“Love is Loud”: On Sloppy Jane’s Madison — Two Years Later

I have always found it very difficult to write about love, regardless if it is for people, for places, or for things. It’s hard to tack down an emotional experience so vast with just words. Love is huge, terrifying, unfathomable, calamitous, and persistent. It can’t be ignored. It refuses to be ignored.

Love, whatever it is, is at the heart of Sloppy Jane’s second album, Madison. Released in late 2021 from Saddest Factory Records/Dead Oceans, Madison is a grand spectacle of unrequited love, described on the Dead Oceans website as “a record with an audience for one. Each song is an attempt at a perfect goodbye to someone.” What makes Madison special on a purely technical level is its production — the entire album was recorded inside Lost World Caverns in West Virginia. With a cave as its recording studio, the album has an ethereal, haunting quality to it, while simultaneously being incredibly visceral and emotional. 

Of the album’s creation and unique setting, Sloppy Jane frontwoman Haley Dahl said in an interview with Vogue that “It was all one big tantrum where I was like, [begins to fake cry] ‘My heart is bleeding everywhere, and I’m going to wear this suit until it rots off my body and I’m going to drag a piano into a cave.’ Just, you know, these big declarations about being upset … I came out of a period of being very emotionally detached, and then all at once there was a big avalanche of everything that had ever hurt my feelings. I just freaked out.”

But beyond its admittedly very impressive production, the album is beautifully written and orchestrated, with lyrics that seem to follow their own dreamy logic. “Party Anthem” describes the kind of romance that, as Dahl puts it, “lives mostly in your head: you can’t break up with someone that you don’t even speak to who you don’t have a relationship with. It’s this world that starts to live and fester in your head.” Dahl’s voice is genuinely stunning — so when she sings “Far away, you were half-pretend / It never happened, it never ends,” you feel it at your core. The album’s penultimate song, “The Constable,” is a sprawling 9-and-a-half minute track about moving on, staying put, and apocalyptic heartbreak. “The Constable” is my favorite song on the album, and also has my favorite line — after describing the end of the world, Dahl sings “But I just ignored it, I sat on the doorstep / Of the house where you used to live.” It’s a haunting image. The world is ending — what else can you do but spend one last moment with love’s echo? What’s the apocalypse, compared to heartbreak?

Funny enough, it took writing this article for me to pin down the part of Madison that I love the most — and I do mean “part,” because it’s got more going on than I could ever cover. While Madison is an album about unrequited and imagined love, I also see it as an album about artistic perfectionism. In “Party Anthem,” the lines “I am / Sorry I couldn't be everything I needed to be on time” call to mind a different quote from Dahl: “A big part of the project [Madison] and why I did it… Was because it felt similar to being a little kid and buying an outfit that was too big that I’d have to grow into. I really valued from the start that making Madison gave me someone I had to become.” In this context, one could read these lyrics as a call to create — even if you don’t think it’s the right time, even if you don’t think you’re the right person. It’s a model of art where instead of making something perfect, you’re making something, as Dahl says, “to grow into.”

In that same Vogue interview, Dahl tells a story about an album she used to own: “I listened to it all the time, and it started to deteriorate at the same pace as my mental fabric at the time … the CD would fall into complete digital distortion for, like, 10 minutes, and then it would get louder and louder and louder, and then all of a sudden, would go straight back into it. My favorite piece of music of all time is my scratched Roy Orbison CD, and that’s, like, my sole influence. I just want to make that music.” For Sloppy Jane, it’s not the music that matters as much as the wear and tear, the love for the music that’s so extreme it changes its very nature. As Dahl sings at the end of “The Constable”: “Well, they say love is loud.” Love is huge and messy and scary — why would you want your art to be perfect when instead it could be something far more interesting?

In the 2 years since Madison debuted, it’s become my favorite album and I’ve become the kind of person I needed to be to appreciate it. It’s inspiring — the idea that you don’t have to wait to become the perfect artist you see in your head in order to make the art you love and the art you’re excited about. I’m not a musician like Dahl and the rest of the folks in Sloppy Jane, but whenever I find myself staring down a blank word document and thinking that I’m not good enough to write the kinds of things I want to write, I think of what Dahl said in DIY when asked what listeners should “take away… from [her] music”: “You can do whatever you want.”