Q&A: Allie’s ‘Every Dog’ Album Solidifies Her Indie Rock Prowess
FROM CAVETOWN DRUMMER TO INDIE SENSATION — Allie Cuva, New York based songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and mix engineer, has just released her second record, Every Dog under the moniker, allie. Allie was born following an extensive position as the drummer of Cavetown in 2020. Cuva has since released an EP, an album, and now her second, Every Dog. The album and the singles that paved the way paint a robust sonic picture, one that proves Cuva knows exactly what she’s doing.
Cuva’s agency in music is clear in her work. Her songs are incredibly intimate and cutting, only emphasized further by the sense that Cuva is truly well versed in her craft. She started writing and playing music in her hometown of Detroit, Michigan, at the age of twelve. From there, Cuva moved to Nashville, where she worked to reach near masterful heights with her talent before ultimately settling in New York City. With her wide array of skills and experience, Cuva was able to make a remarkably poignant and introspective album — just in time for fall!
Luna sat down with Cuva to talk all things allie, Every Dog, and what lies ahead for the rich world of sound Cuva is building for herself.
Photography Credit: Rachel Bennett
LUNA: Congratulations on the release, it’s very good and incredibly autumnal. Was that planned or just a happy seasonal coincidence?
ALLIE: It was kind of all created around this time last year, so it has some chilly moments and also a bit of holding your hot beverage — there’s still a warmth inside.
LUNA: This is your second LP as allie, but you’ve had an extensive career already in music. How have your collaborations and community shaped your solo project and Every Dog?
ALLIE: That’s a great question! I started the project in 2020 while the pandemic was in full swing, so the project really started in an isolated way — just myself and my sibling helping me out with some technical stuff. But, since moving to New York, I’ve been able to get in touch with and meet some wonderful collaborators and it’s really grown now into something that is a lot more collaborative. This record involves some other close friends and I’ve done a lot of other recordings in the past year or two that were quite collaborative as well. So, definitely since moving to New York it’s ramped up the collaboration. I’m always interested in what my friends are feeling — if they’re feeling it or if they’re not. Ultimately, I want to be happy with it but also I want to make something that whoever’s involved can be proud of. It’s definitely grown a lot in the past couple years. I think that’s really beautiful.
LUNA: It sounds very expansive. It feels like there are a lot of people involved in it and around it, so you’ve definitely achieved that pretty well! When you began your career in music, did you envision a solo career for yourself or were you mostly interested in being a supportive figure? What was that transition that pushed you from behind the scenes to more in front of them?
ALLIE: I started playing music around the age of 12, but a lot of what I was doing was alone because I couldn’t find friends in the suburbs outside of Detroit (...) with whom I could play music, so it was largely a solo venture for a while. I would definitely have these visions of, ‘I just wanna be in a band and I wanna play those festivals outside with those flags blowing in the wind.’ But, it just seemed so fun, and so I got more opportunities to do stuff like that as I got older and when I moved to Nashville to go to college when I was 18. I started meeting people there who had similar loves and passions. Even so, though, I’m not sure I ever envisioned doing a solo project until 2020 when I started making things entirely on my own. It’s something that I think was a bit kicked off by personal gender revelations I was having. You know, eggs were cracking and my mind was expanding and I felt more in touch with spirituality within myself. I was able to open a line of communication with something that enabled me to really go in and extract feelings and colors from within and I think that inevitably ended up as like, ‘I guess I gotta sing on this song and it looks like I’m gonna record the guitar and drums, too.’ It’s fun to hear multiple humans getting to influence a song or any form of art. I think it’s more beautiful that way, so I’m glad it’s expanded.
LUNA: For sure, that sounds like a very natural progression of things that make sense as you come into yourself a little bit more. So, you started working with music when you were 12. What was that moment – how did it start and what made it stick?
ALLIE: I remember I had a friend who started taking guitar lessons, I think we were all in like fifth or sixth grade. At that point I was just trying a bunch of activities like sports and other things, but there wasn’t a lot of art or emphasis on creative pursuits where I was growing up. I had a friend who started taking guitar and I was like, ‘that looks so fun.’ I feel like when you’re really young you’re playing with toys oftentimes, and it just felt like a guitar was a toy and what you could do with it was way more expansive and not really defined by the people who made it. It’s meant for exploring and you can make your own stuff with it. Anyways, that’s just how I started to think of it and interact with it.
LUNA: I do want to talk about Every Dog. “Tiny Colored Pills” was the last single before you release Every Dog, what was the reason for the singles you chose to release ahead of the album?
