Words by Willa Rudolph / Photos by Joey Cannizzaro
NYC’s Darla Dean Lewis is the indie pop girl of our dreams! Her new song “Dodger,” released September 12, 2025, is her first romantic love song–”kind of an avoidant attachment anthem,” she tells The Deli. Today, the music video drops.
Illuminated by blue and red lights and being romanced by a tiger-headed creature, Darla says, “the story of the Dodger music video is told through those, like, ‘my story’ notecard videos in early YouTube.”
…Allow me to explain for those who don’t remember or weren’t there. Around the mid to late 2000’s, peaking around 2010, people would share deeply personal, often trauma-dump-like stories, about mental health, abuse, coming out, etc. using only hand written flash cards / pieces of paper held up to the camera, no words spoken aloud, maybe just some music. It was super emo. Mostly, there were lip piercings and straightened side-bangs involved…
It was such a time to be alive… Darla Dean Lewis’s “Dodger” is a Romeo and Juliet type love story told through these notecards, with dramatized reenactments shot over a couple of nights in a baseball field in Bushwick, NY.
“I hired my friend Caroline Maxwell,” Darla explains, “who is a burlesque dancer based in Seattle, to play the love interest baseball jock. So the character is very fun and campy and contrasted with the emo vibes of the notecards.”
Darla wrote the vibrant, buoyant, and dancey track inspired by old YouTube videos of soldiers coming home to their loved ones and the feeling she’d get as a child hearing the roars of Dodger Stadium from her mom’s driveway before ever having been to a game. “It’s about something you can’t really hold, but you want to so bad!” Darla says.
She chose imagery that referenced media and music that formed her young self: “Tumblr vibes, early YouTube videos, Spring Breakers, Project X… All of these were things I was thinking about for the video, as well as making the song itself!”
Lewis’ imagery seems to consistently be campy, playful, and whimsical, and her sound is evolving into a super infectious flavor of indie pop that I haven’t heard before! [editor’s note: pull quote!]
Produced by Richard Orofino (seems like he’s on everything these days!), the track has a symphonic frenzy of strings. Darla reassures us that there are MORE strings to come, and more singles with Richard!
Her next show is on October 4th. Be there or be square! Tickets here.
