve never been to before. I love long rides in the car and just listening to music and staring out the windows and getting to play shows. It's a dream. Seeing all these people come out is exactly as unbelievable as you think it would be. It's like if you're trying to imagine all these people singing your words back at you in cities you've never been to, like 100 people you've never met and you try to imagine how unbelievable it would be — that's how it is. Every single second I have a meet and greet, I'm like “Is this happening?” You see the numbers pick up on social media, but that number is people. Yeah, that's really cool.
You came out with a song recently, around July 4, and the money for that song is going to help families in Gaza. I'm curious if you are planning on doing more things like that with your music.
SDC: Definitely. I plan on having a couple of songs in the works about different things that are really important to me. I think it's a necessary part of what I'm doing [and it’s] great to also be lifting other people up.
How does growing up in a small town affect your overall view of the music industry and making music?
SDC: I think getting to grow up with other musicians and make music together with no pressure, we just hang out in somebody's basement and just hit the bong and make songs and mess around. It makes me never want to let music stop being fun. I never want to get too serious about it.
It taught me the value of having fun while I do music. The older I get — I mean, I'm only 20 — but the older I get, the more I realize I got it right with some of the things back home that used to be really important to me. Which were just hanging out with my friends, having fun with music, being outside, discovering good music, just community with other musicians.
When it comes to your music you do a lot of genre blending. From rap to folk punk, how did you go about crafting your unique sound?
SDC: I feel like maybe the stuff that I had access to, which is really just like my voice and the acoustic guitar, did that for me almost. Because I love writing loads of different genres. I just have fun writing country or rap or pop or folk punk — my friend and I are even trying to do some stuff you can mosh to, like some post-punk kind of stuff. I guess the thing they have in common is that it's me and that it's really stripped down sounding.
I think that my favorite part of your sound is the stripped down, raw aspect. How do you produce that sound and do you plan on sticking with it in the upcoming album?
SDC: For this album, yeah. After that I'm gonna branch out but these songs people have really grown to love on TikTok, and I don't want to deviate too much from what they're used to hearing. I don't really love what I did after “Moving In Place.” Honestly, “Moving In Place” was my first single, the first time I was in any kind of studio setting. And it came out sounding very produced and it was really good for that song and for that moment, but maybe a little more produced than I want to be all the time. But then the stuff I did after that was self-produced. I didn't really know what I was doing. I was doing my best but [it] turned out way less produced and a little more homemade sounding than I wanted it to. Even still, with “Moving In Place,” I thought it sounded great for a first shot, and I'm really happy with it. But when I go back to TikTok sometimes I think, there’s just something special to that really raw sound. So, for this album, I tried hard to make the songs sound like an enhanced version of that sound that's on TikTok. I worked with some really good producers in LA on that.
When can we expect to hear the album?
SDC: I want it to come out by my birthday, October 5. I don't know if that'll happen. So, probably shortly after that. I want to submit it all for mastering at the end of July. I don't know if I'll hit that but I'm trying to. Everything is recorded. It's just the final production touches are not quite done yet. It's gonna be really exciting to wrap up these songs with a bow and just present them to everybody, like “these are the songs!” It's not like, “and now I'm gonna play them 500 more times differently on TikTok.” Just the sense of relief [that] these have been SDC songs for so long now, I'm just so excited to put them out.
Is there anything else you'd like to say?
SDC: I'm really excited about my album. The aesthetic is very 2000s small town dirtbag. I'm gonna have CDs, I'm gonna do really fun stuff with the cover and the back cover, and I'm just really excited. I'm finally putting it all together. It's been kind of my white whale for two years now. Copeland County stream that sh*t.