ALLIE: The singles were “Radio Shower,” “Every Dog,” and then “Tiny Colored Pills” was the featured track that came out two or three days before the album. “Tiny Colored Pills” was coming out just because it is one of the most fun songs to play live, it’s also just one of the most upbeat songs, and I know particularly for this album, it definitely has a chiller vibe to it overall. The tempos are all relatively modest and slow and even veering on slowcore at times and, just having an indie folk energy to it that’s mellow.
That version of “Tiny Colored Pills” just has a more propulsive energy to it, and I definitely wanted to share something like that that you could get easily excited about. It’s just been a favorite over the years. There're actually several versions of that recording that exist and I will release some of those in the next year or so. So, that song started out as really mellow. But, anyway, recently we had been playing it upbeat like that and it’s always just a really fun part of the set; something cathartic and people have seemed to really like that song so, I just wanted to throw those people a bone a little bit as a thank you for sticking with my more dense lyrically but chiller songs. The first two singles are a bit more meditative and might require some more engaged listening. I wanted to give something that you could just bop along to, and then if you wanted to listen to what the song’s about you could and hopefully you’d like that, too.
LUNA: “Every Dog,” the title track, offers a hauntingly tender episode of granting someone space to be themselves. What made it the title track? Was there a driving theme in that track specifically that the record was built around?
ALLIE: I appreciate that description of it! That’s what I would have hoped for someone to be able to discern or experience from it, so thank you for that! It was one of the first songs that was written, but it wasn’t the first. I think that what made it worth making it a focal point on the record — naming the record after it — was that it, I sort of get emotional just thinking about it, but it’s definitely a zoom-out on my life a little bit. It’s not putting myself at the center of something and it’s a little bit more of just looking at relationships I’ve been in (...) this is a theme that’s come up in my life a lot in the past five years or so, which is that, obviously, we’re all individuals with complex lives and a lot of stuff is going on and our paths will inevitably intersect and intertwine, and then just as easily, oftentimes, can drift.
Maybe that’s not always something everybody wanted or planned on. I think sometimes we all wish we could be close with everyone we care about at all times, but it’s not necessarily possible or feasible or the best choice for everyone. So, I think of it as a sort of song that is about giving that space and wishing someone well from a distance and just trying to make it a happy trail, so to speak. I think that’s something I’ve been trying to work on being able to give in my life. As I get older that just happens. It just felt like a bigger theme of something I’ve been dealing with in the past couple years and one of the most important things I wanted to take from this collection of songs. Obviously, not every song has to do with that dynamic, but it is an overarching theme in the past few years of my life and I wanted to let that be one of the most salient things.
LUNA: That’s really interesting. I also feel like a lot of the time writing and songwriting, specifically, almost feel aspirational. So it’s a really big and brave thing that you made the project as a whole about this thing that you’re trying to keep working on. Was your process with this project as a whole mostly driven by the lyrics or by the sound?
ALLIE: Totally. I think I always want to be engaged by the instrumental when I’m making something. Usually everything starts from that. And then I’ll approach the vocal as something that feels complimentary to the instrumental with the melody that I’m singing. And then, I’ll try to figure out what is something that I’ve wanted to express lately to myself or to someone else, themes that I’ve been thinking of, things that have been catching my mind lately. And typically that’s how I’ll start to brainstorm lyrics. I’ll just write down things in parentheses of like, ‘I want to say this, I mean to say this.’ Then, I’ll go back and think, like, what’s a more interesting way to say that and is there a link between these somewhat disparate thoughts. It’s definitely starting from an instrumental place.
LUNA: Interesting. So then, you’re saying that the lyrics are existing first as a parenthetical almost within the sound. So, is it almost like the sound is then driving the feeling that you eventually articulate and it comes out of that, or is it like you have these ideas and these feelings and then from that the sound comes and then the words?
ALLIE: They definitely inform each other. A good example of that is in the song, “Every Dog.” In the middle it kind of drops out, there’s like an A section and a B section. So when it’s right in the middle it has the line, “every dog has her day.” That was something that I liked, but I didn’t think to take space after saying that. When I played the song for my partner and they really liked the song and they were like, ‘that line, I just wanna sit in that. I wanna take time with that and reflect on that.’ I thought that was really interesting and I’ve never done that before, make space for yourself. So I thought, ‘I guess we could do a round of the chord progression with maybe some ambience and just let that sit before continuing on.’ So that was an instance where I maybe had the instrumental, I had the chord progression going and was just gonna keep trucking through but, my partner’s really smart and I really like their taste and I wanna make something they like. That’s an instance where the lyrics inform the instrumental.
LUNA: That’s such a nice circular gift of the song itself, also, because it’s all about giving the space to this other person and then you got it back in the end, too.
