Isabel Dumaa balances nostalgia and authenticity on her debut EP, ‘Just My Nature’
Isabel Dumaa lives in a world of California Americana, surrounded by bows, books, poetry, old Hollywood movies, nature, anything vintage, and most importantly, music. Though they had no direct tie to music, both her moms filled her childhood home with music from John Denver to Bonnie Raitt to Billie Holiday to Fleetwood Mac to Patsy Cline.
Although her hometown of San Fransisco, California is only a quick drive away from LA, San Fransisco allowed Dumaa the space to develop her own musical taste. “I didn't go to art schools,” she said. “I feel like it was a lot of just seeing how music affects the world and affects people.” Since her childhood interactions with music, she has always gravitated towards it. She’s been singing for as long as she can remember and eventually began penning her own tunes.
‘Just My Nature’ photoshoot photographed by Brea Lynn @breannalynn.gif
When she first started writing, it was liberating, fun. “I didn't know anything about writing, which was kind of the joy in it,” Dumaa said.
She followed the “write what you know” philosophy and admitted that, at the time, she knew practically nothing. Once she started learning more about the craft of songwriting, attending songwriting programs, and getting further immersed in the LA music scene, the overthinking began. “[I started] getting a little bit stuck in what a song is supposed to be instead of just letting a song come from [my] heart,” she said.
With her debut EP, ‘Just My Nature,’ she found her way back to the freeing power of songwriting. “I’ve come back to how I thought about writing when I first started.”
Penning the track “Quarter Life Crisis,” originally released in 2023 and now added to the EP tracklist, brought her back to that version of her writing and opened the gate to the rest of the heartfelt tracks on the EP.
‘Just My Nature’ takes listeners along Dumaa’s journey through life, feeling all the excruciatingly normal feelings as a twenty-something-year-old girl—emotional growing pains, pangs of nostalgia, discovery, reflection, understanding how you encounter the world, how you interact with the world.
Dumaa’s proven poignant songwriting on pre-released singles like “C’est La Vie” touch on these uber-relatable themes in ways many of us could never put into words, let alone such precise and impassioned ones. “The golden kid with big bright dreams/But the rust grew thick, and it buried me/I’m covering holes with sticks and leaves/Praying the ground doesn’t break right under me,” she sings. Dumaa is part of a generation of songwriters raised by Taylor Swift, and her influence is evident in Dumaa’s storytelling style of songwriting. One of the clearest moments of her prolific storytelling capabilities comes on the track “Everything At Once.” “It’s watching the news, it’s losing my dog, it’s listening to my favorite song, it’s missing my home, it’s how much I have grown since I was young and dumb,” she sings. “I’m tired of being someone who feels everything at once.” This track remains one of Dumaa’s favorites. “It’s a self-reflection dump of who I am,” she said.
While her own life serves as her most prominent source of inspiration, media also tends to find its way into her music. She looks for inspiration in poetry, in quotes that have followed her over the years, in characters on screen. “It's still me,” she says, “because that resonated with me for a specific reason.” Her creativity extends beyond her own world and into fictional ones. She has a unique ability to fuse together her own experience with others, which might just be what connects her so strongly to her listeners. On “Price of Getting Older,” she morphed the Alida Nugent quote (“You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.”) into a song depicting the change from the bliss of childhood to the hardship of adulthood.
Plagued by perfectionism, time in the studio can oftentimes result in a cycle of Dumaa rewriting and remixing to find what feels wholeheartedly authentic. This serves as a cornerstone for everything she does as a musician. That doesn’t keep her from experimenting with her lyrics and her sound, though. She strives to use live instruments to make her music more organic. She’s used this EP to experiment with those elements without relying too heavily on technology to drive her sound. She found a balance of raw, stripped-back sections as well as more experimental ones.
As Dumaa has settled into her role in the music industry, she found herself hung up on a number of questions: “What the hell do I want to sound like, and what music do I want to make, and who do I want to be?” she asked herself over and over again. But finally, with her debut EP, she found herself, her sound, and her artistry, all while providing young women with a means of processing their fleeting youth.
