Dayglow: An Unforgettable Experience - Exclusive Interview
Only a few years ago, Sloan Struble — better known to most as Dayglow — was sitting in his childhood bedroom in a tiny town in Texas, recording an album that he had only ventured to show his mom and best friend. Now, the musician has over six million monthly listeners on Spotify, with his 2018 single “Can I Call You Tonight?” finding a new life on TikTok where it provides the background music to about 65,000 videos. He’s played the Austin City Limits festival and recently had his late-night TV debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Dayglow’s sophomore album, Harmony House, was released on May 21 of this year, and Struble just announced his first headlining tour. It’s the kind of trajectory most people Struble’s age (21-years-old) only dream of.
When I join the fuzzy Zoom call with him, Sloan Struble’s laid-back, happy-go-lucky energy radiates through the screen. “Oh, my lighting is awful,” Struble remarks as he adjusts his laptop. “Do you think that’s okay? Should I rotate more?” The musician known for his upbeat, danceable brand of indie-pop carries the same attitude as his music. With his surfer-style, blonde mop and a slight hint of a Texas accent, Struble seems like someone you’d want to hang out with at a party, the kind of guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously but has a sort of effortless positivity.
Harmony House, too, is infused with this unique brand of optimism. When I ask about the inspiration behind the album’s sound, Struble says he was “trying to channel as much of the ‘70s and ‘80s pop music as I could. Specifically, community-focused, danceable songs like Whitney Houston’s ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ or, you know, ‘What a Fool Believes’ by the Doobie Brothers.” The inspiration definitely translates to the album, which feels like the perfect soundtrack to a summer where people are finally returning to the outside world.
When I ask how he managed to create such an exuberant sound in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and what the dissonance of recording such an album in the one of the loneliest times in recent history was like, Struble is unsurprisingly positive. “It’s kind of ironic because I had quarantined by myself for like three months prior to the lockdown,” he says. “Because that is kind of like a normal thing to me, where I spend a lot of time alone not leaving the house because I’m mixing or working on music.” He explains that “it’s kind of a helpful thing for me to have had so much time this past year — I don’t know what I would’ve done. I don’t know that I would’ve been able to finish it on my own. It would’ve sounded really different. I might have had someone else mix it because I wasn’t going to be home at all. We were going to be touring.” Clearly someone adept at finding the silver lining, Struble remarks, “I just feel grateful that I could do something that hopefully brings greater good to someone listening to my music.”
And certainly, Struble needed all the time he could get to work on this album. Unlike many of his peers, Struble is the sole writer and producer of every track on Harmony House. “I really have to trust myself,” he reflects, when asked about the pros and cons of making an album in such an insular way. “I think it's an interesting process because my fans really trust me. They really believe in my vision and that’s something that I think being a completely self-sustained artist does. It allows the audience to be a little more flexible.” According to Struble, growing up in a small Texas town where “no one could care less that MGMT is making an album” gave him “no choice but to make music alone.” He adds, “I also didn’t realize people didn’t do that…I just really viewed music as this holistic thing.” Though he now lives in the bustling city of Austin, Struble still prefers to work on his own. He explains, “It’s a lot more personal, at least with what I have going with Dayglow. It’s a really personal thing for these chapters of my life to be shown to people.”
The intimate crafting of the album shines through lyrically on Harmony House, which acts as a sort of snapshot of Struble’s rise to fame. He opens the song “Crying on the Dancefloor” with the lyric “it’s not easy to be somewhere you never dreamed to be,” and for a small town kid this lyric sums things up. “I have way more people listening to my music than I ever would have dreamed,” he admits. “That was really overwhelming at first…and I feel like Harmony House was really therapeutic for me. It was kind of like getting my feet on the ground again which I kind of talk about in the song ‘Moving Out’’ — just moving into a new mindset I guess.”
He says the digital nature of his success is even more surreal. “My life is completely changed because of a major handful of like ten second videos. It’s weird.” The instantaneity that platforms like Spotify and TikTok provide are completely changing the way Struble and his peers find listeners. He shares a story of how Jack Rutter (of Ritt Momney fame) casually dropped a cover of “Put Your Records On” while the two were touring. “He was just bored and he put it on Spotify,” he says. “And then out of nowhere it blows up.”
Still, when Struble tells a story, it is hard to imagine the newfound attention has changed him too much. Opening up about playing Austin City Limits (a dream come true for any Texas native) he says, “It was such a dream. Because I wasn’t even on the poster, you know. It was like a late addition, weekend two only, BMI stage. I think we played at two or something. But we were so stoked and it was so fun.” At the time, Struble was still living on campus at the University of Texas with nine other people. “It was the weekend of Texas vs. OU., so all my roommates were gone. I was alone in our dorm. The fire alarms were going off the night before like randomly. They wouldn’t stop going off and so I had to unplug them all. And so, I didn’t get any sleep that night.” With a grin Struble adds, “This is another funny thing. We all drove in to load on the stage in our personal cars, and when you go to a festival, backstage is just like buses because every band is on tour buses. And then we’re like, you know, a Mustang and a Honda CRV and we all get our own stuff out of our cars and people were so confused. And anyways, that happened and then I drank two Red Bulls and I, like, blacked out on stage. Nobody saw but there was a moment where I was like blacked out singing. It was an unforgettable experience.”
The return to touring and creating more unforgettable memories definitely appeals to Struble. Of the onslaught of livestreams and Instagram reels in response to the isolation of the pandemic, he remarks, “I would definitely prefer that fans come to shows so I get to meet them and talk to them. Because I really did make a pretty big effort to talk and get to meet people. That’s just more fun because I can show them I’m not acting.” With a tour across the U.S. and one to Europe coming up, Struble says he is excited. “It’s going to be a weird time warp because I’ve had a lot of growth since the lockdown and now ‘Can I Call You Tonight?’ is a couple years old but I’m still playing it on my first headlining tour. It’ll kind of be a double album tour for the fans for the first time.”
He hopes fans will expect an “inviting environment” from this tour. “There’s some shows that you go to and you kind of feel like an inconvenience to the artist. You’re like ‘should I be here?’ and it’s like: you’re at the show. So, I really want it to be fun and hospitable. We’re pretty much playing every song I have, so it’s going to be really exciting and I just think it’s going to be a blast. I have this theory that for the next year and a half nobody’s going to hear music. Like everybody has this blind, pent-up energy so like we could play terribly and everybody would be like ‘it was amazing!’ So, I’m excited to just have fun.”
Dayglow is touring from July 25 through November all over the U.S. and will tour Europe in the Spring of 2022. His sophomore album Harmony House is out now wherever music streams.
- Jade Sham