ALLIE: Yeah! And by the end of the song it’s really emptying out and feels like your morning walk. I’m trying to make that sound like you’re kind of stepping out into a brisk morning and there’s just space for you and your experience. So there’s something in that decluttering of an arrangement that maybe has a lot going on.
Photography Credit: Rachel Bennett
LUNA: What song off of Every Dog are you most proud of?
ALLIE: Holistically, that’s a bit hard to answer, but if I focus on it in terms of how a recording came about and how it developed and ended up, I think the song, “From the Dead” really ended up in a place that I didn’t imagine at first. And I’m so glad. You just get lucky sometimes, I mean, you get unlucky other times. That song went through several iterations and so many versions that I had my partner, Caro, her feedback always and my sibling — who I mentioned earlier, I worked on the first record with him. He gave me mixing advice the whole way through. Between the three of us I was able to get the song in a place that just felt really exciting and lush and full. The instrumental was really exploring, in an abstract way, what the song was generally about, what I was singing about. I was able to have each line and be inspired by that and be like, ‘how can I emphasize that in an instrumental way.’ I’m really proud of that one.
LUNA: That’s such a satisfying experience when it goes somewhere that you never thought it would but, when you dissect it, every line sounds like what it should be.
ALLIE: It’s hard to do. It takes so much time and effort to record and finish a song, and I definitely don’t always get to a place where I’m 100% feeling like it’s perfect. It’s more that classic “art is never finished, just abandoned.” But, the point at which you’re abandoning it, you could feel better or worse about. It’s like dropping off a friend and you watch them go into the building and you’re like, ‘okay, that’s chill.’ But sometimes, maybe your friend’s kind of drunk and you send them home in an uber and you’re like ‘let me know!’ Yeah, some songs end that way and you hope people get it. Like, the parallel of ‘I hope they got home.’
LUNA: Slightly moving beyond the record, you also just launched a podcast! Can you tell us a little about that?
ALLIE: I am so excited about the podcast! We’re actually taking a break this week because Sarah, the co-host, is on tour right now with illuminati hotties, so things are really busy for her. It’s something that came to mind when I was thinking about how to promote this album and ways that I could share and surround the album with personal content. So that, if there were nerds, like myself, who wanted to have a deep dive they could have that. After thinking about it and talking about it with a bandmate, I realized that I’ve really been a fan of certain interview based podcasts for a while so, maybe instead of basing a whole podcast on something so myopic, like your own album, why don’t I expand this a little bit and find one of my friends who I think would be good to share this experience with? We can ask each other about our records! And Sarah was just putting out a new record for illuminati hotties, so that felt like a good pairing. Also, she’s helping release my album on her label, so it felt like keeping it in the family. But now we’ve sort of expanded it in the last month since we started it to do some interviews of other artists, so that’s been really fun and I’m so excited to keep going with that and just learn more about people’s processes.
LUNA: It is really fun! It feels like the perfect marriage of the technical stuff but then there’s also the personal stories of the music and the songs and it’s very accessible, still, even when you’re getting into the production side of things. That’s a very interesting rollout strategy of the project itself, it’s another gift that keeps on giving.
ALLIE: I appreciate that and I’m glad you had that experience with it! Yeah, I was just looking for a way to not reduce what I felt like I had made by having to sum it up in a paragraph for a press article – not that there’s anything wrong with that medium – but it’s nice to have other ways to represent and talk about the album, which is invisible art. So, can we use another medium to represent it and explore it? Sarah is also a really amazing and accomplished engineer and producer, so I want to learn from her. So, it’s kind of set up so I can just ask her questions without an excuse! That’s also part of why I wanted to do it and I wanted to keep it accessible. I want to have something where people who are more into songwriting and have less technical experience but are curious about it can find ways to get into it, because that’s been my journey, somewhat.
LUNA: It’s definitely being achieved, so well done and congratulations on that, as well! What’s next on the docket for allie?
ALLIE: I’m so stoked. Nobody has really asked, but I have another record completely finished, that was actually completed before Every Dog, that I had someone else completely produce and mix. His name is Sam Skinner. He wanted to collab when I moved to New York and saw us at a live set and was like, ‘let’s make music,’ so he helped me finish the record. I have an ambient instrumental album that I want to release soon that’s almost done. I also just started this new project with my partner, Caro, called “Tall Girlfriend.” I think they’re an amazing songwriter so I’m so glad that they’ve let me put a microphone up and record. We’ve done some shows so far and they’ve gone great, and it’s just a really exciting time. Fall can feel that way and it’s just all really good.
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